Just want to know if anybody else has seen this before. I've got a VT7 version 2 Via PT880 chipset board with BIOS version 14, and a P4 3.0E Prescott, and 2 X 512MB Kingston RAM. It was running Windows XP Pro SP2 with all the latest drivers properly loaded. Though this shouldn't cause a problem anyway, I had it configured so that there were no shared IRQs. There were no conflicts showing in Device Manager. This board was massively unstable if the DRAM bus was set to dual channel mode. Odd thing is, the RAM was good. How do I know? - It works fine in SINGLE channel mode on the VT7 . . . fast as Hell and rock-solid stable - It works fine in DUAL channel mode on an nforce2 chipset board - memtest86 will run all night with no errors if each single ram board is tested individually - memtest86 will run all night with no errors if BOTH RAM boards are tested in the VT7 But if you enable dual channel on the VT7 board, with GOOD RAM installed . . .. - System will often shut down during boot - System will shut down instead of restart, or restart instead of shut down - System will lock up intermittently for no apparent reason, and will only respond to a hard reset - System will halt intermittently at BSOD, giving various messages to the effect of hardware is bad, return to vendor or RAM is bad, etc. Basically, it REALLY looked like I had bad ram, even though the RAM was recommended by Abit, and the RAM worked fine in single channel mode, and worked fine in dual channel mode in a different motherboard. Now the mystery. Thinking this might be a hardware problem with the motherboard or a chipset driver issue, I did some research and ran across a blurb on the VIA web site stating (basically) don't install the VIA AGP driver on Windows XP, or you'll be sorry. (!) It hinted of stability problems caused by the VIA AGP driver (hyperion 4-in-1 4.53). The recommended fix was to uninstall it. So I ran the 4-in-1 installer to UNinstall the AGP driver. Rebooted and of course it took a few reboots for windows to repair the chipset. Then had to reinstall the nvidia drivers for my FX5900XT and reboot a couple times to allow Windows to pick up all the parts of that and re-discover my monitor. Now the system is rock-solid stable again. Has anybody else seen this problem where the VIA 4-in-1 AGP driver causes massive instability that looks suspiciously like bad RAM? Obviously VIA is aware of a problem or they wouldn't have it posted on their web site. But I ran several google searches on this issue while I was troubleshooting it, and nobody else seems to have seen this specific problem. I find it hard to believe I'd be the first to see this. Anybody else seen it? -Dave
