Did you clear the CMOS?
You could check the integrity of the BIOS or just reprogram it.

The battery was already missing when I got it ... 🙁

I'll look to reflash the BIOS tomorrow

Could you please post some pics of your board and of the missing pins of your CPU?
Basically pics of everything that may be significant. For all we know it may even be as trivial as a misplaced jumper 😀

Sure, I didn't make any picture because it was late X)

So here they are

My test bench (or should I say, my test chair)

A closer view

The poor 6x86

And finally the socket.

Apparently this board autodetects which voltage and which multiplier the CPU needs so the only thing I can change here is the FSB ... I don't think that it is a misplaced jumper issue ...

The board itself is in a great shape

Okay so I used the POST card and it displayed "F0"
I wanted to flash the bios using the hostwap technique ... using another ATC motherboard which I don't use at the moment. It's a 6150 model. But once I powered that board, guess what ? The POST card displayed "F0" too ! I have no idea why it's not working now, it was fine last time I used it ... At some point this board POSTed, but I had a problem with my floppy cable and once I replaced it, it re-displayed "F0" and didn't POST at all 🙁 I tried to move the CPU in it's slot, but no, nothing woke up that board again. The CPU fan isn't moving at all when the board does than

On the 5030 board I measured the voltage coming from the two VRMs. The left one was displaying 0v and the right one was displaying 2.3-2.4volts. I have no clue if those are correct values, but it make me think that there may be some dead VRM here, or that my guess on the socket is right and so that the CPU isn't correctly detected

Both board are using award bioses apparently

I have the ATC 5030 board and it is great. It was in my ''pentium1 with voodoo1'' system and was stable and quick and easy to deal with. I mainly use Asus in my systems now so i tossed it for the Asus TX97
but the Atrend board was just as good.

I now use it for hotflashing bios chips 🤣 And yes, it uses an Award bios.

Is your psu ok? Because 2 dead boards with the same problem is weird. Also the cyrix cpu seems a bit black underneath and that is usually not a good sign (and it might have hurt the board too).

BTW on paper the TX is better but in practice you will probably not notice a difference. Vx boards are fine.

The dark coloration is just a piece of paper which might have been wet for a while during it's life.

I thought about the PSU, but I couldn't verify it's working order at the moment. One thing to mention : the VX board I got worked with the same PSU and I tried the 5030 with an ATX psu and it didn't help either. I didn't try the ATX psu with the 6150 though

Something really odd is going on there I guess ...

I just want to try something different than VX, but all I can get working is VX chipsets 🤣

This is also the only socket 7 board that I own that has the SB_Link connector. I know, I can just stick with ISA slot, but I'm still finding it a good thing to have

If I looked correctly, your Cyrix 6x86 is missing pin Y1 which should be VCC (non-critical)
I used this and this, but would prefer someone with more knowledge to have another look if there may be a good reason to do so.

That Cyrix does look kinda dark underneath. It may have been fried? Those Cyrix's tended to run very hot, it may have burned up if the CPU fan stopped working at one time and this may have damaged the motherboard.

I made a quick test with the 6x86MX in the VX board and it does work ! The cooler I had with it had no fan, but I can see some damages in each corner that have probably been made by screws which means that at some point there was one.

For the slot 1 I found the problem : apparently it didn't like the POST card in the PCI slot. When I removed it it booted perfectly. Once I put it back, it didn't work again. Using it in an ISA slot solve the problem.

I hoped that that was the same problem on my 5030, but it's not 🙁

Does somebody know hop to remove safely the moving part of the socket ? I'd like to take a look inside it without damaging it

Deksor wrote:

Does somebody know hop to remove safely the moving part of the socket ? I'd like to take a look inside it without damaging it

I have done this years ago when I replaced a broken lever (I cannibalized another lever from a broken board) and I ended up using a flatbed screwdriver to carefully unlatch the top of the CPU socket, replace the lever and click it back.

But it's very easy to break something and I actually ended up breaking the socket of the already broken board (I used it to practice).

I only did this repairjob once though. I'd be hesitant to recommend to remove the moving part of the socket just to take a look inside.
Can't you just use a small bright light to have a look inside? When the socket is slid open you should be able to see through the holes right?

Well like I said, I didn't notice any damages through the holes, but I'd like to have a better look inside ...

Though the Cyrix being a power hungry CPU, maybe it just burned the VRMs since I measured 0v on one of them. But I'm not sure if it's the normal behavior of the board or not and since it's locked up to some step, it doesn't power on that VRM. Shouldn't cost me a lot of money and time trying to replace it though. On all my pentium motheboards, I've always seen one of the two VRMs (and that was always the left one) getting super hot. On this board, the VRMs are only cooled by the PCB, so yeah, maybe the CPU cooked the left one (which is the one that gives 0v)

I don't know how I could test the working order of that VRM though

So I just powered it on another time, and I felt that the CPU was getting warm, so this can't be a dead VRM issue, right ?

I also removed the moving part of the socket and I didn't see anything wrong.

I'll try to reflash the BIOS like I said (I still haven't done that right now), but yeah ... I think that unfortunately it's dead and it can't be repaired 😢

So today I finaly decided to reflash the BIOS, and this happened :

IT WORKS !!!!

I knew that this could fix boards, but I never thought I would have a board with a dead bios. I tried not really believing that this would fix it, but apparently it worked !

I'm not cursed anymore 🤣

According to uniflash, the original rom says "unknown" so I think it's just a toasted chip and not the result of a virus

Niiice!

Now go have some fun with it and keep us informed! 😁

For all we know the board was bricked by its previous owner who tried to flash it 🤣!

I don't think it was bricked by the previous owner because like I said when I tried to reflash the original bios chip, uniflash couldn't determine it's type so the bios chip is probably just dead.

I don't care for that little chip, they are not as hard to find as a working pentium board with better chipset than VX 🤣

Here are the results of speedsys with the pentium mmx :

I tried the Cyrix 6x86MX that came with this board but oddly, it gets stuck at some point when speedsys is checking stuff.

Also for the missing pin, this is really odd because when you look at it, you can see that there was something there, but you can't see any remain or trace, just like it was just glued on the ceramic and wasn't really used for anything 🤣

Deksor wrote:

Also for the missing pin, this is really odd because when you look at it, you can see that there was something there, but you can't see any remain or trace, just like it was just glued on the ceramic and wasn't really used for anything 🤣

2017-03-04 15.20.38.jpg

I noticed that!

Like... @Cyrix : '' damn, we forgot a pin! Oh, no worries, we glue one in and no one will ever notice.....''

Looks really strange...

Good to hear you got the board working, it really is a good board. You will like it.

Deksor wrote:

So today I finaly decided to reflash the BIOS, and this happened : […]
Show full quote

So today I finaly decided to reflash the BIOS, and this happened :

2017-03-04 14.23.45.jpg

IT WORKS !!!!

I knew that this could fix boards, but I never thought I would have a board with a dead bios. I tried not really believing that this would fix it, but apparently it worked !

I'm not cursed anymore 🤣

According to uniflash, the original rom says "unknown" so I think it's just a toasted chip and not the result of a virus

Big congrats!
I assume you reprogrammed with a new chip?
The previous owner/scraper might have reused the original BIOS chip for other boards and filled the socket on this board with a dud.

Hm now that I'm trying to install windows, something odd is happening 🙁

The hdd is detected correctly through the bios and fdisk sees it, but when I create a partition and that I reboot, the partition is gone ... I tried with 3 hdds and 2 ide cables and it still does the same thing. On the other hand the CD drives are working

I can use an IDE controller, but that's still unfortunate. Maybe running the CPU at the 83.3 fsb (required by Cyrix) during all it's previous life did hurt the chipset a little bit