nd22 wrote:

From October 25 to November 20 the system was used with the Duron 1800 and ran without crashing even once! I did memtest, superpi, 3dmar2001 all night loop and worked perfectly! The problems started when I switched to the Athlon xp 3200 and particularly when the CPU is under 100% load! The primary culprit seems to be the PSU! I am now searching for an era correct PSU on the local eBay.

If you find one, feel free to ask here whether it's a good one or not. Many could have certain issues which you may want to be made aware about. I'm certainly not a PSU guru, but I can find my way around 😀

nd22 wrote:

As a side note I got myself a SATA to PATA adaptor and tried again to connect the western digital 1000gb hard drive using the adaptor on the IDE port: again the system freezes on drive detection without letting me to enter the bios and runs perfect as soon as I put in a smaller drive - drives tested and working 100%: Maxtor 80gb sata1, western digital 320gb sata2, Intel 180gb sata3, Intel 240gb sata3, Intel 480gb sata3.

This might be some problem with its newer interface?
I know there might be several potential problems which could be your issue here, especially since it only seems to affect your newer harddrive.
Does your harddrive work in any of your other systems? (also try a few SATA ports)

edit: You may need to repair any old PSU you find. The better 5v ones tended to be made during the capacitor plague 😵

I went to http://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator and done the test there and (TDP selected is 90%) these are the results (I used a radeon 9600 because radeon 9250 is not available!):
It seems I need a 5v 30A PSU that can supply 180w and the 3.3 and 5 v rails!
What I don't understand is how the guy in this video build his athlon xp 3200 system using a rosewill with 16A on the 5V rail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PktLMYV6CCw&t=164s

I found one FSP PSU with 30a on the 5v rail. This is the one: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article106-page1.html and the manual is here: Would it be any good or should i search for something with more A on the 5v rail?

Looks okay to me. FSP is a good brand, as well. Not the best, but generally they don't ship with major design flaws and safety hazards, and they're not overrated like crazy in their capabilities.

nd22 wrote:

I found one FSP PSU with 30a on the 5v rail. This is the one: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article106-page1.html and the manual is here: Would it be any good or should i search for something with more A on the 5v rail?

That's a very typical PSU for the days P4 and Athlon XP existed side by side, these will power both contemporary 12v and 5v type systems (they don't have any official name so I'll just call em that, for convenience's sake).

I'd say a PSU like that one would be one of the most suitable ones one could find in the wild.

Just don't forget to check its caps before you use it, caps can fail even if the unit has never been used.

And agreed with gdjacobs, FSP's been a mainstay for me for years. I found that especially in the old days (P2, P3) FSP was ahead of any other PSU I'd encounter, not counting the brands I only came across once or twice.

nd22 wrote:

I went to http://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator and done the test there and (TDP selected is 90%) these are the results (I used a radeon 9600 because radeon 9250 is not available!):
It seems I need a 5v 30A PSU that can supply 180w and the 3.3 and 5 v rails!
What I don't understand is how the guy in this video build his athlon xp 3200 system using a rosewill with 16A on the 5V rail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PktLMYV6CCw&t=164s

Whats the model number of the Rosewill PSU used in that vid?

Some sA boards used the same plug the P4 used for its power, though I don't know for sure it actually used 12v or still 5v.
NForce boards often had these plugs, I didn't see these plugs as often used on VIA or SiS chipsetted sA boards and even if they have the plug, I can't guarantee the board is actually using the 12v to supply power to the CPU instead of the more traditional 5v used on virtually all sA boards.

The power supply used is: rosewill RD500-2SB! This is the one: http://www.rosewill.com/rosewill-stallion-ser … wer-supply.html. It has 16A on the 5v rail and a maximum of 130w on the 3.3 and 5 v rails! The motherboard is Abit nf7-s version 2.0 which is the predecessor of the AN7!
I will buy Friday the FSP 350w PSU and do a test!

Today I got the FSP 350w PSU and installed it at once. The problems remains!!! The PSU is fine, all capacitors looks fine and the system boots ok at FSB 182! As soon as I put FSB 200 the system restarts itself at windows startup. However I noticed that if I increase the FSB 1 by 1 the system boots fine but programs no longer works for example firefox refuses to start and crashes every single time at FSB 189; total commander refuses to start at fsb 188; as a general rule as the FSB increases the system becomes less and less responsive and programs starts to crash until at FSB 191 windows crashes and system restarts! I am starting to think that is not a problem with the PSU but with the silicon image controller!

This sounds like you're hitting a clock limit for the core. What multiplier are you running? The Barton 3200 shipped in two varieties, with a 333mhz FSB spec and 14x multi or with 11x multi and 400mhz FSB.

IT'S THE MEMORY!
I was getting desperate, I could not understand how with an ATX 1.3 PSU the system is still unstable and I was thinking the silicon image controller to be bad on this motherboard! So I used a SATA to IDE adaptor but the system still hangs! In desperation I tried to go back to the basics: with only the CPU, the RAM, the GPU and the ODD I loaded memtest and it did pass at FSB182 but gave lots of errors at FSB200. I switched the RAM with some 256mb GEIL stick and passed at once! I am now in windows XP writing this reply!

Sweet! I didn't think to ask, I guess I assumed you were running memory and FSB asynchronously.

I am running the memory and FSB synchronously for maximum performance! The system worked without a glitch for 3 hours; i played starcraft, superpi, need for speed Porsche, browsed the web all without a single BSOD, error or restart. The only thing that is freezing the system is the latest version of CPU-Z! I will try with an older version tomorrow. Now should I keep the FSP power supply (ATX 1.3) or should I put back the corsair PSU (ATX 2.2)?

The FSP is more era appropriate and a better match to the requirements of your board. I'd stay with it.

+1 on the FSP. Nice specs for that setup

Thank you very much sir, but it's not completed yet!
I will keep the FSP PSU!
It seems I stored inappropriately the memory sticks: all stored in plastic holders are fine, all stored in metal boxes are destroyed and with them all my 1gb memory sticks. I have to buy new ones but now that I know the motherboard and the processor to be stable I can focused on the next task at hand: what would be some good 2*1gb memory for this setup? Should I search for CAS2 latency or should I just buy the cheapest pairs of sticks?

nd22 wrote:

Thank you very much sir, but it's not completed yet!
I will keep the FSP PSU!
It seems I stored inappropriately the memory sticks: all stored in plastic holders are fine, all stored in metal boxes are destroyed and with them all my 1gb memory sticks. I have to buy new ones but now that I know the motherboard and the processor to be stable I can focused on the next task at hand: what would be some good 2*1gb memory for this setup? Should I search for CAS2 latency or should I just buy the cheapest pairs of sticks?

Well, I guess a good lesson learned here is to not store hardware components in metal boxes.

Personally I'd just replace all your defective DDR-400 1GB modules if you can do it cheaply and also your defective 512MB ones if you can get them for next to nothing.

I don't really care about DDR-400 being cl3 or lower (lower is faster here), but of course lower is usually better.

The smaller modules I think may also come in handy in case you want to build a DDR Windows 9x rig and don't feel like messing with getting it to run with the very large amount of memory.

Just get what you think you will ever need 🤣!

nd22 wrote:

Thank you very much sir, but it's not completed yet!
I will keep the FSP PSU!

Good, in that case I will stick around for a bit longer 😁

Enjoy!

Today I got for free 2 1gb memory sticks from an unknown manufacturer and I thought let's test them! I noticed that the system always hangs when the memory is set to FSB400 but boots fine when I set the CPU/memory ratio to 6/5 which result in DDR333. Could it be a motherboard problem or I should search for some known brands like Kingston or corsair?
As a side not I remember that before directx9 games a strong processor could very much help a weak video card but in need for speed Porsche the frame rate is downright horrible at 1280*1024 (this is the maximum resolution of my monitor)! I will post a screenshot with 3dmark2001 which gauges the system performance very well and is not too GPU bound!

Sorry for double post but it seems I am not allowed to upload too many screenshots at once! The score is way too low, shouldn't be something over 10.000 marks?

Today I bought a 1gb stick of Kingston memory! Memtest passed with flying colors at ddr400! The system runs fine with FSB:DRAM = 1:1 now. The seller also has a kit of corsair ram, with heat spreaders and CAS2. Should I buy the corsair or should I stick with Kingston? Does CAS2 has a large influence on performance or CAS3 is fine? As you can see the score in 3dmark2001 is not modified, is within margin of error, does not matter if the memory is DDR333 or DDR400, if it is dual channel or single channel, if it is 1gb or 2gb of memory.

Good to see your up and running!
Re the RAM, IMHO it doesn't make much of a difference but you do get the personal satisfaction that you have squeezed every drop of performance out of a system. (sexy heatsinks add to this as well)
If its a good price then why not? It's your dream build remember, but, really that's what your paying for not a noticable upgrade as such