VOGONS


First post, by Adrian_

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Hello guys (and girls if if's the case, of course 🤣 ),

I just started the project of building a computer for old games, which is intended to be a dual boot Win 98SE/ Win7 machine. My goal is to use a modded 1.4Ghz Tualatin on a Bx board and after much fiddling with pliers, ridiculously thin wire, soldering iron and so on I came up with mr Frankenstein's creature that can be seen here

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Did the voltage bridge on the back of the mobo

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then loaded the modded Tualatin bios still available on the internet, put 4x256 sticks of PC133 RAM and fired it up. It booted up first at the safe values of the Cubx but with all the 1024mb RAM detected. However, when I went in the Bios and set up the correct values for the CPU, it booted seeing the processor as a 1.4Ghz Celeron and with only 768Mb RAM detected.

The whole thing appears to be stable (I booted into Win 7 mini from the Hiren CD without issue), with the CPU being correctly detected in CPU-Z

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BUT it will only detect the whole 1Gb RAM if I set FSB to 100Mhz in Bios.

I tried all kind of BIOS settings and all boot-up tricks I could come up with (cold boot then set FSB to 100 then reboot and set FSB 133 and so on) but as soon as I set FSB 133 the board only detects 768MB RAM.

Since I actually have 5 of these sticks I tried to see maybe one is defective but it's not the case and all are the same model, rated 133 anyway. So the question is: did anyone managed to get a BX board run 1Gb RAM at FSB 133 and if yes what were the settings/tricks?

I don't see in the bios any setting for bumping up the NB voltage so I'm kinda out of ideas here. Any suggestions are welcomed 😀

Reply 1 of 8, by Adrian_

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For the last 2 hours it's been happily cruising in memtest at FSB 100 with all 1024Mb RAM detected, so obviously a Celeron Tualatin 1.5Ghz would be a safe bet for this board, but I'd very much like to make use of that 512kb Cache of the 1.4Ghz PIII-S 😀

I'm currently testing with the 124Mhz option at which the board still detects the whole 1024 RAM. This puts my 1.4Ghz Tualatin at 1.3Ghz and should be a bit more gentle with the AGP card.

If anyone knows of a mod to feed the Bx chipset a little bit more voltage to enable it to run 1Gb RAM at 133Mhz please share 😀

Reply 2 of 8, by firage

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Maybe try 512 MB for stability's sake at 133 MHz. I guess you're dual booting XP with 9x to want to pair that much memory with this board. It's not really an XP beast.

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Reply 3 of 8, by Adrian_

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It's stable enough to run even Win 7 with 768Mb at FSB133, let alone Xp with 512Mb. Thing is I'm trying to use it as a dual boot with 98SE and Win7 and 1Gb would certainly be useful to have with W7. For Win98SE I will just limit the available memory to 512Mb using the MaxPhysPage value in [386enh] section of system.ini

Reply 4 of 8, by Anonymous Coward

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Because Asus did not buffer the memory slots (I believe this is normally required for using 4 sticks of sdram), I would guess asus purposely limited the number of memory slots at 133mhz using some kind of bios lockout.

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Reply 5 of 8, by Adrian_

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I don't think there's a lockout on this particular board as it works just fine with all 4 sticks at 124Mhz. Probably the NB isn't getting enough current/voltage to run all 4 sticks at 133Mhz, but unfortunately there's no option in the bios to increase the NB voltage, as in later motherboards.

Maybe there's a voltmod for the Bx chipset? Couldn't find anything with google but again the chipset is so old that most of the stuff relevant for it is now below radar, so to speak...

I also have a Gigabyte Bx2000+ and it also has 4 slots, will test on that one with a plain coppermine CPU and see if it detects all 4 DIMM's at FSB 133. Sadly I don't have a Tualatin capable slotket...

Reply 6 of 8, by Adrian_

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I received a PM about using the VIO mod to raise the RAM voltage. Thing is the CuBx has the RAM VIO mod implemented by the manufacturer, by using a jumper, you can adjust from the board's default of 3.45V to 3.65V this way. But this doesn't help with detecting 1Gb RAM at FSB 133 as this is a chipset problem and would require raising the chipset voltage a bit.

Still looking for a solution 😐

Reply 7 of 8, by Kamerat

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A temporary solution could be using SoftFSB or similar software to change the FSB while in Windows. One issue on Windows 2000/XP is that some software and games speeds up when doing this, the game Far Cry is one of them. If the CUBX uses the same PLL as the P3B-F (the ICS 9250xx-08) it should be supported by SoftFSB.

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Reply 8 of 8, by Adrian_

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The problem turned out to be very trivial: one of the 256Mb sticks was PC100 and not PC133. Incidentally it was the one I put near the CPU slot, which is rather difficult to install as the distance from the edge of the MB is longer then the thumb, so when I swapped sticks (I have 5 of them) it somehow got ignored. They were all purchased together LONG time ago, all were Kingston and the label on the odd one didn't mentioned at all that it was actually a PC100. Apparently it could do 124Mhz at stock voltage of the CuBx (3.45) but didn't posted at 133Mhz even with 3.65V.

The stupid thing is that I tried to check the SPD data with CPU-Z when I booted Win 7 at 124Mhz but the CPU-Z version included with Hiren's didn't read these DIMM's. However, I had a suspicion (the label on the odd stick was a bit different) and I ran AIDA, which read the SPD data. And behold:

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I now swapped the PC100 stick with the spare one (which is PC133) and booted directly at FSB 140 at stock voltage. Currently running memtest. 😀

Now I need to find a long wire as thin as the one I used on the CPU pins so I can put it all around the other pins and make some sort of platform, so the CPU sits evenly in the socket. Will probably start another topic with the whole project.

Thanks everyone who tried to help 😀