Originally Posted by ozzie
I remember reading recently that there is a conflict with Aureal based sound cards and the Via chipset......are you using an Aureal soundcard?. I was having similar trouble until I switched to A Creative sound card.

I'll admit Via has come a long way, but from my Pentium-based experiences (I haven't taken the athlon plunge yet) they have a ways to go yet. I wonder if Intel would have saved some serious market share by reworking the venerable BX chipset into a design that supports the 1/2 AGP divider and the handful of other buzzwords/gimmicks with no real performance advantages that the Via Apollo Pro 133A brings with it. Heck, they might have been able to squeeze out some more performance while they were back in the silicon fiddling with things. They could add in pages of indecipherable BIOS tweaks and then force us to download more OS drivers too!

To me this seems like a better way to spend some R&D dollars instead of trying to force-feed us the mediocre crap that we know as the i8xx chipsets. But then again, who would buy the "latest and greatest" if BX rev. B was available? Probably just the clueless doinks that think "new" is always "better" without doing any research other than Intel press releases. You know, the same people who wouldn't even consider buying a motherboard because it doesn't support AGP 4x or UDMA 66. Little do they know by the time either of these things make a significant difference the hardware they are buying today will be obsolete. It seems AMD has Intel on the run, and with Intel bent over the ol' Rambus barrel they can't afford the chance.

Ok, I am running a Geforce DDR in an Asus K7M, is there any hope at this tweaks found for the VIAKX133 work also for my board?
If the answer is YES, where are that golden tweking instructions for Windows 98 and Win Me ?

OK, guys, I can't give a complete recounting of BIOS tweaks and the like right now, but here's the gist of it:

Drivers:
-NVIDIA 5.32 Detonators for Win2K (leaked)
-viaagp.sys update from Tom's Hardware
-Via AGP driver 4.03

BIOS:
-AGP 2X (4X disabled)
-AGP Fast writes disabled
-AGP driving value EA (thanks Brandon Bell of GamePC)
-AGP aperture size 256MB (PC has 256MB)
-I believe I turned up the CPU I/O voltage a couple notches

-Sacrifice one lamb, pour blood over "Via stability" altar
-Stir

Forge here -
Threw away my 133A based Tiger 133 for a BX based Asus P2B-D. Gawd, it's good to get ~500MB/s memory throughput, instead of the crap 250-300 I was getting. BX133 forever!!

I have an ASUS K7V running win2k with a TNT2 pro and I also experienced random lockups. I must say, things improved with the Detonators 5.32 driversn but not all is fixed. You tell in your article you tweaked the system.Can you tell me what tweaks are you talking about? I would like to know, so I can improve my stability issues.
Thanks.

I was still opting for his 'mental stability' as the culprit. :p

mentally unstable => system unstable
mentally unstable (but with counselling) => system more stable

Hmmm. The sample text doesn't seem to work.

I did have to tweak out the KA7 in Win2K to get it stable

Exactly what tweaks are we talking about here?