Just discovered something which could mean the second revision of Abit Slotkets III’s are unstable.
I’ve been trying to get my PIII 700 stable at 1000Mhz for days now, but have failed. I’ve been using the new ABIT Slotket III. Swapping out power supplies, different BE6-II motherboards, graphics cards, made no difference.
I could tell that the problem wasn’t with the processor, but with the bus speed (143 mhz). The system became completely unstable when two RAM modules (Micron PC133) were installed instead of one. This lead me to believe it was the RAM. I couldn’t even boot to windows if any RAM modules were installed in the farthest DIMM socket. Sometimes the machine wouldn’t boot after a reset or restart, and required powering down and up again. If the I/O voltage was higher than 3.6, it wouldn’t start windows no matter how many RAM modules were installed.
I was about to give up, but as a last attempt, I changed my new slotket III for my older slotket III. The difference being that the newer one has a little chip on it that the older one doesn’t have.
Well, immediately after changing the slotket, stability improved dramatically. I could boot and run games and Windows with the RAM in any sockets. It still was slightly unstable so I changed the position of one of the modules to another socket, and it’s perfectly stable now at 1001 mhz :-).
Changing back to the old slotket resulted in complete instability again, as well as the system not posting on some restarts.
I could have just had a dud slotket III, but then again maybe these new revisions just can’t handle the higher bus speeds. The newer slotket III was only stable at a bus speed of 140mhz or lower.
I wonder if anyone else is having similar problems?
Be the first to comment