A7M266, What Fun (A hint of sarcasm)

A7M266 with 1.2 Tbird/266 Mhz FSB, 1x256 PC2100 DDR (Mushkin w/Hydundai chips), Leadtek GeForce 2 Ultra, SB Live Platinum, 2x45GB IBM ATA 100, TDK 16 speed burner and a Pioneer DVD ROM (oh yah, and a 56k modem that connects at 26.4K).

The things I have noticed with my new system:
It's faster (than my old P2 400)
It was extremely twitchy running 266 FSB during Win2k and Win98SE installs (I know, but I have to dual boot). If I was running at 266 FSB, the 2k install would crash after it loaded all the temporary drivers from the setup disks; 98SE would crash with a "Windows Protection Error" while trying to enter the license key. I turned the FSB down to 200, and was able to install with no problems. I was able to run stable in Windows with a 266 FSB, but I have yet to really test it. After a hard crash in 2k, I would get a BSOD telling me to reboot again; I would only be able to get past this by going back to 200, booting up, shutting down, and then going back to 266 and it was fine again. Right now Win2k seems like it'll take the 266 fine, 98SE I had to turn down to about 250.

My questions:
I've heard this board is stable...anyone give me an idea what I'm doing wrong? Anyone experience anything similar to this on a diff board? Or was my board the runt of the litter? I've tried to remove the VIO1 jumper to turn down the RAM voltage, works worse (need more testing tho). Could it be the RAM itself? (I think my Mushkin chip just growled at me.) IRQs are fine, no conflicts, the GeForce is happy on it's own, etc etc. Maybe I shoulda bought Pentium?? (Uh-oh, gotta go, the Tbird just ripped loose from the socket and it coming after me with that delta black lab.............)

Ghideon

[chainbolt]

I am using the A7M266 now since 3 months without any
problem. It's extremly stable and highly overclockable,
with and without the multiplier settings. My Duron 850 is running at 1150 at this board w/o multipliier changes just be raising the FSB. My 1.2 Giga EV266 is running at
1430 MHz (10x143) and at 10x140=140Mhz completely stable. I have not experienced any issue with this board. In Japan this board is highly popular with a kind of fan club already, it's simply the best performing and most stable DDR board currently around. We will soon see how the upcoming VIA DDR chip set for socket A will do. I'm not aware of any issue with this board.

For me it looks more like a software problem. I also noticed that this specific RAM you are using is not validated for the A7M266. it seems that DDR RAM is
still a bit "unstable" by itself. I hear e.g. that
mixing DDR RAM sticks from different makers leads to problems etc.

Did you put all BIOS settings back to default?
Do you have the latest BIOS 1.004?
Did you check all voltage settings VIO, VIO1, and VCore?
The new TBirds EV266 are somehow strange with their voltage, they run better/stable if you lower the voltage.

[INTRUDER]

Ok I'm alitte new at this. Being that I just came over from Intels a few days ago. But my first thought would be, is it actually a 266mhz fsb T-Bird or a 200mhz fsb T-Bird. But if it trully is a 266mhz, then I would argee with chainbolt that it could have something to do with the DDR memory. I base that on what I have read about DDR and thats why I went with an Av7V133 and pc133 cas2 memory instead of DDR.

INTRUDER