Yeah, I know its dated. Still, I have seen numerous people running at 190 or 200mhz fsb on a KR7A. Well, I just got some new ram yesterday, so I figured I would be looking at atleast 180.. Dident exactly happen that way.

Better start at the beginning and list my current system specs.

1700+ JIUHB 0310 DUT3C
Abit KR7A-Raid (the one with the two dark caps and yellow raid)
512mb Infinion PC2700
ELSA GeForce3 "classic"
SoundBlaster Live!
noname NIC
20gb Quantum Fireball 7200rpm hdd
12gb Quantum Fireball 5400rpm hdd
L&C generic style 300W PSU

Cooled by a Volcano 6cu+ with AS3 correctly applied and seated well on the CPU, 5 80mm fans in my case (Antec SX1200). My NB fan died yesterday while I was installing my ram, so I hung a delta 60mm over it the northbridge as a temporary fix.

What I have done: Well, the rig does 166 fsb with nice timings (2-3-6-3-1 @ 2.75vmem) no problem. 100% stable, and runs at about 34C cpu temp, 21C mobo at that (1.83ghz).

Now, I figured this was just the beginning of the fun and up the fsb to 175. It booted into windows 2000 pro sp3 no problem, and proceeded to promptly reboot when I tried running sandra. At this point I wondered about the ram and dropped the timings to 2.5-3-6-3-2 and upped the voltage to 2.85vmem. Tried again. Exactly the same thing.

Ok, so its not the RAM. I drop the fsb to 170, and its 3dmark2001se, quake3, vietcong etc stable. with no overvoltage (except mem at 2.75v) and nice timings. Now I work my way up to 173 fsb and it §§§§s out after a few mins of gaming. Check my temps, and they are around 36C/21C after the crash (in bios).

Now, I thought it was too high a PCI bus (173=43mhz, 174=44mhz). I pulled my two PCI cards and disabled the serial ports, parallel port, fdd controller etc in BIOS. With both the network card and sound card removed I tried 174mhz and got the exact same thing.. Huge 3d artifacts in Quake3 and a hardlock a couple mins later.

I've tried turning off AGP fast writes, running 2x etc and upping the VIO to 3.65. My northbridge heatsink is just barely warm with a 60mm delta blowing on it.

So I backed off, and went down to 172fsb. Now, I completed about 25mins of BURNK7 with no problem. After a half hour or so of burnk7, in my experience, a system crashes if its going to. Now, I pronounced this stable and closed burnk7 to go online for a few mins before I started working for 173. 5 mins into my web browsing and the system restarts.

Hmm ok, so 172 ISENT stable. I backed down to 170, ran burnk7 for an hour with no problems. Fired up winamp and opera and sat back.. started loading a webpage and opera gives me a fatal error, instantly hardlocking the system (not just a reboot). Now, my temps where around 34C cpu and 21C mobo all this time. 168 is very stable, and I've been running burnk7 for around 6 hours now.

I'm running out of ideas guys. I was really hoping for atleast 180 fsb, but it looks like I wont even get 175. What am I doing wrong? I know oppainter, ddtung and mricee (for all of you who I have not mentioned, my sincere appologies, these are just the names that come to mind off the icrontic thread I stumbled across last night looking for info) have run the KR7A at fsbs exceeding 190mhz. HOW??

I think my problem may be my power supply, because my voltages are a little on the low side (I upped my vcore to 1.675 from 1.6 for stabilities sake, btw). My 3.3+ is at 3.60, 5+ is at 4.70 and the 12+ is 12.22. Standby voltage is 4.73.. these are fairly stable, but dip or rise on occasion (12v and 5v).

I'm going to try and get ahold of a new PSU in the near future, but as always $ are sparce so it would be great if I could get somewhere with this one if at all possible.

What do you guys think? Give up and buy a new motherboard? Whats the best way to get to atleast 180 fsb? Sorry about the length, and thank you VERY much in advance for your replies

-RuKK