mobo probably

Yep, seconding the possible mobo issue - maybe witchety caps? Do you have another 100MHz-FSB P3?

RAM *could* be it too, if you have some PC133, give that a shot. (Though there is some PC133 that doesn't work right in a 440BX board).

Heat?
New paste?
Psu?
Bios reset?
Bios update?
Caps?
Connector on the cpu not clean?
other ram?

4 things that stand out for me.

CPU/mobo is dyeing
Ram is running at the wrong timings or over rated
Motherboard needs a recap
Pci clock divider jumper is not set right. (if the board has one)

Thanks for the quick replies guys. Unfortunately I do not have another 100fsb P3 to test.

@ meljor ... The heatsink that came with it already had a pink thermal pad attached to it. I'm going to wipe that off and apply some Arctic Silver paste. I'm also going to clean the P3 cart pins like a good ol' Nintendo game.

LIGHT BULB - I just realized that my P3 CPU is missing half of the CPU cover. It's just showing the bare CPU chip on one side. The HSF is attached directly to the chip with a thermal pad in between. Is this bad?? yikes. It almost feels like the HSF is not making tight contact. It seems as though the last person who had this (I bought it used), removed the side panel that covers the CPU. Perhaps they also had some problems.

The PSU's are good, BIOS has been updated, Caps seem fine.

Will report back this weekend.

Any more idea's are always welcome 😉

Retromangia wrote:

Thanks for the quick replies guys. Unfortunately I do not have another 100fsb P3 to test. […]
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Thanks for the quick replies guys. Unfortunately I do not have another 100fsb P3 to test.

@ meljor ... The heatsink that came with it already had a pink thermal pad attached to it. I'm going to wipe that off and apply some Arctic Silver paste. I'm also going to clean the P3 cart pins like a good ol' Nintendo game.

LIGHT BULB - I just realized that my P3 CPU is missing half of the CPU cover. It's just showing the bare CPU chip on one side. The HSF is attached directly to the chip with a thermal pad in between. Is this bad?? yikes. It almost feels like the HSF is not making tight contact. It seems as though the last person who had this (I bought it used), removed the side panel that covers the CPU. Perhaps they also had some problems.

The PSU's are good, BIOS has been updated, Caps seem fine.

Will report back this weekend.

Any more idea's are always welcome 😉

''missing half the cover'' is fine, every p3 slot1 cpu i have has that. I think only the p2 had the full cover on both sides (mine do) but maybe that's just boxed versions, i don't know..

Load bios or setup defaults and try that. Try pc133 ram? Get another cpu, they are cheap.

good to know Meljor! thought someone jacked it up 🤣 .. and thanks Phil.. great video's man. Very inspirational 😉

I'm going to look and see if I missed some kind of PCI jumper setting as well. If not, perhaps just buying another chip is the way to go.

will report back!

I strongly suspect your problem is the board, not the CPU. It's not impossible that the CPU might be witchety, but that doesn't happen very often, while motherboards frequently get squirrelly. Also, a 440BX board is of exactly the right age to suffer from capacitor plague (that is, premature failure of electrolytic caps due to a spate of crappy ones in the late 90s and early 2000s). It's also old enough that even non-crappy caps could show issues due to age.

But yeah, reset your BIOS settings, and if there's a newer BIOS available, you might try flashing that. (Back up your existing one if you have the means to, first).

If you have a multimeter, check voltages while trying to boot. 5v and 12v are on the molex plugs. 3.3v and standby voltages can be backprobed on the ATX power connector. You can find Vcore at the tab on the back of half of the mosfets near the CPU (the other half of them will have 5v there).
The P2B series boards have good caps, but they are old now so a failure there isn't impossible, just a lot less likely than it is with most other boards of the period.
Some meters can measure clock frequency but few can measure high enough frequencies to be useful here. But if you happen to have one that can, try to confirm the 33MHz clock at PCI and use a PCI video card so AGP is out of the picture.
Definitely reset the CMOS and load defaults as was mentioned. Sometimes stuff can get corrupt that isn't shown in the setup menus.
RAM is a question mark.

Bet you a beer it's the motherboard. I've seen this before. I had one 440bx witch would not do 100MHz fsb with any cpu - turns out the chipset was damaged (I had it recapped). It wasn't properly stable at 66Mhz either...

I've seen this on Ali Aladdin V boards as well. When the NB goes, you can't get 100MHz stable, but it will post at 66MHz. Others will give the dreaded "gate A20 error" at 100Mhz but run fine at 66.

WOW, great info guys. Really appreciate the help!...let me see if i can reply to everyone here.

@ kanecvr - thank you, good to know I wasn't the only one to have this issue! Beer's on me.

@ Shamino - Dude, your the man. Thank you for all the great info, but I have no idea how to use a Multi-meter 😢 I've always wanted to learn, but none of my peers know how to use one either. Definitely on my list of skills to learn.

@ Jade Angel - I've heard boards around this time may have capacitor issues. Will definitely keep that in mind. I'm also going to update the BIOS to latest version. There's a beta bios I have not tried yet.

Tonight I'm going to attempt:
- Tripple checking Jumper settings
- Re-applying Thermal Paste
- Cleaning Contacts on CPU
- Update BIOS/ reset factory defaults
- Try a stick of PC-133 RAM
- Use PCI video card or AGP card to rule out one or the other.

OK guys, wish me luck! I'll report back with my results. 😎

ok guys, I'm back... and the verdict? It's a no go. No matter what, it won't boot with a 100FSB.

I updated the bios to the very latest, cleaned the CPU contacts, changed thermal grease, checked all jumpers, tried multiple video card configurations. it's just not happening. The ONLY thing I wasn't able to test out was with a faster stick of PC133 SDRAM. I just have a bunch of PC100.

Now instead of doing absolutely nothing when I hit the power button, now it turns on the PSU and CPU fans, but that's about it. No Speaker Beeps, no life beyond that.

So, in the end, I guess I just have to make due with a P3 @ 416mhz. Is it perfect? No, but it's close enough. Shouldn't really make a big difference in performance. I'll be playing mostly late DOS era games, and some early 3Dfx voodoo games (once i find one for a decent price that is).

Thanks again for all help guys!

Check your ram timings, your board may default to cl2 or cl1.5 and your ram may be CL3 Also did you try different pc100 sticks? Also dose your board have a PCI clock divider/ratio jumper?

You can try to disable external cache in the BIOS to se if the cache chips on the CPU has gone bad.

I had a similar issue recently, but mine turned out to be the CPU. I have an old S7-MVP3 board with an AMD K6-2/350 (AFR, I think). I verified the chip was supposed to be 100*3.5, and it would post at that, but always a Windows protection error. The only way Windows would come up was at something like 75*3.5. I played with jumpers endlessly, same issue.

I ended up getting a K6-2/500AFR and it runs perfectly fine at 100*5, so the board is fine.

Maybe someone had overclocked the K6-2/350 back in the 90's and burned it out- no idea. 🙁

I'm messing with an Asus P2B revision 1.02 motherboard with a PII 450 at the moment.

My Asus P2B is very very picky about memory to the point I thought the motherboard (or at least the BIOS) was dead.

C0 C1 was the only thing my POST code indicator card showed when powering on indicating issues with the memory. This was with 5 different known to be working 128MB and 256MB modules, the 6th module I tried worked prefectly...

Thanks for all the help guys... I went back and tried all of your suggestions, but to no avail.

@ Jade Falcon - unfortunately there is no PCI ratio jumper. As for RAM, I tried many different PC100 sticks. I set the bios to "by SPD" for timings, is that correct? I tried this with both CL2 & CL3 sticks, one at a time, In all different slots. I wish i had a PC-133 stick to test it out with, but that probably wouldn't make a difference.

@ Kamerat - I disabled the Extended L2 Cache on the CPU, but no luck. Good idea though!

I think I'm just about ready to throw in my hat. Tried everything i could think of, except for trying another P3-500 or higher CPU. I may invest in one of those to test it out one day. we shall see.

thanks everyone for all your help.

-Retro 😎

Just a quick update on this,

I ordered another CPU to test out on this board, and sure enough it would NOT reach 100fsb either. The Pentium 3 600mhz I purchased would only reach 500mhz at best. No bios settings or jumper changes could fix the issue.

So in the end, it was the board after all.

Back to the seller it goes. Thank's everyone for all your time and help on this.

regards,
Retro