I've recently acquired a free Pentium 3 motherboard (a Fastfame 3VBAE2) from my brother-in-law, but it fails to boot.

Symptoms:
Initially - A long, continuous beep with no screen response. Even clearing CMOS didn't do anything, nor did replacing battery.

Then, I did some research, and apparently that's a response for BIOS corruption. OK, so I thought maybe the board got borked by a failed BIOS update or something. So I flashed the BIOS chip with the most recent BIOS version using an external flasher, and cleared CMOS again before starting up the computer. This produced results! ...But the computer locked up at the point in the boot sequence where it's identifying master/slave configuration.

So I thought maybe I needed to enter the BIOS and check the default settings. I rebooted the computer, and tried to enter the BIOS, successfully, but once inside, it locked up again.

Right, restart again. Now it didn't even reach the memory check. Restart again. This time, it froze up with only half the Processor spec printed out on the screen. Like, it literally cut off mid-word. Restart again, now it locks up in the screen that displays the graphics card info.

I figured at this point it was some kind of progressive corruption, because each successive attempt never got further than a previous attempt got. So I re-flashed the BIOS. Lo and behold, it goes for further before locking up again, and then demonstrated the same cycle of less progress on each subsequent reboot.

Now, I'm no expert with BIOS functionality and interactions, but I figure it's one of two things, given the improvement. Either something is wrong with the CMOS memory, or something is wrong with the BIOS chip. I'm just not sure which. Thing is, I think the CMOS memory on this board is in the South Bridge chip. If that's the case, and the CMOS is the problem, I obviously don't want to waste time & money getting a replacement BIOS chip for a dead board.

So, given the set of symptoms above, can anybody make an educated guess on whether it's the CMOS or the BIOS?