Putting the system together was pretty easy. I used one stick of Crucial PC2700 512MB ram, an AMD Athlon 2200+ XP cpu, and the ABIT
Siluro GF4 Ti4200-8X OTES video card after my failed attempts with the
All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro. More on that in a bit. After making all the connections, everything booted up on my first try. The manual is very helpful and labels all the connectors and jumpers nicely.
After doing a fresh install of Windows XP and installing the necessary updates and drivers I proceeded to run a few tests. When installing Windows XP, make sure you have a floppy drive connected as it will need the serial ATA drivers on the 3.5” floppy provided by ABIT if you have your primary hard drive connected this way. Since I hadn’t used my floppy drive in ages, I had taken it out and I was forced to reconnect it for installation purposes.
Now here’s where the ugliness of the KT400 chipset comes in with the Radeon card. I would get random lockups on tests without any warning. To make a long story short, there seems to be some problems with the Radeon cards and the AGP 3.0 specification on KT400 boards. NForce boards seem to be fine but when using any VIA drivers that have the AGP driver for 8X, lockups occur in 3D applications. I’ve contacted both ATi and ABIT and while I hope that there is a fix for it, but there have been too many posts on the subject to give me any hope. Some people suggested upping the AGP voltage but the BIOS was devoid of this option. If I didn’t install the VIA drivers, the machine ran flawlessly but many of the benchmarks were lower than expected. Some tests I did get through fine with the Radeon card but it was very sporadic as when the computer would lockup. So, I decided to stick in the ABIT
Siluro Geforce4 Ti4200-8X OTES to run most of the benches. With that card, the motherboard was stable and didn’t exhibit any problems with the VIA Hyperion drivers installed. Let’s start off with
3DMark 2001 SE
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