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Iwill DVD266u-RN + 2x 1.26ghz Tualatins = flakiness

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First post, by deighvebee

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Hi all, this is my first post here. Stumbled on this message board doing research on old hardware now that I've gotten into retro PCs. Seems like a cool corner of the internet. I'm hoping to tap into your collective wisdom to triumph over my arch nemesis: the famous Iwill DVD266u-RN. In theory it's the holy grail dual Tualatin board; AGP, DDR, RAID, etc. However my experience with it has been anything but charmed.

I've had an Iwill DVD266u-RN in the closet for about 10 years now. It's always been flaky, booting sometimes but usually no POST/video. Every few years I foolishly think "I bet I can get the old girl working, past me was an idiot." Every time, I fail. This year I've gotten further than ever but I'm still stumped.

The problem: The board refuses to boot/post consistently. The fans spin up but there's no post code or video. Once it a while it does boot, and as long as I don't mess with the memory it continues to work. If I ever try to add more or move the stick to another slot she gets pissed and refuses to boot again.

The setup:

  • Iwill DVD266u-RN
  • 2x 1.26ghz PIII-S Tualatin CPUs
  • Voodoo 5 5500 AGP (I've also tried a Radeon 9200 AGP)
  • 1GB DDR (one stick)
  • Sound Blaster Audigy2
  • 3Com Gigabit NIC
  • IDE hard drive

Progress so far:

  • After a lot of experimentation I believe my issues are memory related. Memory slot 2 seems to be the only one that detects an installed stick. Also, sometimes moving the memory around causes the board to not boot. Even after putting the stick back in slot 2, it won't boot again until I reset the CMOS or wait a few days. Quite perpexling.
  • Swapping out the Tualatins for a pair of 1Ghz coppermines made no difference.
  • Swapping out the Voodoo 5 5500 AGP for a Radeon 9200 AGP made no difference.
  • Swapping out the 1GB stick of DDR for a 256mb stick made no difference. Slot 2 is the only one that works reliably.
  • I did discover the board had a custom BIOS from Quantum 3D (yes, the company) on it. That BIOS had very few settings, so I was hoping that was the cause of my problems. I successfully flashed the modded bios I found here https://badcaps.net/forum/showpost.php?p=30830&postcount=67 which worked great, but did not solve the problems.
  • I do not see any bulging capacitors or any other signs of failing hardware.

Thoughts? At this point I'm resigned to the fact that I might never figure it out.

Reply 1 of 4, by RichardG867

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deighvebee wrote on 2021-01-30, 17:53:
  • I do not see any bulging capacitors or any other signs of failing hardware.

Capacitors can fail without bulging. My Shuttle FV24 board showed no signs of bulging, yet it was unstable (integrated graphics crashing to a black screen after POST or within the operating system), then I replaced a few caps and it became stable. I would recap the board, as it falls well into the capacitor plague era.

Reply 2 of 4, by Ozzuneoj

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I have two of those boards and nearly all of the caps are swollen and leaking.

I have a previous model (no tualatin support) and the caps on that one are fine as far as I can tell.

Yours probably needs a full recap, which is likely not going to be fun unless you really know what you're doing. It's a huge board with lots of metal to absorb heat.

I'm getting better at soldering, but my results with boards made after the late 90s are still not as pretty as I would like, so I have left these boards to be fixed later. It's going to be a big project. My boards were also advertised as having a custom Quantum3D bios, but I haven't powered them on with the caps in such bad shape.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 4 of 4, by Ozzuneoj

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deighvebee wrote on 2021-01-30, 21:54:

Interesting. Any idea what Quantum 3D product these boards would have been used in?

No idea. I have a couple of Graphite arcade systems, but they are much smaller and a bit older. If Q3D made high end workstations or simulators, that's likely where these were used. Dual Tualatin PIIIs and 266Mhz DDR was a monster of a setup back in those days.

This would have been post-3dfx, so I'm not sure what the other specs would have been. Maybe an early Quadro or GeForce3...

Edit: Or maybe a V5 6000, based on this post from 2001...
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=921526

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

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