I have no problems at all.I have an athlon 750@850, abit ka7,sb live,ibm 20.5,asus 50x,yamaha 8x4x24,supra supersonic dsl,all running with the latest drivers.no lock ups at all.

I'm running a Vortex2 card (A3d) in my K7V and use A3d in all my games..... never had a problem with lockups.... actually I've never had a lockup in games (tried over a dozen now) except for a few in NFS Porche unleashed, which turned out to be driver related and since a driver update for my TNT2U (diamond V770), that has been resolved and NFS has not locked up again.

I use Aureal's reference drivers for the sound card (diamond's SUCK!) and have not had ONE lockup that I could attribute to the card..... love my rig.... runs so smooth.

Originally Posted by maglito
I have had the Epox KXA for a while now. I had some problems when switching form a ViperII to an Elsa Gladiac (Quake3 was jittery but 3dmark was fine). I ended up doing the reformat thing guessing some s3 driver was buried too deep for me to find and was own there screwing me over. So, this time around I tried the WinME route and Quake3 was really bad, could harly move the mouse in the menu. And that was after trying both the 4.22 and 4.23 via drivers, although when installing them I did get a strange registry error when the 4in1\'s loaded their AGP part and was promped to re-boot. Anyway what ended up working was downloading and installing the VIA AGP gart drivers seperatly. Now I\'m getting almost (high 90\'s) 100 fps Quake3 high quality all settings maxed (800*600). And I\'m happy, its never crashed in 3dmark or Quake3(just ran really poorly without a proper VIA AGP gart but never locked). So if you have funky AGP problems (esp. w/ WinME) download and install the AGP gart seperatly. It took me a couple days to figure that one out.
~Tony

Here's my nice, stable, KX133 system:

KA7 flashed with RX bios
Athlon Classic 700 (clocked at default)
SB Live! Value
GeForce DDR 32 meg (some generic-o brand, VisionTek I think)
(running with 5.22 Detonators)
256 megs (some Major Brand) PC133 RAM
A Matrox 15gig U66 HD @ 7200 rpm
Kingston 10/100 Ethernet card
Creative Labs CD-ROM (48x I think?)
Windows 2000 Professional
PS/2 mouse and keyboard

I haven't had a problem since I got it all working.
I had pretty dismal overclocking results, though...

i have a sd11 athlon 650 running on the default w2k drivers and it has not crashed once since the conversion from 98. in 98 it locked up frequently, especially in half-life. the thing never locks when i running the game, just when im starting or exiting. so ive come to the conclusion that win98's kernel is just unstable (there is more to this than i stated above, but beyond the discussion of this board), always has been always will be, im afraid of how windows ME will turn out. now with win2k and my v5 beta drivers, everything flawless. i know mine is irongate and urs is via, but i thought id put some good news about amd in one of these discussions.

I've been using a brand new Athlon 950 on an ASUS K7V for about two weeks now. Aside from the problems associated with Windows 2000 (I have to replace the viaagp.sys file before it would even boot, and have since gone back to win98 until they fix the agp issues), I haven't suffered any lockups or problems. I have been very happy with this system, and judging by usenet traffic, the k7v is very stable. Perhaps the problem surfaces only on other kx133 boards?

The rest of my config:
Maxtor DiamondMax Pro 27Gig
asus 6800 geforce ddr deluxe
SBLive! value
256mb pc133 RAM
adaptec 2930 scsi w/yamaha cdr
d-link nic

Ok. Here's my system:

Abit KA7 w/ RY bios, all RAM Tweaks and VIA 4in1 v4.23 drivers
Athlon 700 clocked t 805mhz
256mb Mushkin Infineon "Athlon Tested" PC133 SDRAM (2x128)
Matrox G400 PD6.0 drivers
Aureal SQ2500 Sound w/ latest drivers
E-Tech PCI56rvp Winmodem 1.35 drivers
AOpen 52x CD-ROM
Maxtor DiamondMax 40+ 20gb UDMA66 HD
Win98SE

I don't see any problems that can be attributed to the VIA chipset, at least in my usage. I has some problems getting the G400 to work with Quake3, but that was with the VIA v4.20 4in1's. With the v4.22 and v 4.23 that problem is gone. I've played lots of UT, Age of Empires:Age of Kings, Quake3, and Asheron's Call. The only problem I was having was with Asheron's Call. Though I think it was a Windows problem that I have now fixed (at least I haven't BSOD'd in a week now :) )

Also, I built a very similar system for a friend. The differences being the sound card (SBLIVE!) and the vid card (Elsa Gladiac GeForce2 GTS) and no modem. He only has the VIA v4.20 4in1's and hasn't had a bit of trouble. Nothing at all. Maybe our systems don't get stressed enough. All I know is that I'm very happy with this Abit KA7.

Amish

I guess this is where I stick my neck out again ;)

Just to conclude the no-VIA in Gateway Athlon mobos:

"Specific details about the problem are scarce, but Ritter says Gateway has verified that neither the Thunderbird processor, nor the AMD 750 chip set Gateway uses with the chip, are the cause of the problem."

Source: http://www2.marketwatch.com/quotes/articles.asp?symb=AMD&sid=373&so...e=htx/http2_mw&guid=%7BE60CF5A0-8C17-47E9-93B9-A...[watch.com]

Whether or not the problem with lock-ups (as described above) is a VIA problem is something you can argue both sides of. Assuming that the A3D problem is similar to the graphics card lock-up (which seems very likely), it appears clear that VIA has left little overhead with their KX133 northbridge... meaning that the motherboard makers must take even greater care than normal to make sure that trace lengths are kept at a minimum.

Anyone remember the recent loosening of Rambus / i820 timing specs? This seems to be becoming more and more of an issue in motherboard design today. :/

As for a COMPLETELY satisfied KX133 chipset owner? I am one. I use it as my home system at the moment. It's an Asus K7V and it doesn't seem to be suffering from any of the described lock-up problems. Of course, I don't use an A3D board, so that particular issue wouldn't show up. My system has never locked up during heavy AGP usage.

I did, however, have some problems with some similar systems a while ago, BUT only when using the 4in1 drivers on the accompanying CDROM. Using the ones available (back then) on VIA's web site solved those problems completely.

To me it seems that there are some problems with SOME KX133 motherboards, but not nearly all. E.g. the Asus boards do not seem to suffer from the same problems as the Abit and EPoX ones. It may be that VIA has understated the timing specs of their northbridge - clearly this would be something for e.g. EPoX to comment on ;)

It would be nice to know if the described problem exists on ALL KX133 chipsets, or if it is limited to a few. Since Abit it involved, there may well be quite a number of others too.

Sincerely,

fyodor // FullOn3D.com