This is an article for anyone that has an Athlon system and is experiencing stability problems with it. I'm pretty sure it can help you out. If you can't be bothered reading the story then just track straight to the third-last paragraph to get to the nitty gritty and the solution :)

If you're having trouble with your own system and are thinking of mailing me for suggestions, please post to the forums instead - that way everyone learns..

About a week ago I got an Athlon 500 and MSI 6167 board. I took it home and installed it, along with a chunky VEK32 cooler from Eyo. The problems started from the get-go as it got blue screens and spontaneous reboots while trying to re-detect the new hardware of the motherboard. I deltree'd Windows and attempted a reinstall, which took forever because of continuing lockups and spontaneous reboots. After a couple of hours I got sick of it and took the board back and exchanged it for an FIC SD11 board. The FIC board didn't even finish POSTing. It kept re-scanning for SCSI devices on my SCSI card in an infinite loop, and if I went into the SCSI bios it would have a corrupt screen. I rang back and asked if I could try a different MSI board, because it went a lot better than the FIC board and perhaps I just had a dud, or the original version which had known issues with some AGP cards. The shop guy agreed and this time I decided to put the machine together in the shop and test it in front of him rather than wasting my time going back home and having it screw up there. As it turns out this was a good move (or non-move :), because it went better for awhile, but then blue screened when it attempted to detect the network card. It also beeped continuously with a blank screen with the Siemens RAM in it before POSTing (which it never got around to actually doing), when I took it out and just left my NEC ram in it, it was sort of fine (well, getting to a blue screen is more progress than no POST :).

After all of these problems I was getting sick of it and I had a talk with the shop guy about it, wondering what I should do. He said he couldn't refund me on the Athlon or even exchange it for a P3 because his supplier for some reason refused to give credit/exchange on the Athlon. Perhaps his supplier knows how many disgruntled Athlon buyers there would be :) He would test my system for me to see what exactly was wrong. I went and visited a friend for a few hours while he worked his magic on my system. A few hours later I called back and he gave me the news. The problem he said was the RAM. He said that my Siemens stick was no good at all but the NEC was ok on the most part. He had used his own PC133 stick and it seemed better than my NEC. The NEC stick is PC100, CAS2@100MHz, so I thought it should be fine for the time being, but decided that I would upgrade to his RAM as soon as I could afford it. I have had both my DIMMs running with no problems at up to 112MHz/CAS3 on a BX6 2.0 with a P2 or Celeron (after that the CPU became a limiting factor so I don't know how well it went above that) so it confused me how either of them would have problems at 100MHz on the Athlon system. He said there were still some problems with the MSI board with the good RAM, so he gave me a refund on the board, I guess it was from a different supplier. I remembered Agg and his K7M review, which didn't seem to have any of these problems, so I decided to give him a call. I asked him if he still had the K7M from Eyo there and if he did could I come around and test it with the rest of my system. He said fine, in exchange for me taking some stuff back to Eyo for him when I went to pay for the board. A fair exchange in my opinion :)

That night I took my CPU and bare guts of a system over to Agg's place and we sat around for most of the night setting it up and testing it. A major problem was not being able to power it up, in the end we discovered that my power supply was dead! I think we were both thankful that I hadn't blown up the board. After we had it set up in some bizarre Siamese twin configuration using his case but with my hard drives hanging outside it, we found it was a lot stabler than either the MSI or FIC boards. We got one or two blue screens, after which I figured that it was probably the RAM and decided to put extra effort into selling it and buying some new stuff. Luckily the blown power supply was a warranty job which I got done the next day (thanks Eyo :) when I went to pay for the board.

When I got home all seemed fine, a few software errors every now and then but nothing too drastic. Looking in alt.comp.hardware.overclocking.amd I also found out that I need an AMD approved power supply unit to get it stable, because the power-hungry Athlon demands a very clean supply. This regardless of how many watts the PSU can output, apparently you can have a monster 300 watt PSU but it will have enough noise in the power lines to throw the Athlon off. Or sometimes the +5v and +3.3v lines (the important ones for the Athlon) don't output enough current even though overall the PSU is 250+ watts. I don't know where mine sits in the noise or power scale of things, it's a Macase 300 watt. Either way it's not approved according to AMD (http://www1.amd.com/athlon/power if you want a complete list of approved power supplies, http://www1.amd.com/athlon/config for other info on building an Athlon system) so the other day I set off in search of an approved one. I emailed all the companies which have a 300+ watt approved power supply, and got a few answers. The best value one I found was the 400 watt Leadman (http://www.leadman.com.tw/ATXPOWER.htm) , which I ordered today from Taiwan. I found this to be even better value than the only other approved PSU I could find locally, the Sea Sonic SR300-FS (http://www.seasonic.com.tw/atx-fs.htm). If anyone wants a Sea Sonic then tell me and I'll give you details of where to get it, but be warned they're very expensive at about A$150. When the Leadman arrives I'll tell you how it goes, the net cost was about $100 including freight.

Anyway, as the days went by things got worse. I think they did anyway, maybe I was just lucky and nothing happened on that first day, because I did occasionally get good runs out of it. I was praying that it was either the RAM or the PSU, preferably the former because it will be some weeks before my new PSU arrives. If it was anything else (eg, TNT2 card, or even the m/b itself) then I was basically stuffed. There's just no way I can _not_ use a good 3d card, it would defeat the entire purpose of the upgrade, and, well, if the motherboard wasn't coping there's no way I could exchange it for a better model because there _are_ no better models. If the m/b was at fault I would have to simply buy a cheap Celeron and board and let the Athlon collect dust until a better VIA Athlon board came out. Thankfully I don't think it's the board.

Today I got paid, and I even though I haven't sold my old RAM yet I've had offers from 2 people (one for each), so I decided to trust them to honour their word and bought a single 128 PC133 DIMM, Kingmax brand. I only bought one so that only one of the people has to keep their word :) If they both buy my RAM I'll buy another 128 meg stick. I whacked it in, booted up, no blue screens or software errors! The old config had gotten so bad that it would often require 3 or 4 reboots from a cold start before it would start up, and spontaneous reboots sometimes happened. But so far after about 2 hours of Prime95 torture test, not one error, whereas before it would bomb out within half an hour. Still no blue screens or software failures. The RAM has solved most of my problems, at least I hope it has! (touch wood) I want at least 24 straight hours of torture testing with no errors before I can say for sure. If there are some errors I'm hoping the 400 watt psu will fix it.

So to any Athlon owners out there with stability problems (all of you? :), first thing I say is to get some GOOD quality ram. Can't afford PC133 ram you say? I am going to give the shop I got mine from an almighty plug. How does $290 for a 128 meg PC133 DIMM with a liftetime warranty sound? Yes, I too was incredulous. This is cheaper than most PC100 DIMMs, and it's also better quality than most of them, if not all of them because of the extra 33MHz speed and lifetime warranty. Please don't quote me on this price however, as you are all aware RAM prices can fluctuate wildly on a daily basis, so tomorrow it may be far more expensive or cheaper. $290 was the price on the 11th of November 1999. Looking at today's Trading Post I see PC100 RAM going from between $270 and $367. $20 for the extra RAM speed is Buckley's, and you can be absolutely sure that the $270 stuff is the cheapest nastiest stuff you can find, in line with my Siemens stick. The RAM I bought today is top-notch stuff, I have no idea why it was so cheap."Where do I get it?" I hear you ask. HDP Computers in Bexley, phone number 9554 5133. He has really good prices on a lot of stuff, but his range isn't as diverse as Eyo. But go for the RAM here, it is a definite improvement on my already good quality NEC PC100 RAM, and if his price holds then you will probably not buy better anywhere else.

Whatever RAM you end up getting though, go for at least PC133 RAM. You have spent $670+ on your board and Athlon, you don't want to skimp now on some dodgy RAM. Or even RAM which you think is far from dodgy but in actuality is. The NEC stick I have was the top of the line stuff when I got it, it was about $100 more than the other usual PC100 stuff that was around at the time. But I would go so far as to say that if I had gotten the Kingmax RAM with the Athlon I would still have the MSI board. I'm glad I have the K7M now though, it's definitely a better quality board than the MSI and has more features, and supports higher clock speeds more reliably than all the other Athlon boards, according to Anandtech. For anyone that has or wants a VEK32 cooler but is worried about fitting it in the K7M then the solution is to simply file 2mm off one of the fans in the area that the power connector fits and leave the screw out. It's no big deal at all and doesn't substantially decrease the structural integrity of the fan.

The good news is my old RAM isn't dead for anything except Athlon application. The Siemens stick is running very happily at 100MHz/CAS2 in my Celeron Linux box and hasn't missed a beat. I'm going to test the NEC RAM in it again before I sell it just to make sure it isn't fried. I don't think it is though, if the Siemens was bad enough not to even allow the second MSI board to POST and it still works, the NEC must be fine. I am sodded if I know why the Athlon demands such high quality RAM. Obviously there's more to it than just the speed. I couldn't even get my Athlon stable at 90 or 95MHz FSB speed, and slowing the RAM down a notch from its auto-detected SPD ratings seemed to make it worse, or definitely no better anyway. I wish I could figure it the reasons, but there are the facts. RAM is the first step you need to take towards a stable Athlon system. Or perhaps the second, I still won't be happy until I have an approved power supply in my system (look up 5 paragraphs if you've skipped straight to the end :). I'll keep you posted.