More Problems

The AGP stability issue continues even today, despite using the fastest and most stable 'Cruical' SDRAM combined with appropriately slotted PCI cards for IRQ's (no sharing etc.) and a compatible sound card, my Asus A7V continues to hang in games (D3D or OGL) at random intervals, thus requiring a restart each time. It also happens on the Soltek and Abit based Tbird systems, each with different hardware and software set-ups.

Although it's not just about AGP, graphics are indeed of core concern to gamers, but you'd be surprised by what can cause a VIA or AMD K7/Tbird chipset to hang. For example, using an A3D soundcard is a top way to coax your system into hanging via almost any game after only a few minutes of play. At high activity a problem occurs and your system will either freeze or restart itself.

The same also happens under Sound Blaster boards, although with SB it's down to the old SB16 compatibility issues, you just need to disable SB16 in the system and it should be ok. Beware that using four speakers with either EAX or A3Dv2 at a high quality will often cause games to crash.

Other things such as the lack of different SDRAM memory type support and problems with the system bus overall give yet more grief. In fact if you want a completely stable AMD board between the K7 and Tbird generations, then you'd better be prepared for hours of PCI switching, bios tweakage and software alteration.

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