ARE THE EARLY KT4ULTRAs DEFECTIVE??

Question

I bought one of the first KT4ULTRAs available. In fact, I preordered it ,so that I could have that board that had 8X AGP, 200FSB, and all the goodies that were being used to promote the sale of the KT4 ULTRA series Motherboards. Well ,we all know what happened to 200fsb and 8agp, but I figured that it would still be a pretty good board.That was back in September. The KT4 I bought struggles to achieve 133 FSB and won't go even 1 fsb over thar Hi perf settings locked the board up . Any attempt to use FUZZY4 caused the board to reboot. I downloaded the latest ver. of FUZZY4 and was at least able to see what it looked like. It would now display on the desktop. After reading 100s of posts I found that I wasn't alone lots of people with much better ram and and different XPs werte having the same problem, It has been suggested that the clock gen. on the early KT4s is defective and that later boards that have been sent as RMAs take care of this . Have you had this same problem? Were you able to RMA your board because of this?Please post if you had this kind of problem. BIGDADDY51  

Answer 1

Quote
Originally posted by dan chies
I Bought one recently and then did some research.. Yes I know stupid.
BUT I returned it for a Refund :-)
I found that this is genneraly regarded as a "bad" board.. there are several issues with it that causes it to be avoided.. you have found a few.
Also it offers NO actuall improvement over the KT333 chipset: 8x agp is laughable, Raid is simply stupid with a 64kb stripe capability. AMD cpu's only accept data at the max rate that PC2100 Ram provides.
 Not much worth paying $$ for is there ;-)
Ya really gotta stop reading the adverts to base your buying decisions on.
You must not have done your research well because the Athlon can make use of any additional bandwidth, provided the cpu is clocked with it *synchronously.* In otherwords, a 133 fsb/133 dram bus setup is much superior to a 133/166 setup (because of bus latencies involved with asynchronous timings.)  But a 166/166 Athlon setup will be much faster than a 133/133 Athlon setup.  AMD plans to introduce a 400MHz fsb Barton early in '03 in which the timing will be 200/200, and the Athlon will be able to use every bit of the additional bandwidth.  With Intel backing the use of DDR 400 now, it seems that JEDEC approval of a DDR 400 standard is all but accomplished.
I agree that AGP x8 doesn't bring anything to the table in performance terms with current 3D software. It is, however, the AGP standard everyone will endorse next year, including Intel, its progenitor.  My current Athlon motherboard uses an nForce2 chipset and supports my Radeon 9700P perfectly at AGP x8.
Last, the 64K stripe is generally considered the best compromise between stability and performance--I see nothing wrong with it.  It's an integrated controller, for goodness' sake.  You want more?  Do what I did and buy a dedicated RAID card.