I’ve spent a bunch of time going through various forums to try and determine which KT133A mobos seem to have problems with the multiplier, and which don’t.
The short answer is that none of them are virginal, but some seem to handle this better than others.
A big problem with doing this is trying to separate out those people with legitimate problems from those who haven’t done all the necessary troubleshooting.
Having said that, here goes (in company alphabetical order):
Abit KT7A: This does happen, much more so than with the A7V133, but not as often as with the Epox, IWill, or MSI boards.
Asus A7V133: This seems to be a rare occurence. There’s some instances where there’s multiplier problems, but it’s not clear whether or not it’s a problem with the mobo, or just a pencil job.
Epox KTA3+: This seems to happen pretty often with 1.2Ghz chips.
IWill KK266: This seems to be happening very often with 1.2Ghz chips; there’s also a situation in many cases where only one or two multipliers actually work, no matter what you set it to. Recent BIOSes improved matters for some, worsened it for others.
MSI K7T Turbo-R: Not much on this one yet, but there are definitely multiplier problems.
Please note that what I’m saying is only addresssing one narrow issue, and is NOT an endorsement of the A7V133. My own personal experience with the A7V133 and it’s multiplier is that it can be a little too prone to jump back to a default 600Mhz every once in a while for no apparent reason.
That’s a minor quibble, but after working with this board for almost two weeks, I certainly can’t endorse this board for Win2K; it just crashes too much (and I’m not the only one with this problem). It really seems to have a problem with IE, both in Win98 and W2K, both version 5 and 5.5. It just doesn’t bring everything down in Win98.
The overall impression I got surveying around is that the Iwill probably does a bit better than the others outside of this multiplier issue. The KT7A also looks to have improved over the KT7. The Epox boards are middling, and the MSI folks seem to be having problems.
RAID difficulty seems to be a constant.
Something you should keep in mind is that this usually is not a common problem, especially in the cases of the Asus and Abit. Most people don’t face it. The odds on you facing it go up dramatically if you buy a 1.2Ghz CPU. However (and I’ll talk about this more tomorrow), it’s also becoming clear that if you expect a real shot at 1400-1500Mhz, you need to buy a 1.2Ghz processor.
AMD is clearly distinguishing between lines of processors; it’s not like the 1Ghz and 1.2Ghz are the same thing; they’re not. There’s different codes for different processor speeds, and they’re yielding different results.
Again, more on this tomorrow.
Frankly, if you haven’t bought one of these, and plan to, I’d wait to see if these guys can get some of the bugs out first.
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