A7V133 Setup

[chrish]

Here is what I have so far
A7V133 MB
256mb Memory 1xdimm
60gb Hdd IBM (Ultra100)
Sound Blaster live 5.1
16x pioneer DVD-Rom 106S
ATI all in wonder Radeon (TV NUT)
Case (330W enermax power)

Was about to order 1.2g tbird but decided to wait a few weeks for price to drop after 266fsb comes out, or is it worth it to go after the 266?

Am definitely a novice at this, first time builder
The AV7133 has promise 100ultra controller
Board has 2 sets of IDE connectors, one Ultra100 primary&secondary, and one IDE primary and secondary. I take it if I set up the ultra in Bios I could only use those connectors, not the IDE. In other words I only have 2 channels, not 4. Will eventually add burn drive when money permits.
I plan on sharing the secondary with the DVD and burn.
Anyone have configuration suggestions? Should I go with mostly defaults on the BIOS?
It also looks like from what I read here that the audio needs to be disabled in both jumpers and BIOS. Would this apply to other options?

Any advice appreciated
Thanks


Chris

"There is no spoon"

[bassvax]

I think the A7V133 is a great board. I just finished my first build with this board. Some things I've discovered along the way:
Quality of RAM is Super Critical with this board. Mostly leaving the BIOS setings to default to start with show the SDRAM frequency as 100MHz with SPD (Serial Presence Detection...I think) as default...using the SPD the CAS latency and a couple of other settings will be set automatically according to SPD result. I purchased (at least I was told)CAS 2 RAM and the SPD registers it as CAS 3. You can safely change the frequency to 133 MHz, but wait until you got your system stable to do some tinkering with the other settings. In a follow-up post I will throw in some links that will help (and may confuse) you with this particular board. I did not flash my BIOS to an update yet...still researching which to use. Some negligable bugs were addressed.
I used the SB Live Platinum 5.1 also and yes, don't forget to disable on-board sound by jumper and in the BIOS(I only did jumper and couldn't get it to work-now is great). This, provided you got the board with on-board sound and not the other version.
As for the RAID...I decided against that for now. It is my understanding that to use the Promise IDE controller you will have to first put the HD on the first primary IDE (ata 66) and from there do a basic set-up. You may even need to update the BIOS for the Promise to work correctly, not sure about that yet. The links I will provide will cover this in more detail. For now, I have actually disabled the "PCI Mass Storage Device", aka...Promise Controller, in the device manager and am using the standard IDE controller. Take into consideration the placement of PCI cards on the board so as to give your video card (hopefully AGP) room to vent and avoid nasty IRQ conflicts. I can't remember for sure, but I think I put the SB Live in slot 2, the NIC in slot 4 and the modem in slot 5. There is an AMR slot for an AMR modem, but it is shared with PCI slot 5.
Try to tie back all those ribbon cables to facilitate air flow.
The US ASUS site has been fairly horrible lately...the german site offers more recent updates though. I'm at work now so I can't access my pc to think of other issues right now. I'll post those links shortly. Keep us posted on the progress http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

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Jerry

[bassvax]

A couple of other things:
The LED leads were not explained well so you may have to
flip them if your lights don't work.
I'd double check the jumpers to make sure you are in
Jumper-Free mode.
Let me know what revision of board and manual you have and
sometime we can swap stories.
A couple of sites: http://www.amdzone.com/ http://www.amdmb.com/ this one has tons of info on this board.
Check the forums for some specific help with installation...
I wish I'd read these before I started building. It will keep
you busy for a while.


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Jerry