Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 10:52:30 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Does FreeBSD have a problem with some AMD processors? Message-ID: <20011229105230.J48518@monorchid.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20011228115744.A1908@tisys.org> References: <20011228181009.F95692@monorchid.lemis.com> <20011228115744.A1908@tisys.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Friday, 28 December 2001 at 11:57:44 +0100, Nils Holland wrote: > On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 06:10:09PM +1030, Greg Lehey stood up and spoke: >> I've been using AMD processors almost exclusively in my main work >> machines for over 4 years, and I've been very happy with them. I'm >> currently running a K6/233, a K6/333, an Athlon 750, a Duron 850 and >> an Athlon XP 1700. Last August, though, I bought a machine which gave >> me a lot of trouble, the Duron 850 mentioned above. I found that it >> would freeze for no apparent reason. I established that it wasn't the >> memory by taking the memory of another machine and running it like >> that; it made no difference. I ended up also changing the motherboard >> and the processor, but the hangs continued. I could expect a hang >> within 8 hours when doing 'make release' > > I bought an AMD Athlon 1000 Mhz and a Chaintech board. After assembling the > stuff, it just didn't work. Nothing. So I went to the place of purchase and > got my mainboard replaced (I kept the CPU). After reassembling my machine > with the new board, it *would* work, but after three hours, it would > suddenly reboot, and then reboot over and over again when the BIOS passes > control to the operating system. After three such reboots, I turned the > machine off, and were not able to turn it on again. It just sat there, > totally dead. I then got my board exchanged a second time, and the new > board's been running fine ever since then. Interestingly, I had a very similar problem with a motherboard I tried exchanging while chasing this problem. On shutdown, it would not power off, just go into power save. I had to hold down the power switch for 5 seconds to power it off. After that, power on would not work for about 20 minutes; turning power on showed no sign of life. I believe this was an ECS K7S5A, but I don't have any documentation left for it. > Now, I have found a lot of similar stories on the web. I guess some > mainboard manufacturer's (and even VIA as a chipset manufacturer) > seem to care very little about quality assurance. I certainly got that impression from ECS, especially the K7S5A. The instruction manual was terrible, didn't match the motherboard, the BIOS didn't allow much tweaking. I'm running my Athlon XP in an Epox 8KHA+, and that's much better. > As a side note: I have bought numeros board from Epox and never had a > single problem with them, so in my opionion, Epox (together with ASUS) is > probably one of the companies I would recommend people to buy boards from, > but Chaintech and other cheapies should probably be avoided... I had some trouble with the Epox motherboard for my Athlon 750 nearly 2 years ago (sorry, can't find the type number anywhere), but I worked round the issues and it's been running stably ever since. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. If you don't, I may ignore the reply. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20011229105230.J48518>