System lockups w/Pulsar 1 and AMD/Via hybrid -- help needed!

[mothra]

I have recently upgraded to an AMD 1400 DDR system on a Biostar M7MIA motherboard. The M7MIA has an AMD northbridge and a Via 686B (yuck) southbridge.

Everything works great, w/network card and Geforce3. With the Pulsar 1 card installed, my system will lock up hard at random intervals. Sometimes it happens when my system sits idle after bootup, sometimes it happens an hour into heavy usage. The lock-up provides no debug info. Just a frozen mouse. The power button on the system doesn't work -- I have to press the reset button or yank the power cord.

I have a 400W power supply, the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers, Highpoint raid (integrated on board) drivers, latest (8/16) motherboard BIOS, ... No IRQ conflicts. I do have USB turned on, although I'm not using it. (Hmm.. have to try turning that off next.)

I thought maybe it might be a memory issue, but the memory seems to count up OK when I turn off the fast count @ boot. The 686B chipset seems suspect, but it is the AMD northbridge, and I don't get any dialog boxes about "PCI overflow errors".

If anyone has any suggestions, I would appreciate them greatly. I'm at wits end and have few inexpensive options to troubleshoot at this point.

<B>Thanks!</B>

[subhuman]

Be sure you have the Via 686B South Bridge patch, http://www.viahardware.com/686bfaq.shtm

I have had exactly the same issues with motherboards with onboard highpoint. Highpoint is VERY picky about BIOS/driver versions, and in general is buggy. HPT370 fixes some of this, which I suspect is the chip used on that board. HPT also uses an IRQ and there is usually no way to disable this.

What version of windows are you running? What kind of cooling do you have on your CPU?

Go into Device Manager, click on Properties, you should get a list of all your IRQs.. anything sharing with Pulsar?

It could very well be a heat issue as well.

Try removing a stick of RAM and trying it with one, then the other stick (separately). Also if your board allows it, try underclocking your CPU (133 x 10.5 = 1400, but 100 x 10.5 = 1050) -- see if this makes the system stable, it could very well be the way you have the heatsync mounted.

Finally the Power Button not working seems to me to indicate that it could be Power Saving mode that is causing the problem. Turn off ACPI in the BIOS and disable Power Management in Windows. I believe there is a Windows Update fix for this as well.

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