!HELP! Newbie computer building Q.

Hi all,

I am taking my first stab at building a computer. I bought a FIC AD11 board supporting 266 FSB and DDR Ram, an Athlon 1.4 Gig, and 256 Megs of Kingston DDR 2100 Ram. The HDD is Seagate 40 Gig and DVD is Toshiba.

I put it together all right, but the system is very unstable. I keep on getting memory faults in which the system crashes (in Windows ME) or gives me a nice blue screen (in Win2K or XP trial edition).

I strongly suspect the memory, but can anyone help me here? Any ideas of what might be going wrong? I know its a vague and possibly dumb Q. but I have taken it apart and put it together, swapped IDE cables, in short done everything I could.

Thanks,

-Rahul.

Was the Windows OS fresh installed after you build it or did you use a HD from another computer? It could be the drivers of the old board are still there causing problems.
Otherwise check if the FSB is set to 133Mhz in the BIOS or let the BIOS detect the correct speed by setting the speed to AUTO. If the speed can be set on the board(dipswitch or jumpers), try setting it on 133 with the highest CPU speed according the manual

Hope you understand what I am saying. If not I shall explain it.

I'll bet it's a noninstalled driver issue!

SPEEDO

AMD and VIA drivers that is. Check this first.

Looked it up:
Set the dipswitches to 10.5 (all 4 off), jumer FS at 2-3
If no succes, press ctrl+C after turning the PC on. Set the CPU host/PCI clock to 133/33MHz. auto detect enabled, SSmodulated disabled.
No succes, auto detect disabled.
You also could try ADR_EN jumper on 2-3.
Still nothing try clearing the CMOS. You have to set everything in the BIOS again, but leave the clocksettings as it is.

Hope it works!!

I had to set a jumper to set FSB to 133 MHz. CPU voltage, multipliers and other arcane stuff are at autodetect.

I am fresh installing onto a blank HDD.

I dont think this could be M/B driver issues as I get these memory errors during OS installation as well. I started with Win2K, gave up after multiple retries. I managed to install WinME, but I get errors a few minutes after bootup. I then tried to install WinXP Home edition trial, and always get errors during installation.

The thing that perplexes me is that WinME boots up fine and runs for a while before crashing. Is there anything in the CPU voltage settings etc. which could cause this? I tried turning off all optimisation settings such as Shadow RAM, etc. in BIOS.

Thanks for the help!

Rahul.

Nice board you have by the way. Havn't seen a FIC board around here:(

Well found something on the FIC site:
http://www.fica.com/techsupport/faq/...62/AD11.stm#Q1
I hope you have a 1.4GHz/266Mhz CPU!!
The speed is locked of those Athlons, so ADR_EN jumper must be set on 2-3!!

**EDIT** Ow you already did!!

Did you load BIOS setup defaults?!

thanks for the replies.. I managed to get the system running by stepping down the FSB to 100 MHz. Dont know why the hell it wont work with 133MHz though. I doublechecked that my mobo, proc and memory are all 133MHz enabled. I have no clue whats happening.. I have a seperate post asking for help with this problem :)

Sounds like you got a 1.4GHz/200mhz Athlon on your hands.

Ok here's a dumb question, I assume you've got a good heatsink attached to the cpu and used thermo grease? Is the power supply an athlon approved power supply?

If you think it could be your memory, try lowering the cas timing to 2.5 or 3.

Well, the box says 266 MHz.. maybe AMD screwed up and shipped a 200 in a 266 box :)

I have the heatsink attached using the "phase-change" compound which comes with it.. Was too lazy to scrape it off and go buy Arctic Silver.. I dont plan to overclock or anything so figured it should be okay.. I checked in the BIOS, CPU temp hovers around 45-50 deg..

I got the SDRAM CAS timing to 2.5.. My mobo doesnt seem to support 3.. the only options I have are 2.5 and 2.

Thanks.