Another K6S5A reboot problem....

[LAJay]

This may have been covered in other threads, but I haven't found one that covers my situation exactly yet... so here goes...

My K6S5A motherboard (i love it) has 1x256meg and 1x128m pc100 ram, two older hard drives on ide1, an XP 1700+ proc, and cdrw on primary ide2.
My BIOS bus speed is set to 133/133.
Video is OLD pci ATI-All-In-Wonder 8meg. (i'm not a gamer yet, so don't knock the pci video thing just yet)... I have the newer XP drivers from the ATI web site.
OpSys is XP Pro sp1.

My system randomly reboots in the middle of something - no real pattern as far as I can tell...

My TEMP is NOT to blame, as it is between 40 and 50, and it has rebooted sometimes right after I loged on to the system (1 minute).

My MEM was tested with all mem86 tests ok.

My Windows2000 partition seems to be ok - leading me to believe a driver problem in WinXP.

Which part of the bus is it referring to in the BIOS, north or south bridge? or both? because of my memory at 100, do i have to make this setting 100? won't that slow down my processor as well, though? (indicating to me that the bus speed setting in the bios controls BOTH north and south bridge?)

Thanks!:t

[Peter M]

Weeeelll ... the bus speeds you set there are CPU and RAM. You aren't ACTUALLY surprised that PC100 RAM running at 133 MHz doesn't work right, or are you?

www.memtest86.com

The bad news is that this board, like most of them all, doesn't allow you to run the CPU bus at 133 with the RAM at 100.

[BipolarBill]

Yup - you need new memory. May as well get DDR...

[LAJay]

Well, the system in W2K works fine, but not XP...

also - memtest86 found no problems running at 133 on the 100 memory. (it's Kingston memory, so it's good)

So why would it crash?

Ok - well, if I have to decide between new memory and a new video card, (assuming i lower the bus to 100), which would give me the better performance for now? the DDR ram and running the pci video, or leaving the ram and lower bus speed and upgrading the video to agp - because the video doesn't perform so well either....

[Peter M]

Or you step back to a Duron. These run 100 MHz CPU bus, which enables you to run 100 MHz RAM as well.