Asus A7M266 tweaking

[Lev]

Hey,

My system specs:

Asus A7M266, AMD ThunderBird 1400 MHZ 266 FSB with 254 MB Corsair PC2400 CL2 DDR RAM and a Asus V7100 Geforce 2 MX..

How can I tweak my system to get optimal performence?

Which drivers, bios, programs, bios settings etc...?

Thnx,

Reinier

[MrMonkey]

could somebody please answer the question as i too would like to know this information

[RavenTai]

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

ftp://ftp.asuscom.de/pub/ASUSCOM/BIO...MD_761/A7M266/


make shure u have installed the latest AMD agp miniport driver look here

http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/


via 4.32 4 in ones for your southbrige ONLY INSTALL 3 OF THE 4 do not install the via agp

http://www.viahardware.com/download/index.shtm#4in1


there is more look in the asus forum lots of good stuf

[DAfshar]

You mentioned that we NOT load all four from Via's latest 4.32. Why is this?

[RavenTai]

the VIA 4 in one is for a VIA northbrige and VIA southbrige

the a7m266 has a VIA 686 south brige and a AMD 761 northbrige

so the AMD agp driver should be used instead of the via agp the other 3 are functions of the southbrige ide ect

[DAfshar]

And the AMD AGP Driver that we are referring to is the Miniport 4.80 Driver version?

[RavenTai]

yes http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/


4.80 for win 9x/me
5.22 for win 2k

[BobyJo]

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.

[BobyJo]

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.

[DAfshar]

Well, after taking everyone's advice and talking with Creative, I decided to try to install the Savage 4 drivers and see if they worked.

NOPE!

The damn card was stable for about 3 minutes! Then it decided to screw up my registry and now I get a viagart.vxd error on startup.

Wow! This is so much fun!

[BobyJo]

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.

[DAfshar]

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 ??????

[BobyJo]

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.

[DAfshar]

Yes.

Currently running:

AMD AGP Miniport 4.8
Via 3-in-1 ver. 4.32
Asus V7100 Pro ver. 12.90
SB Live Plat drivers dated 05-2000



What do ya think?
Interestingly enough, I get some "not enough resource memory" errors if I run the system a long time.

AND...

I want to disable Vsync but I'm not sure how to do this.

[BobyJo]

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.