Last chance to see the inside of the system.

That is until I find/make better heatsinks and or by 2 more 80mm fans for the cpu's.
I was thinking of buying a small cad/cnc setup for it. I could use better vrm heat sinks.

I'm messing with an Asus PC-DL at the moment.

The motherboard is supposedly brand new but it looks more like a refurb if you ask me, it has scratches on the northbridge heat sink and such. The motherboard is really really clean though so it's a typical refurb.

I first tried to get the board running with two Prestonia 3.06 CPUs and 4 sticks of "known to be working with all kind of timings and speed" bog-standard PC3200 memory. The motherboard would stop at random reserve POST codes just like the PC-DL you bought. I removed the second CPU and 3 sticks of memory but I saw no improvemnt and after 10 tries or so the board stopped spitting out any codes at all until I left in unpowered for a while with the clear cmos jumper in clear mode.

Sometimes I really wonder if it's supposed to be this hard to get a freaking motherboard running... I kind of hope that when I flash the latest BIOS the nightmare will be over but to flash a newer BIOS I need the board running

Edit.

Forced to 100 MHz FSB the motherboard at least POSTs to BIOS, with the jumpers set to auto mode the motherboard still plays dead.

/Edit

Edit2

I shorted it down as I created my own thread descrbing the issues I experienced with the PC-DL instead of derailing this thread.

/Edit2

@skyscraper

That chipset should NOT be that picky. I never had the pc-dl, but I did have its big brother, the ncch-dl. Same northbridge, different southbridge. I remember just throwing 3gb of cheap ram in it, and it worked just fine. Never had an issue. I was also running 3.8's in it too.

The chipset supports ecc/reg ram. That stuff is "typically" higher quality as it was never marketed for the common rabble. It was also likely never overclocked wither. I'd wager a bet 2/3 of all ddr1 ram has suffered some overclocking.

luckybob wrote:

@skyscraper

That chipset should NOT be that picky. I never had the pc-dl, but I did have its big brother, the ncch-dl. Same northbridge, different southbridge. I remember just throwing 3gb of cheap ram in it, and it worked just fine. Never had an issue. I was also running 3.8's in it too.

The chipset supports ecc/reg ram. That stuff is "typically" higher quality as it was never marketed for the common rabble. It was also likely never overclocked wither. I'd wager a bet 2/3 of all ddr1 ram has suffered some overclocking.

The Intel 875p chipset can handle ECC but not registred memory, most of my ECC memory is registred.

As soon as I ordered the board I read through all 378 pages* of the PC-DL thread at 2cpu.com*. Many people there have had all kinds of issues with the PC-DL. 😀

*At work! *Not the sharpest people on that forum, it took them a year to figure out how the CPU FSB/NB-Strap override jumpers work.

I also own a NCCH-DL and yes that board just POSTed at first try with standard memory but it's a much newer board with a newer BIOS, the 1003 BIOS for the PC-DL is from Q3 2003. I only bought the PC-DL because it's a true year 2003 motherboard! 😁

Edit

It seems both the D1 Prestonia stepping and the Gallatin 3.2 1M with M0 stepping are officially supported by the 1003 BIOS so there isn't any CPU compatibility reasons for the motherboard not POSTing with the FSB jumpers set to default (auto/133).

As I have tried different PSUs and video cards we can rule out those beeng the issue. Another common issue with the PC-DL is the backplates shorting out stuff, I don't use backplates (diddn't get any). Both CPUs get detected and work at 100 MHz FSB so I think we can exclude both shorts and bad CPU sockets (another common issue on both the PC-DL and NCCH-DL).

With the motherboard forced to 100 MHz FSB most memory seems to default to runnng at 133 MHz 2.5-2-2-6 but I have tried to relax the timings before moving the jumpers to default/auto/133 MHz FSB without luck.

/Edit

Edit2

I think I will start my own thread about my adventures with the Asus PC-DL so I have something I can link if I don't manage to sort out the issues.

/Edit2