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Gigabyte Gurus - Looking For Advice

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SkyHook

Senior Village Idiot
Joined
Jan 24, 2002
Location
York, Pennsylvania
Well here I sit with a brand new GA60XET-C. I currently have a PIII-S 1.26 running on an Iwill BD133U with a PNY GeForce3 Ti200, 512meg of ram and a 3Com NIC. I have had this package running stable at up to 155 [email protected]. At present I have happily been running at [email protected].

I have pretty much always been an Abit user and made up my mind to experience some other manufacturers products when I started with this processor. The Iwill has proven relatively successful but I have seen so much debate surrounding the Gigabyte 60's that I wanted to see for myself.

Now to the point, what things can you tell me in advance about this board and processor combination to make it at least as successful as my experience with the Iwill. Are there new or different BIOs available from either Gigabyte or elsewhere? Any jumper setting that need special attention? Any help or advice appreciated.
 
Heh, not a "Gigabyte Guru" but, what i can tell you
from my experience. I put my system together "out
of the box" and o/c'ed to 160FSB at default CV. I
did a bios update (F9), there is a new F10 update,
but i'm fine with F9. I suggest you assemble your
rig and look around in bios, get to know it, and go
from there. I didn't run into any surprises and doubt
you will either. The only problem I have experienced
so far is ram. My chip will run 175FSB air cooled at
3,3,3,7/9, but 2,2,2,5/7 is another matter.

HAVE FUN!!!
 
Once Again!

Once again you come through for me "pappypete"! I'm just about to take the plunge and start pulling wires and unscrewing things, so hopefully in a couple of hours I'll be back up and running. Don't know exactly what I expect to achieve, as I stated the Iwill BD133U was doing everything I asked of it, but I just got the notion that I had become way too set in my ways with just Abit boards, and wanted to see and experience some other manufacturer's products. Plus in a little while I will be putting together a box for my wife, and guess what, she'll end up with whichever of these two boards I decide not to use for myself. Guess I'll take my BE6-II and make a wall hanging out of it, it has served me well but the Tualatins have won my heart.

BTW - Here's a screen shot of my "Low Voltage Iwill Setup"
 
I Have Returned!

Well Now That Didn't Hurt A Bit!!!

Out of the box, into the machine, and away we go, NO PROBLEMS! One question, it reports it is running BIOs Ver. F7, is flashing to say F9 or F10 a smart idea, or is there nothing to be gained?

Oh and Motherboard Monitor seems to hate this new board, even after selecting new sensors it starts hollering at me as soon as the program loads up. Do you have it running on yours and if so what's the secret?
 
Glad to see you're up and running! I believe the
bios update is a good idea. I don't remember all
the details but there is quite a difference between
F7 and F9, not much from F9 to F10. I have not
heard anything negative about F10, go for it. If
you didn't find it by now, there is a bios utility on
the Gigabyte disk. I can't help with motherboard
monitor, don't use it, I rely on my temp probe for
CPU temps.
 
Be sure to flash to the latest bios as this allows full control of the pci/agp dividers right up to the 1/5th and the 1/6th ones....

To stop the alarm going off in MBM use the very latest version of the program and read the readme file on how to stop the alarm from going off....You have to edit an option to reset the alarm when the program starts up.

Do not use the Gigabyte supplied mobo monitoring software as it reports incorrect temps with Tualatin chips! Use the Gigabyte supplied Windows bios flash utility to flash the bios though....

Above all....Have fun with your new purchace and try upping the DIMM voltage to keep it stable at CAS2 and high FSB's. Some people on these forums have also had success by cooling the northbridge (I think it's the northbridge!).
 
PappyPete and others are right about the only problems
you might have is with the RAM.

I got my P3-s coasting along at 151fsb at default core.

Had it up to 171 for a while yesterday, but things were
just a little shaky. Think it was my ram as I tried vcores
from 1.575 up to 1.825 without any success.

We need some PC180 CAS2 ram sticks for these beasts...:D
 
6502kid said it all, need a TOP-OF-LINE ram for the combo you are running. Flash to F9, 10 is a must, for 1/5,1/6 dividers are not presented with F7. I tried F9 and 10, however, my board went dead after i flash the f9, then hit "peformance setting" or whatever in the bios..it never recover. right now, i am using f10, and avoid doing anything after you flash ur bios;) since you can do 155f with 1.525, my guess will be you can hit around 170 or more depends on your cooling, oh, i cool my south and northbriges...:D
 
i got my tonicom today, but i am a little bit disappointed, for it is a 6ns ram, and i still cannot make my system totally stabized @180 even with this bad boy...i have not tried to max out my kingmax and tonicom yet, but will try today.
 
@tainice

do you already have heatsinks on northbridge, southbridge and clock generator and perhaps also on the onboard Soundblaster and on some of the CPU voltage regulators??
Hopefully 180 MHz FSB wil work for you!

I don't really think it's CPU cooling that is holding you back. So H2O will probably not be the solution.

Regards

Ingo
 
omg, guess what? i think my board is one hair away from dying, i was trying to flash my bios again yesterday in hoping of this would "fix" my gernerator right. however, after the flash, some kind of weird message occured and said, "this board is not fully ACPI compatable, sh$t, now i cannot even get it to pass the routin bios checkup, for my cpu sum is not accuate. i will try to reinstall the hd again if i can, but i guess i would have to buy a new board... :(

guess what? i will just purchase st-6 this time...i hate gigabyte's bios flashing utility!:mad:

skyhook, sorry man, kinda f hijack ur thread..:p
 
It's All Good!

Nobody Hijacked Nothing From Nobody! All conversation is good.
Anyway, the GA-60XET-C took one in the heart! Tried to flash from f7 to f9 with that rotten utility they included on the CD and 3% into the write phase CRAP CITY! Locked up tight and then spontaniously tried to reboot, except there ain't nothing on the chip to reboot from!
I give three cheers to Motherboard Express Company, called them up and in less than 5 minutes I had an RMA. And every time I have called them to order something or get help with something, I have spoken with a REAL PERSON, usually in only two to three rings of the phone! My tech call about this BIOs SNAFU, was answered on the second ring, by someone who actually knew what he was talking about. They even offered to cross-mail a new board to me that day if it would help me out, but I don't need one that bad, so I took the conventional RMA route.
Anyway, keeping talking, I'm making notes of eveything that's said for future reference!

:p
 
I have flashed the bios on my Gigabyte XET many times using the Gigabyte supplied bios flash utility and have never had a problem. Just remember to peform the flash at default settings (ie: NOT OVERCLOCKED!) - just in case.

And remember....A bios flash is risky on any make of mobo. Like Celemine1gig said....Thank god I have the XET with duel bios!:)
 
Don't Misunderstand!

First of all, I am not finding fault with Gigabyte directly. I am not new to the always present dangers of screwing with the BIOs on any motherboard. Secondly, my remark toward the Giagabyte flash utility is rooted in my longstanding rule that BIOs flashing should be done from the DOS level. My mistake was in assuming that Gigabyte had somehow mastered the dangers of flashing the BIOs from within Windows.

For all those who have never experienced a problem with this utility I am happy for you, but let my experience be a warning that Gigabyte has not as of yet made it a foolproof operation. Over the course of my many years of experimenting in this field I have probably done 50+ BIOs flashes, and this is the first that was totally unrecoverable, so I could easily believe that I was "due" to having the big one at least once.

My only aggrevation was that I had "f10" and the flasher setting here on a nice fresh DOS floppy ready to go when I decided instead to stray from my usual procedure. My decision, no one elses, and in the end it will all be taken care of.
 
tainice said:
omg, guess what? i think my board is one hair away from dying, i was trying to flash my bios again yesterday in hoping of this would "fix" my gernerator right. however, after the flash, some kind of weird message occured and said, "this board is not fully ACPI compatable, sh$t, now i cannot even get it to pass the routin bios checkup, for my cpu sum is not accuate. i will try to reinstall the hd again if i can, but i guess i would have to buy a new board... :(

guess what? i will just purchase st-6 this time...i hate gigabyte's bios flashing utility!:mad:

Hi tainice,

one last suggestion. I know it sounds stupid, but did you clear your CMOS by jumer after having flashed the new bios???
I think you already did that, but dumb things happen if you're not fully concentrated for one moment. And sometimes the obvious isn't obvious if you're trying to find it!
Hope you can recover you board.
BTW, did you flash the bios while running at 170 MHz FSB???

I once got that bios checksum error message when overclocking my FSB too high on my old Abit BF6 BX-board. After shutting down and clearing the CMOS, everything was fine again.

I really hope you can get your rig up again as fast as possible.
And SkyHook, of course I wish you luck, too, with you setup!

Regards

Ingo

Update: Thank god I've never had any problems with the Gigabyte flash utility.
 
thanz people, actually i can boot into windows, but it will crash within 5 minute, even with saft mode. try to reinstall the w2k and 98s (always double boot) cannot do that, for some part of mobo is totally screwed. new board is only way out. i did not sleep yesterday at all, just striving to recover it...i am really tired now, got to sleep. :(

it is just so weird, i had no problem after the flash, but couple hours of usage later, strange things started to happen, and then i ended up with no board at all...:eek: same thing occured with my first board, nothing after flash, but afterward....
 
Secondly, my remark toward the Giagabyte flash utility is rooted in my longstanding rule that BIOs flashing should be done from the DOS level.

I don't know about the 'final release' bios but the beta bios's could not be flashed from DOS as this procedure would result in a checksum error....The 'only' way to flash the bios was via the Gigabyte supplied bios flash utility - in which case it worked a treat.

Tainice....Are you 'sure' it is your mobo that is at fault here?
 
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