Finally! GA-7VRX rev 1.1 stability!!!

Hi guys,

I finally got my gigabytch stable! Well touch wood I have, it's doing well so far.

I did the AGP capacitor mod on it....
http://mysite.freeserve.com/hoodspages/cap_mod.htm

But that did not seem to help much.

I was using the F4 bios and the "153 trick" .....
http://mysite.freeserve.com/hoodspages/fifth_divider.htm
but it was horribly unstable still, even dropped back to stock on 133Mhz...

So I tried F6 BIOS and that stopped the 153 trick working and stock was still horribly unstable.

Then I tried the latest F8beta BIOS which didn't seem to be much improvement, but the 153 trick worked again. I was just about to reach for a chainsaw and a can of gasoline, when I decided to try the RAM on CAS2, don't know why, left all the other settings conservative, and put the RAM on CAS2, now my RAM is up to this, I always knew it was, was just leaving it on 2.5 just to be safe. Miraculously it worked! It ran at 166x10 stable and I got it all the way to 172x10.5 stable now!!!!

So word up to fellow sufferers, CAS2 may be your answer! Although the capacitor mod may have something to do with it as well. Just if you've got a modded or RMA fixed board and still can't seem to get it running right, try CAS2.

CPU: TbredA XP1700
RAM: 256Mb Samsung CTL PC2700 (They sell these chips as 3200 now) set at CAS 2 and set as DDR 266 in BIOS to be sync with the FSB.

Stability has thus far been proven by being able to run 3Dmark several times in a row (used to crash a lot) and having used Folding@Home on gromacs units with SSE enabled all night with no crashes. Both these were particularly sensitive on my system, which would annoyingly run Prime95 or CPUburn all day with no problems and crash using IE, hence you'll see me spouting off about how useless Prime95 is as a stability test occasionally

regards,

Road Warrior

nice job, I got a GA-7VRXP rev 2.0 and it runs very stable. I really like gigabyte and haven't try out one of there motherboards until last summer. I just wished they overclock as good as the abit nf7-s but its alright.

gah, one thing worse on the F8 bios seems to be with the PCI, now it's known this drops out when it's set to "by hw" for the FSB in bios, but before with the F4 it used to recover on the warm boot from 153 to 166+. Now on the F8 when I power on, or when I have to reset, I have to wait for it to fail and kick to "by hw" then I have to change to 133, power off, then power on and change to 153 and then change to 172 again. Otherwise if I go from by hw to 153 to 172, the PCI doesn't get picked up again.

Gonna get round to trying the F7 just in case that's got the same stability but is nicer with the PCI.

Super Nintendo, yeah, the rev 2.0 are pretty good by all accounts. I wanted a rev 2. I ordered mine like 2 months after they were meant to be the only ones shipping but got the rev 1.1

Road Warrior