A7V600 woes....

[Bert]

Hi,

I am building 20 to 30 PC's a year, normally with good results.

My last project: A A7V600 board in a beautifull Chieftec case.
Switched it on and the BIOS said 'CPU speed: 1300 Mhz.'.
That's too low, I thought for a AMD 2700+. I put it higher
(dont remember the figure it offered 2500?) and rebooted.
Dead. No sign of life. Except for the green light on the board.
I cleared the CMOS three times, ripped out all cables, exchanged
memory, to no avail.

I got a new board in the shop and exchanged it. Again the BIOS
showed 1300. Now, I didn't want to make the same thing happen twice,
so I left it that way for the time being.Started installing XP, which stopped
the install because it couldn't find de SATA drive. Stupid me, let's quickly
make a floppy with the third party drivers....
Booted the machine, and............... NOTHING. Dead again. Exactly
the same as the first board.
Exchanged memory, pulled out all cables, nothing but the damned green light.

Is there a whole batch of A7V600 rotten or what could be going on?
Power supply blowing up the board? Expensive brandnew Chieftec case...
And why does it boot just one time?

Bert

 

[Wazza]

The A7V600s have been out or a while and there don`t seem to be too many
folks having problems with them.
Set your FSB to 166 and that will give you the correct FSB of 333. A
multiplier of 12.5 will give you the CPUs true speed of 2080 and if your ram
and video card are ok, you should have no problems with the A7V600 board.
Mine is working flat out like a lizard drinking and I am quite pleased with
it.

Now, on to what I think your real problem is.
Most home builders throw a mobo into a case, then whack a heap of drives
into it coupled with a real hot rod video card (high power draw) and then
have the temerity to expect a standard 400 to 450 watt PSU to power it all
trouble free. This situation just gets worse when there are one or two USB2
devices calling for power and don`t forget the couple of extra fans that go
in the case somewhere to keep the whole thing cool.

A couple of weeks ago I experienced the old "green led on but no boot"
thingo and I found that if I were to plug and unplug the main power cord to
the computer quite a few times, the thing would boot off the front power
switch. Probably what was happening was an arcing inside the PSU that
temporarily completed the "boot" circuit. Once going, the computer would run
all day. This is of course a damaged circuit in the PSU and a new and bigger
sucker fixed this little problem.
When I first experienced this "no boot" thing I also thought it was the link
on the mobo from the front panel switch through to the power supply and
therefore thought I would have to RM the mobo.
Disconnect all your drives and try a diffrent PSU and I think everything
will be ok.

 

[Bert]

A couple of weeks ago I experienced the old "green led on but no boot"
thingo and I found that if I were to plug and unplug the main power cord to
the computer quite a few times, the thing would boot off the front power
switch.

Not with me

Probably what was happening was an arcing inside the PSU that
temporarily completed the "boot" circuit. Once going, the computer would run
all day. This is of course a damaged circuit in the PSU and a new and bigger
sucker fixed this little problem.
When I first experienced this "no boot" thing I also thought it was the link
on the mobo from the front panel switch through to the power supply and
therefore thought I would have to RM the mobo.
Disconnect all your drives and try a diffrent PSU and I think everything
will be ok.

You might be just right. It is a Chieftec 360W PSU (Asus recommends 300W or
higher).
Today I plugged in another brandnew 2700+, no change..
Tomorrow I'll have a more powerfull PSU. If that doesn't help it must be
the case itself (joking).
I will post a follow up...

(The strange thing remains that *both* boards booted right *one* time.
The second boot they died...)


Thanx!
Bert

 

[Bert]

Disconnect all your drives and try a diffrent PSU and I think everything
will be ok.

I did, no changes.
But the problem is fixed now.
It was a rotten GeForce AGP card which caused all the trouble....


Bert