Creative Geforce2 Titanium & Abit KR7A-133

[Roger Selwyn]

I have recently purchased a new motherboard, KR7A-133, with Athlon
1800+ and Crucial 256MB DDR2100.

This combination seems to fail about 5-10 minutes after every cold
boot. After the reboot it will then perform correctly. This is
replicable by leaving the PC for a few minutes, boot from cold, start
some programs (explorer, eventvwr, task manager is what I tend to use,
so no significant load), then leaving for 5-10 minutes. It will at
some point reboot. When rebooted it will produce a minidump. The
config I have is:

- Abit KR7A-133
- Creative Geforce2 Titanium
- Maxtor 20GB D740X DMA133
- Crucial 256MB, 184pin, PC2100 Non-parity, CL2.5
- Athlon XP 1800+
- Pioneer DVD Drive
- Floppy Disk
- I have disconnected all other peripherals, including sound card,
modem, etc.
- Installed as above, then disconnected floppy and DVD.

I have formatted the hard disk, and installed a completely new copy of
Windows XP Professional. No upgrade. I have installed latest VIA
drivers 4.37v. Also Creative XP drivers for video card. I have also
tried basic MS drivers for video, and nVidia reference drivers.

I have also tried in various combinations:-
- Changed 'AGP Driving Value' from DA to EA
- Increased CPU and I/O voltage by one step
- Increased 'AGP Aperture Size' from 64 to 128 to 256.
- Fail-safe config in bios

I have spoken to Creative who suggested the following, which I have
tried:-
Video Bios Shadow - disable
Video Bios Cacheable - disable
System Bios Cacheable - disable
C8000 – xxxxx Shadow - disable these values
Assign IRQ To VGA - This MUST be enabled
VGA Palette Snoop - This MUST be disabled
Enable ESCD - disable
Power Management - disable
DPMS - disable
Virus Checking - disable
PnP Aware OS - disable
Turbo External Clock - disable
Cache Read + CPU with pipeline - disable
AGP Aperture Set to 256MB

Nothing appears to correct this problem. I have run this video card on
an ASUS P5A (Ali chipset) motherboard with no problems.

Since I can think of nothin else to do. I'm returning the motherboard.
The video card I've had for a while so it isn't so easy to return.

Can anyone recommend a motherboard that meets the following criteria:-
- Supports Athlon XP 1800+
- Support DDR2100
- Minimum of four IDE devices at DMA100, preferably DMA133
- Minimum of 4 PCI slots - I use four now when fully configured
- AGP 4X
- Won't fail with video card.

Would an ALi or AMD chipset be more stable. I am considering the ASUS
A7A266-E. Any views?

Cheers
Roger