rgart wrote:

I have not done much reading on the pentium 3 coppermine series.

whats with the elevated center on the cpu?

do I need a special heatsink/fan because a generic flat heatsink/fan will not sit flush and contact all of the CPU.

Early versions have an exposed die, whereas later versions have an integrated heat spreader (IHS) to improve contact between the die and the heatsink. This in itself did not improve thermal conductivity, since it added another layer of metal and thermal paste between the die and the heatsink, but it greatly assisted in holding the heatsink flat against the die. Earlier Coppermines without the IHS made heatsink mounting challenging.[7] If the heatsink was not flat against the die, heat transfer efficiency was greatly reduced. Some heatsink manufacturers began providing pads on their products, similar to what AMD did with the "Thunderbird" Athlon to ensure that the heatsink was mounted flatly. The enthusiast community went so far as to create shims to assist in maintaining a flat interface.

wiki

Thanks Jorpho.

I'm almost ready to ditch this project and use the voodoo 2 SLI in something else.

For some unknown reason.

Every time I install windows 98 the first time it loads, It crashes hard instantly.

Sometimes Windows is nice enough to crash back to a black screen and say "Windows Protection Fault" but most often it just crashes hard and I cant move the mouse or alt-ctrl-del etc.

I cleaned up the motherboard as best I could and removed the massive amount of dust. I also found two metal clips touching some of the traces on the bottom of the motherboard and I was confident that was causing it but I straightened it out and now there's no contact and It still crashes.

Changing RAM/Video Card/Ribbon Cable changes nothing.

Going back to defaults in the bios/Loading Optimal settings.

Disabling LPT, Serial Ports, Changing RAM timings, PNP on, PNP Off.

I'm wondering if I'm missing a capacitor or an electrical component has come loose because I have been holding onto this motherboard for over 10 years or so.

Looking at these pic's. Does anything look out of place to you guys?

Are there not meant to be capacitors where the round circles are stenciled onto the motherboard?

The most annoying part is the PC works FINE in Win98 Safe Mode!

[/img]

BAD CAPS

Read about it here:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Easy enough to fix though. More then a few people on vogons did that already very successfully on their mobos.

What makes you say bad caps?

Symptoms I described or the caps look bad to you?

Well if that's the case this Pentium III is on the back burner for now.

Do all capacitors eventually fail? One day...?

rgart wrote:

What makes you say bad caps?

Symptoms I described or the caps look bad to you?

Both. The symptoms are a dead giveaway for bad caps, but look at the last picture. The first capacitor on the right is about to bulge.

It's not impossible it could just be some wacky driver issue.

Perhaps bootlog.txt might be useful?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/188867

I see definitely 4 caps already bulging, they are so dead.
If you like using the board ever again for good use replace them.
If not you risk blowing your regulator circuit for the cpu.