On Sunday September 22 2002 05:16 am, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Thursday 19 Sep 2002 8:56 pm, you wrote:
> > On Thu, 19 Sep 2002 09:46:37 -0500
> >
> > Marcia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
> >
> > lilo append mem=nopentium
>
> Charles, could you tell me more about this? Is this something that
> all of us using Athlons/Durons should be using? Obviously this is
> there to avoid specific problems, what are they?
Altho all chipsets and processors have bugs (errata), any
manufacturer, AMD, Intel, Cyrix, SiS, VIA, etc., the best way to avoid
Athlon or Duron problems is to _only_ use motherboards and power
supplies that are recommended by AMD
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_869_4348,00.html
That link is for XP's, but there's similar links for Tbirds and
Durons. I suspect Marcia's problem probly starts with the PSU and/or
motherboard. Ram quality is another likely culprit. Ram performance and
reliability is greatly affected by the quality of the mobo and PSU tho.
So even very good ram mght have problems on a marginal mobo/PSU.
'Course overheating is always a suspect.
FWIW, I've had a 1.4 Tbird oc'd to 1.55 with an AMD approved mobo
and PSU for over a year an a half. Never used the nopentium option,
never had any problems. GeF2 w/64mb's usin the open source XFree86
driver. The nopentium parameter is to limit the page size requests from
system ram for the AGP card. If the video card has 16mb ram or more
onboard, the system ram probly will never, or rarely be used anyhow.
If system ram is being used by the Vcard, and causing problems, one
quick and dirty way fix is to set the AGP aperature in bios to 4mb.
Drawback is that it effectively disables AGP sidebanding and will
somewhat decrease 3d/accel performance.
For more on the AMD/AGP issue see,
http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/35/175/7626960/
Note: "There *is* an Athlon/AGP issue. This issue has
*not* been tied to a bug with the Athlon/Duron processors."
...and...
"Our conclusion is that the operating system is creating coherency
problems within the system by creating cacheable translation to AGP
GART-mapped physical memory."
IMO, another suspect is closed source proprietary drivers. As I said,
even on a highly oc'd, hot system, I've not had any problems without
nopentium usin the openXFree86-4.2.1 source driver which BTW, now
provides some 3d/accel support for nvidia cards. XFree86-4.2.1 included
with Mdk 9.0.
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
