View Full Version : Who besides LuckyStar made the KTAPRO mobo?
My duron friend has a no-name mobo with BIOS and windows showing a KTAPRO chipset name... The manual (with no mention of mfg) shows that this is a KT133a mobo. I want to flash the BIOS for him at lunchtime today, and was wondering if anybody has heard the KTAPRO name outside of LuckyStar... Their most recent bios update is pretty old, and I wanna do this to make sure his single stick of 512 (4x64) will work properly in XP Pro. Any assistance is appreciated.
PS: Yes I know to write down the BIOS codeline and go to one of the mobo specific sites with a "mobo ID system", but I thought maybe one of you might know something off-hand.
-r-a-g-e-j-g-
I went to pricewatch and did a general search, a motherboard category search, and even a Lucky Star motherboard search for "KTAPRO" and I came up with 0 results. This suggests that there is no such chipset. Then I went to google and did a search and found this:
http://www.motherboard.cz/mb/luckystar/KTAPRO.htm
so it turns out the "KTAPRO" is the name of actual board, and the chipset is KT133a. Here is a list of KT133a boards for you:
http://www.pricewatch.com/1/2/3078-1.htm
however for bios updates, it's most likely Lucky Star or none at all because while the chipset might be the same between an Asus board and Lucky Star one, the bios is most likely not, and even if it is the boards could have minor differences that if you flashed with an Asus bios it could mess up the board bigtime.
So in conclusion, use Lucky Star bios or leave the bios alone.
My friend re-nigged on his bios flash plan... Says he's too afraid, and thinks it's un-necessary... (maybe I'm spoiled by my Gigabyte dual BIOS) So he's not gonna use the 512 stick I got him, he wants to trade it in for a 256 stick of crucial cuz he's sketched out by the price I paid for it ($30)... Jeez, some people get so freaked out about market grade RAM, BIOS flashes, OS changes, jumpers, voltages, shims, sinks, slots, boot options, etc. etc... but they'll OC their vidcards... Sheesh. Now he won't even try the 512 stick by itself in that system (as opposed to his 2 128 sticks)... Sorry but I think (and maybe I'm wrong here) that 768 is much healthier for a Duron 1000/WinXP than 256, especially for multiple bots in BF1942... THere, I'm done, sorry I'm ranting.:mad:
-r-a-g-e-j-g-
(likes DDR and dual bios)
thcdru2k
11-05-02, 09:28 AM
jumbo has a ktapro. search for jumbo mainboards.
Originally posted by ragejg
...he's not gonna use the 512 stick I got him, he wants to trade it in for a 256 stick of crucial cuz he's sketched out by the price I paid for it ($30)... Jeez, some people get so freaked out about market grade RAM...
generally speaking with SDRAM it's ok to uses the cheapest memory you can find. It's only DDR that I recommend the good stuff. Using a KT133a I assume he's using SDRAM so he's really got nothing to worry about and shouldn't waste the money on Crucial. As for the BIOS update, tell him to look at it this way the board is pretty old and cheap enough to replace, so sure if that Jumbo-brand bios looks good give it a shot. Try comparing the boards first of course, and worst case scenario you could always try going back to the LuckyStar bios. Other thing I would suggest though if the board does get messed up is replace is with a nice K7S5A. It's cheap, it supports more and faster components, and it's both SDRAM and DDR compatible.
Have you guys heard of major probs with single 512 sticks (4x64)?? People are freaking him out about that, not to mention the "scary market grade ram" thing...
-r-a-g-e-j-g-
Originally posted by ragejg
Have you guys heard of major probs with single 512 sticks (4x64)?? People are freaking him out about that, not to mention the "scary market grade ram" thing...
-r-a-g-e-j-g-
no i havent, whats wrong with the 512sdrams? my ddr one works great
We got to his house at lunch and he said "I'll try the 512 stick"... I said "ok, cool"... He put the 256 chip in front of the 512 then booted :eek:. I didn't see him put them in so I couldn't stop him. It booted and only showed 256. I told him to shut it off. I reversed the order of the chips and it showed up correctly... and the system ran fine... Went to install BF1942 and it went fine till it showed an error saying the source of the installation may be corrupted. We hit retry till blue in the face and then hit ignore. He took the cd out and notices some small smudges, which he cleaned. Then we had to go back to work... We think the error may have been crap on the CD, but it could still be RAM trouble with 4x64 and his motherboard... maybe...
More on this when we get to his house later and install NU 2002 to check for bugs... and where can I get that memory benchmark utility, SiSSandrasoft or whatever it's called? I'd like to get the lite version of that, cuz I have no real memory bandwidth test programs, and need some...
-r-a-g-e-j-g-
It was a CR error... Never seen one like that before... BUT, he installed XP with default via drivers, not the 440's, and maybe that's why. Windows generated a log report when it was restarted... He took the ram stick out and restarted again, and relaoded new via drivers. Now he's loading it again... Let's see if it errs again...
...nuthin yet...
...made it to second disc...
...more than last time...
... @ 99%...
...done!...
Speaks bad for the RAM...
Gues I'll try it on a KM133a...
...or send it back to DVCentury...
Anybody want a 512 stick SDR?
$20 + shipping?
-r-a-g-e-j-g-
THe gigabyte 7ZMMH mobo didn't like this ram either... just like the other system it crashed BF1942 1.1 and restarted win98 in safe mode... It didn't corrupt this system tho. It sucks, cuz I ran memory stability tests on it and generally worked the crap out of the system with the stick in it (tried it at 100 & 133)... and it worked fine. But the batlefield game showed us almost exactly the same thing it did before. YOu could ibstall it and start to run it this time, but get a minute into playing and it would shut BF right down and exit to windows. Explorer crashed, and it hung on shutdown... Me no happy with DVCentury... or BuyAIB for that matter. 2 systems, 6 hrs, much coffee, 2 pks of cigs. They should give me a 1gb stick of crucial pc150.
-r-a-g-e-j-g-:mad:
vBulletin® v3.7.1, Copyright ©2000-2012, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.