the 1.03 bios is just fine it is kinda dangerous to flash so u are on your own on tht one if u have the 1.02 bios there are some mem settings u dont have. if u are feeling adventurous 1004a can be found here
I am using bios #1004a latest and best I have seen. I do not use the VIA 4n1 drivers at all. I have benchmarked the system drives with and without VIA drivers. The MS Win98SE drivers installed with Win Installation works a lot better and no allergies. Benchmarks with VIA drivers 4.31 and 4.32 was in the 800-900 range. Same system with MS Win98SE drivers was 24,200. So if you are not having any problem with the MS Win Drivers don't touch the VIA drivers. Now if you are uning Win2000 you will probably have to use 3 of the 4 drivers. NEVER install the AGP driver simply because the AGP controller is part of the AMD 761 chipset. Not any part of VIA. The only VIA controller on this system is the northbridge hd controller. This has nothing to do with the video on this mobo.
Now back to your original question. Tweaking the A7M266. Set the latency on your memory to 2.5-3-3. Set the voltage on memory up .5 volts, go to fsb adjustments and up the fsb about 4-5 mhz at a time until the system becomes unstable. Back off 1 mhz at a time until the system is stable. Most of these boards will go to arround 150mhz maybe a little higher. Be sure you have a great cooler, I use the ThermoEngine w/Delta 38 fan. The highest temp I have had is 41c. I use an IBM 75GXP hd, radeon 32DDR vid card. NOT LE. fps is not as geat as nVidia cards but fps is not everything. What you see on screen in color depth and clairty is just as important.
Now that you have eleminated the vid card as the cause, you should remove the SBLive and see if this is the problem. If so go by the previous post on Diagnostics.
Thanks to all who post their opinions. This is really becoming a learning experience.
I went ahead and bought the new Asus V7100 Pro GeForce MX400 video card because that Savage 4 just didn't want to work. In doing so, my system is working now but seems a little unstable. I get a Kernel32 error every now and then.
Plus, now it seems that Win 98SE is showing two monitors: my Fujitsu and a standard VGA monitor. I wonder if this is because the GeForce 2 MX400 supports TwinView. Anyone know how I can get rid of this? Plus, I want to disable Vsync as well.
Is there any evidence of SB Live Platinum causing problems on the Asus A7M266 ??????
Well it seems we are back to the original problem. SBLive card w/Via hd controller. If you are using the VIA hd controller drivers, you must be using v4.32. This version has the fix for SBLive problems and VIA controller problems. If you are not using VIA drivers, ie:Win98SE drivers. You are having other problems. Have you followed the diagnostic proceedures?? Just replacing parts is not goint to fix the problem, until you find out what is causing the problem.
Well now you have given more details. What is your system recources?? If they are below 80 you need to get rid of a bunch of programs running in the background and get the recources up to above 80. I will think this will resolve this problem. Just remember system memory has nothing to do with recources. So addiing more memory will not change this problem.