Cleary_Mike@emc.com wrote:
Hmm. I had been thinking lately of getting a K7S5A w/ an Athlon XP 1.6 GHZ & 256MG of DDR memory. Although you said that XP's are "generally" OK, is there still some risk here? Any other thoughts? Opinions?
The original link explaining the problem, clearly identified the problem to a smt resistor mounted under the processor. The "xp" ready boards have most likely had this resistor changed. You need a good soldering iron to do the patch. The good boards have resistors in the 40-50 ohm range. The bad boards are up around 70 ohms and can be fixed by soldering a 200 ohm resistor in parallel. Your distributor may have the digital multimeter needed to measure it, before he ships it. You really should ask your distributor to check the boards rev #; rev 0 seems to be OK. Ask him to pre-install the processor and DDR ram, and run memory checks. If it runs without error, you probably got a good board. If not, return the board, or select a better board.