The onboard sound is superior to your 5.1 SB live card as it has 6.1 capabillities and a digital speaker jack.

Hello all,

I have been using my GA-7VAXP ver 1.0 for over a year, originally had a 1Ghz Athlon, then upgraded to a 1900+ AthlonXP. Now I have a Barton core 2600+ that uses a 333FSB. From my reading online, it runs at 1917Mhz with a 11.5 multiplier. I set the Dip switches for 166fsb and left the multiplier switch at auto. I have also upgraded to F14 from F4 BIOS in preparation for the Barton chip. The Problem that I am having is that the computer will turn on with the HD LED constantly on and no POST beeps or Video Card BIOS Logo(Nothing on the screen at all) I have tried setting the multiplier to 11.5 via the dip switches. I have tried changing the FSB to 133 and 100. I have also tried removing the battery and shorting the solderpoints to clear the cmos. I am using a ThermalTake Volcano9, 420 Watt PSU, a Copper Shim, and PC2100 RAM(I know that it will be running asyncronous, but I plan on upgrading eventually.) Also, if I stick in my old 1900+(and make the dip switch changes), it works just fine. I am about to install it in my Wife's computer, but I don't think it will help her Ancestry.com research nearly as much as it would help my Q3A score

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

On another note, I believe it was Ali that had a problem with the Onboard RealTek NIC. Well my Wife's GA-7VAXP had the same problem, as far as WinXP was concerned it worked, and the link light was turned on behind the computer, but the link light was not lit on my router. Different cables had the same effect. Ultimately I installed a Linksys NIC that had been laying around the house, and disabled the onboard NIC in the BIOS to free up resources.

Update: I've installed the 2600+ in my wife's computer, but it only works at 133fsb, so its running as a 1800+ instead of a 2600+ setting it to 166fsb yields Beep codes. Can anyone confirm that a 333fsb will work with pc2100 RAM?

Update2: Well I tried it in my computer again this time without the shim and with an old Heatsink and it booted up fine at 166fsb, but it wouldn't let me run the RAM at 133(DDR 266/PC2100) so it would lock up while loading Windows.. Oddly at 133fsb on my PC it Runs as a 2000+ instead of an 1800+ as it did on my wife's computer. It is still a little faster than my old 1900+(and the Barton has 2x the L2 Cache as my old T-bred 1900+) so it looks like I might get some PC2700 or PC3200 RAM for Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

I have had this board since last spring, and I have had absolutely no problems whatsoever. My system is as follows:

GA-7VAXP rev 1.2
Athlon 2600
1 gig Crucial DDR
Nvidia Geforce FX 5200
Soundblaster Audigy Platinum
400 watt power supply
4x NEC DVD+RW ND-1100
TDK 52X CDRW
450 Gigs of Harddrive space
Pinnacle capture card
Pixelview T.V. card
Windows XP Professional

Everthing works flawlessy together, only other board this stable was an MSI.

hi,

Im new to this- but ive spent the last (lets count em') 4(scratch that, 5 now) hours reading up about this board/cpu and overclocking in general. Pretty sure ive hit all the main sites and i reckon i know whats going on. So heres my problem.

-athlon xp2100+ palomino(locked)
-7vaxp rev 1.0 bios F14
-256 kingmax pc3200 (ddr400) (recognised as auto in bios though 333 works aswell.
strangely enough 400 doesnt though)
-a few hard drives + 3 cdrw/dvd/dvdrw drives. Im using the raid as ata
(though id be surprised if this is relevant)
- runnin xppro sp1
- chip is at 1742 mhz (133*13) (though wcpuid reads 134*13 (which is obviously correct given that 133*13 must end with a 9, not a 2)
-only have 2 fans (i think, cant believe i dont just open up and look) and cpu temp is 67deg c. From what ive
been reading, this is quite high for a non oc'd board so i guess i should deal with that (how?)
-SW1 is set to 133 (came that way)
-CK_Ratio is auto
- i dont use top performance cause it doesnt really do much and apparently causes some instabilities.


So ive used that easytune piece of crap that came with it and it happily overclocks to 139 (FSB) (using easy or advanced mode). Whoopee! A whole 5 mhz (65 at the cpu). Anywhere after that, easytune just causes xp to reboot midway through its stupid 'optimising values!' thing and it starts up with 139 and works fine. Note that the temperatures have not increased and remain at 67 celcius. -no problems running anything.

Alternatively i've tried using the bios to do it. Similar experience, 139 is fine (no voltage changes required) but any higher and it carks it. I have used the +5% cpu voltage option but to no avail. the system is left in the state of "cant do a hot-boot" i have heard others say, in addition to which it cant boot all the way to windows when cold-booted.
***correction: hmm, not really sure if i gave this a proper test come to think about it, but assume it did fail and i'll post back in a minute or two if it did actually work***


I realise since my CPU (athlonXP 2100+) multiplier is locked at 13 (which i believe i can unlock if necessary) then its possible that the jump from 139*13=1807 to 140*13=1820 could be pushing the cpu beyond its limit (though i cencerely hope not as that would be a bit disappointing) so i figure something else must be at play.
Once i get it all working i'll do the low multiplier-high fsb/high mult-low fsb to find the limits and all will be dandy so all im really after now is why this aint working.

Theres basically a couple of questions i have which the past few hours have not been able to settle for me.
1) given that this board can take 100/133/166 fsb, why does it come set at 133 and how come people report problems when they put it as 166? (I have not tried this yet since as it cant even do 140 why would 166 work) Is the answer to this that the palimino 2100+ is a 266 FSB chip? (does this even make sense?)
2) Where do i find these 2-2-5-2 memory settings that people often refer to. (I know about ctrl-F1 so please give explicit directions)
3) Im thinking about buying a stick of kingmax 512 ddr400 cause 256 is just too s**t and have read some stuff about this board having some sort of issue with 2 ddr400 dimms. will this work?
4) I have downloaded that http://www.<something something something>.de F13 pro bios but havent flashed it yet since i figure the only part i want to use is the agp/pci freq = FSB/x feature anyway and what i'm having trouble doing should be posible with F14

So essentially i want to know the standard question of Why wont this work - with the two added questions of 100/133/166 and the memory timing stuff.

thankyou in advance for anything you have to say (and to all who have already said-i swear ive read through about 25 pages of this thread)

.help

-nick

This seems to be a popular thread.

Well, I HAD a GA-7VAXP "emphasize HAD".

Here's what happened. It's a great board don't get me wrong. I had no problems until recently when vertical lines would pop up all over my screen. My first thought was that my video card, ATI Radeon 7200, was going out on me. I switched the card with a 32 Meg ATI card I had in my other computer just to see if that was the problem. My 7200 ran fine in the other computer and I was still getting lines on my screen and sometimes the computer would lock up with the other video card.

I then began unplugging everything I had on the board except the video card to see if any of my peripherals were causing the lines. Nope, it still would pop lines on the screen and lock up. I even monitored the board and chip to see if they were overheating and set my bios back to the F13 from the F14 and even swithced to the 2nd bios. Still the same results.

Then I began to unhook everything and when I started to unplug my power supply, which is an ANTEC 400W that I just purchased about 5 months ago, I noticed that it was literally fused onto the plug on the M/B. Three of the wires were black and charred. Now I never noticed any overheating problems nor did I smell any burning wires, but there they were! All this seemed to come about over a weeks time. It started so gradually that I really just thought it was little things like video drivers or the video card. It wasn't until it just wouldn't post that I started getting worried. Luckily my procesor, memory and HDs survived.

I'm going to get a gigabyte GA-7N400 PRO2 and another PS and am hoping I have better luck with this one.

Could it have been a spike in the PS or just a bad board?

I have an Gigabyte 7VAX... and i think i have problems with it. I just bought a Pinnacle PCTV Stereo (not PRO, so without FM) and when i install it in any PCI slot .... the computer just won't start. No video card initializing, no keyboard lights... nothing... no beeps also. Can anyone tell me what can be the problem?


Thank you.

Boris the Fly:
First of all 67degrees C is way too high. some heatsinks come with some gunk on them, Check yours if it has anything other than thermal greese, scrape it off and then put some greese on the cpu core only. Use your finger so there is a good uniform layer(or finger through a plastic bag) then put your gunk-free heatsink back on.
For your RAM you can get to advanced BIOS options by pressing CTRL+F1 while in the BIOS and play with different memory settings.. although from my understanding the KT400 Chipset that this board uses.. gets better performance with memory running at 333DDR(PC2700) make sure to at least try it at CAS2.


Anthony Myers:
Capacitors in Power Supplies go bad all the time... but if the wires are burnt, I think maybe something might have grounded out on the mobo, I've seen circuit boards fried by a single lady bug.. a Surge Surpressor is always a good investment. a power spike could hasten a powersupply's demise. In the future you can look at the voltage output in the BIOS if any voltage is more than a volt off, it might be a good idea to replace it. Maybe it was the Chipset Fan Burning out and grounding out, those things are more than worthless, they are a liability... you can get a Zalman Northbridge Heatsink, its bigger and can cool passively with no fan required. I'm not sure the the GA-7N400 PRO2 uses a cheap chipset fan or not, but if it does, you could order a replacement heatsink so when you start hearing it whine, you'll be able to do something about it.


Catalin Ciurezu:
Well, with it not booting it might not merely be an IRQ problem. You might test that TV Card in another machine to make sure that it works... Otherwise, you might try disabling stuff that you don't need in the BIOS. I have my serial ports disabled. cause I will never use them, Parallel port is disabled(USB Printer) I don't have any USB 2.0 Devices yet and only a few USB 1.1 devices so I disabled USB 2.0. disabling the floppy frees up another IRQ. If all else fails you can update your BIOS with the latest firmware. Might also make sure that "Init Display First"(or something simular in the BIOS) is set to AGP I'm not sure if the GA-7VAX has RAID but if it does, and you don't use it, disable it (saves a bunch of time booting too!) I sometimes find that clearing the CMOS fixes funky problems like this(just take the battery out for a few minutes.)

You know Michael, after mentioning the chipset fan, I remember that the fan on the chipset had been giving me problems. When I first bought the board the chipset fan just kept popping off. It wasn't seated on the board good at all. I got the clips to finally set and the fan sometimes whined when I first booted up for a few seconds but then ran as normal. I monitored the fan and board temp for a while and after a while it would whine only every other boot. That should have flagged me that the fan was bad, but I didn't think about it after the whine stopped. I will check the new board when it comes and replace the fan for that Zalman heatsink. You're absolutely right. Those chipset fans are not practical at all. Thanks for the info!

thanks michael- i figured as much the more i read on.

also to anyone else who was thinking about answering me- i've since found out (haha, i say that like its an achievement) that indeed the 2100 palo is a 133 fsb chip so thats great... so what kinda limitations does that give me?

oh, and itd be really good if someone could suggest what kinda fan/heatsink i should use (or just general cooling stuff really) the reason i ask is that ive read that some boards for amd dont have clips strong enough to take certain types of cooling cause theyre just too heavy- resulting in broken clip and falling off heatsink - imminent death. I'm sure i dont need the state of the art 'fridge-power' cooler but some suggestions would be great- cause i dont want to buy [that one] cause its $4 more expensive than the other one beside it and really have no clue what trouble i bought into.

of course feel free to tell me to go buy something cause theyre all the same if indeed they are.

omg! i just read some stuff regard cooling for this board:

given that this board has no HS/F mounting holes, doesnt that severely limit the size of possible replacement HSFs for my original amd one? like heavy ones could quite easily snap that little clip i would imagine.

how have you guys dealt with this? Is simply putting in an extra 2 system fans good enough?

-nick (goddamit my names not boris the fly! i really should fix this)


ps: oh s**t! i dont even have a system fan! (cpu fan + power box fan only! hahaha no wonder its always pushing 60) seriously though, whats the weight limit on that clip for the CPU HSF and what should i get? Thermaltake seems to own the market from where i see, but at night and early morning i have been known to walk into walls so perhaps my sight is not to be trusted...

hey,

this may seem like an extreme cooling solution to aviod heavy HS/F on this board, but has anyone ever tried using a peltier device?

(-no longer boris the fly)

Thanx, Michael Morgan.
I removed all the stuff from bios, including audio and lan and parallel port. I haven't removed yet the serial ports. When it works, sometimes it does - that's the strange part and i can't find a rule when it does and when not, the tuner takes IRQ 19 and no conflicts are being reported by WinXP. All works just fine. 7VAX does not have an RAID adaptor so i can't disable that and i already got the last BIOS from Gigabyte, F12 that is. It's really getting on my nerves that it doesn't even generate an error so i can figure this thing out.

Catalin,

i was having real issues with random total failures recently and it turned out to be irq stuff. Everyone was saying recet the irq tables (or somethin)- only problem was i had no reset irq option.
So to do it i had to just manually select irqs in bios for the various stuff, restart-let it load, restart, and change it back to auto in the bios, restart, and it all worked fine since.

Does everything work fine when you take it out? cause thats sorta the bag i was in.

this is kinda obligitory, but have you checked your ram. its often the cause of weird problems like this where sometimes theres no problems at all but sometimes just no dice.

good luck

Hi Nick

I have a GA7-VAXP Rev 1.1. I installed a Thermaltake Volcano 11 Xaser Edition, due to the very hot summer we had in England. This cpu cooler is excellent. My cpu now runs at about 35 centigrade. I've only got one case fan but my power supply has 2 fans.

It's also worth getting the modified F13 bios from http://lumberjacker.kettenfett.com/

This has more options than the original bios.

I am very pleased with this motherboard, and have had no problems at all.

Hi, nick parao and thanx for your advice.
The problem is that when Windows works, it shows that PCI got IRQ 16-22 which is very weird as i can assign from Bios only IRQ 1-15 to the PCI slots. So what should i do? Assign IRQ as i want without taking into consideration what Windows says?
Another thing very weird is that, if i let the computer unplugged for about 1 hour or so it will surely work for the first time i boot it.... but only the first time. If i restart the computer from windows it works. If i turn it off, if only for a second or two, it doesn't boot up anymore. If i remove the tuner from PC everything is fine.


----- completing this post:
I tried to disable everything from BIOS (serial, usb 1 and 2, parallel and serials, audio and lan) and tried to asign IRQ to PCI slots... but in Windows PCI slots had the same IRQ as before, nothing changed. I'm pretty much out of ideas.

Thanx.

thanks andy- i was looking at one of them, its either that or the tt volcano12 xaser (only 8$ more, although it weighs like 700 g so id have to rig up some crappy support string or something).

haha- very hot summer in england hey? that'd be rough, like 28 degrees eh? come to australia and visit darwin for a few months and 38 all year round will be normal.



Oh, and i've been reading some stuff about matching your memory timing with cpu... if im running a fsb of 133 does this mean i should shoot my ddr400 back to 266? (surely not)

-thanks

Anyone who might come by my post and is looking for an answer to the problem I had...
The blasted thing is very sensitive to heat.
The major kewl tower heatsink with dual fans wasn't keeping at cool as the crappy heatsink with skinny fan provided with the retail processors. 10 degrees made all the difference...
I put on the heatsinks that came with the processors and all runs excellent.
This was done with 2 computers. So It's not just a fluke.

I did learn about memory from this experience as well. Gigabytes run pretty much any kind of memory, but it's good to keep them the same kind...
Asus doesn't like CAS 3.0
2.5 or less works just fine with Asus.

Wish to thank all of those who contribute to help troubleshoot the world.

I bought an unlocked Barton 2500+ at a show in Taylor, Michigan. I have Giga-byte mobo GA-7VAXP rev. 1.2. W/ stock HSF and speed I got 140*-145*F. I installed a Tt Volcano 11+ w/ clear mod, Artic Silver, & upgraded the fan to Tt Smart Fan ll and got my temps down to 96-107*F. Now I OC at a multiplier of 15 (my board goes to 18) & fsb of 175 (w/ no added voltage). I have a 20-30*F increase in heat depending on how much noise I am prepared to deal with. I am using three (3) Kingston 2700 512 ValueRam modules and cannot do any more with my fsb. However, my CPU Clocks to 2640mhz for 3600+. According AMD specs, the Barton Core CPU's are designed for a maximum of 2800mhz, for me that would take a multiplier of 16. My system refuses to boot at that speed, and I probably would have a hard time keeping it cool anyway.

Tt Xaser III v1000a, black series 12-bay, upgraded from hardcano 10 to Hardcano 11(USB 2.0 & FireWire)
Giga-Byte GA-7VAXP rev1.2 BIOS F13
Antec 550 TrueControl PSU w/ front control of 12,5&3.3v & minimum PSU fan speed w/ 5 Antec red 3-LED case fans (2 side, 2 rear & 1 top) slaved to it
AMD Model 10 2500+ Barton Core 15/175@3600+ made in Dresden, Germany
Tt Volcano 11+ w/ clear mod & Tt Smart Fan II w/ Artic Silver & Stainless
Steel Dragon fan cover
(3) Kingston ValueRam 512 pc2700 (333) w/ Tt heat spreaders and 60mm fan
Plextor 708 8x4x4x2x DVD write 40x24x40x CD 12x DVD rom (IDE 1 Master)
Memorex 48x24x48x/16DVD rom (IDE 1 Slave)
(1) Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9’s 80GB ATA 133 7200rpm 8mb cache system drive (IDE 2) set as Master
(2) Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9’s 80GB ATA 133 7200rpm 8mb cache RAID O video drive from onboard Promise controller, both set as Master on IDE 3 & 4 respectively
PcToys copper braided round cable on all including FDD
(2) Tt Smart Fan II's in front of hard drives
Chaintech 128mb 8x AGP w/ s video & DVI out
FireWire 3+1port card w/ internal feeding Hardcano 11
ATI TV WONDER VE
Tt 12" red cold cathode sound activated 3-way switch light
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy ES Sound Card
Creative Labs Inspire 2.1 Speakers
Tt black & red multi-media keyboard
Tt black & red usb optical mouse
Tt black & red mouse pad
Samsung Sincmaster 19”CRT 1600x1200 @ 68hz .20 dot pitch
APC UPS 1500VA
Lexmark z45 inkjet printer
Epson 825 inkjet printer
Xerox 470cx 4-in-1
Sony DSCS75 3.2 mp camera (2) 128mb Lexar ms
Canon canoscan 676U
USB hub
Windows XP Home
1 Studios DVD X Copy Gold

I had it at one time (for only 1 week), and now use it as a frisbee because of all the problems I had with it...

So youdidn't return it and get your money back then.......you used it as a frizby?