ABIT KA7 and Athlon stability?

[Sean Ward]

> We recently added 32 additional nodes to our cluster.  Each node has a
> 950Mhz AMD Athlon on an ABIT KA7 Motherbaord.  We have each filled with
> 2 or 4 pieces of 256MB PC-133 ECC Muskin memory (18 with 2 pieces and 14
> with 4 pieces).  We have had consistent stability issues that end up
> with a kernel panic or the more frequent black screen with no way to
> recover either without a hard drop or reset button hit.  I've looked
> through as many mailing list archives as I can find and I see nothing
> similar to what we are seeing.  Does anyone else out there have Athlon
> boxes on an ABIT KA7 motherboard or some other KX133 based board?  If so
> do you see these same issues?  If not what board are you using?  Any
> other relevant comments would be appreciated too.  Thanks.

    As evaluation systems I have two Abit KA7 based systems with Athlon
750's, and 2 pieces of 256MB PC-133 Mushkin memory in each. I did encounter
some stability issues when using the Mushkin memory with the full 133 mhz
frontside bus, which were resolvable, at a reduction in memory bandwidth, by
using the 100 mhz bus setting, and turbo memory timings. The one box has had
occasional kernel panics which I believe are memory related, requiring a
hard reset, although the other box has happily had (at present) 50 days of
uptime (ie, when I built the box). I would suggest trying out some memory
testing tools, as I suspect that the Mushkin PC133 ram is not as high of
quality as it is billed at (I was normally able to reproduce lockups by
running STREAM for extended array sizes/times), and I was able to repeatedly
reproduce memory related lockups when running with the full 133 mhz memory
bus and CAS-2 settings.
-Sean Ward