terryJones
30th Jun 2006, 11:10
I would like to warn people who are considering building a cheap system about PCChips motherboards.
I built a system up last week with a PCChips K7 motherboard and a Radeon 9550 256 Mb card. Would it boot, would it fkcu.
I had a radeon 9600xt bells n lights card, so I tried that, just to ensure the AGP slot was working. Same result.
I also had a old 128 radeon9200 so as a matter of interest I tried that. It worked, thus proving the well being of the AGP slot, as I have had a fault whereby a PCI card would work but a agp would not.
Anyway, to get to the point, this morning I heard from PCChips with the following information.
"Dear Terry,
Please be informed that the M/Bs of the list below will cause the limitation ‘’can not reboot’’ when using the ATI Radeon 9600 & 9550 VGA card. This limitation is due to that Radeon 9600 & 9550 VGA card has pull-up resistor on clock PIN, which will result in system clock generator’s H/W trap error then system can’t work well.
Because these M/Bs (for entry level) and the Radeon 9600 & 9550 VGA card (for mainstream) are in the different market segment, we will not have special action plan for this issue. Therefore, we will take this issue as the limitation for R9600L &R9550 VGA card with some ECS models.
Sorry for any inconvenience."
As I see it, if they know what the problem is, and can be this specific, why don't they alter it...
(As an aside, my own Asrock motherboard is even cheaper than this PCChips one was, but the 9600xt card is chumbling along quite happily.
I built a system up last week with a PCChips K7 motherboard and a Radeon 9550 256 Mb card. Would it boot, would it fkcu.
I had a radeon 9600xt bells n lights card, so I tried that, just to ensure the AGP slot was working. Same result.
I also had a old 128 radeon9200 so as a matter of interest I tried that. It worked, thus proving the well being of the AGP slot, as I have had a fault whereby a PCI card would work but a agp would not.
Anyway, to get to the point, this morning I heard from PCChips with the following information.
"Dear Terry,
Please be informed that the M/Bs of the list below will cause the limitation ‘’can not reboot’’ when using the ATI Radeon 9600 & 9550 VGA card. This limitation is due to that Radeon 9600 & 9550 VGA card has pull-up resistor on clock PIN, which will result in system clock generator’s H/W trap error then system can’t work well.
Because these M/Bs (for entry level) and the Radeon 9600 & 9550 VGA card (for mainstream) are in the different market segment, we will not have special action plan for this issue. Therefore, we will take this issue as the limitation for R9600L &R9550 VGA card with some ECS models.
Sorry for any inconvenience."
As I see it, if they know what the problem is, and can be this specific, why don't they alter it...
(As an aside, my own Asrock motherboard is even cheaper than this PCChips one was, but the 9600xt card is chumbling along quite happily.