RE: Strange Crashes with 2.3-42 and Athlon 500

Unfortunately, memory and power supply vendors have not kept as close to the
specs as we need.  The latest generation of cpus puts some serious demands
on these subsystems.  You might recall another cpu manufacturer bashing the
memory makers last fall.  Please check our web page to see that your memory
and power supply are on the "approved" list.  It strikes me as quite
unlikely that you are having a cpu design or manufacturability problem.  MB,
maybe.  Memory or power supply--check first.

Nathan Zook

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jochen Buehler [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2000 4:35 AM
> To: Jeff Garzik
> Cc: Andreas Steffan; [e-mail]; nsmith;
> [e-mail]; Alan Cox
> Subject: Re: Strange Crashes with 2.3-42 and Athlon 500
> 
> 
> Jeff Garzik writes:
>  > Andreas Steffan wrote:
>  > > We have two boxes running the Athlon-500 on MSI boards. We found
>  > > them to be stable using just one 128M DIMM, but as we 
> add more memory
>  > > the system gets *very* unstable immediately. Our conclusion is to
>  > > ditch the MSI boards for ASUS boards. That will 
> hopefully solve our
>  > > problem.
> 
> We are running several Athlon 500 and 550s with MSI 6167 boards
> here, all equipped with at least 256MB of memory.
> The only problems occured with 
> 
> a) bad memory (8ns PC100 DIMMs) which gave all sorts of wired crashes
>    and fs-corruption. We're using 6ns CAS2 memory now and avoid mixing
>    different brands. Never had a crash since then.
> b) bad power supplies. Some 230W supplies seem to have difficulties
>    with more than 128MB and more than one disk.
>    Standard 300W ones seem to be fine.
> 
>  > 
>  > My local computer store hardware guy tells me that 
> Athlon-500's have
>  > problems, and heavily advises the 700 and above (and not 
> just to pad his
>  > bottom line :))
>  > 
>  > He mentioned one trick -- make sure you have at least 32MB 
> of AGP'able
>  > video memory, if you have an Athlon 500.  If you have less, many
>  > motherboards malfunction apparently.
>  > Again, this problem isn't present on Athlon 700 and above, or so he
>  > says.
> 
> Hmm. After my experiences, I can't buy that.
> 
>        
>       Jochen
> 
>