Hello there,

Recently I brought out an Abit BE6-II v1.0 mainboard back in use,
and aside from the fact that I will need to recap the board sometime when I get the time for it and feel for it,
the board is working quite ok... aside from a rather odd, odd to me, glitch on the first pci slot.

When I brought the board out and tried it with an AGP card it worked, no problem whatsoever.
Next a PCI video card was tried, and, it didn't work, no boot. had inserted it in the first slot, right next to the AGP slot.
tried a different card, still no go.
tried another pci slot, the board boots.
go back to the first pci vga card i tried, inserted it in the second slot, it boots.
tried all the other slots, the board boots.
pci slot one seems to be defective, I think. I tape it off, mark it as bad and go on with what I was going to do, trying out some hardware.

eventually, curious of nature, I try to look for what could be wrong with that first pci slot.
no pins are bent, no corrosion is visible, even clean it with some contact spray, nothing seems to fix it.
so I try with a port 80 post code card, and the card gives the wrong results.
It still boots, but with the card in any other slot, it gives the correct code FF at the end of the bios and start of boot,
though with the card in the first slot, it gives the wrong codes, ends up at 26, previous code 25 (never mind these codes they are wrong.)

Now this post card is one that only uses very few pci signals, I've checked the pci pinout and it uses the 4 C/BE lines, 15 address lines and the reset line.

So logic would dictate that whatever problem there is should be with one of these signals.
As far as I know these signals are all shared amongst the pci bus, so whatever is wrong with one slot, should make all the other slots fail to work. Right?

Now while i'm trying to figure this out, I notice that the cpu speed seems to be off.
There's a PII-350 cpu on the board, and I hadn't set the softmenu up for the correct cpu,
but meh, I just needed it for testing, so whatever. there was no cmos battery when I took the board in use, so settings should've been default. Right?
after I took the board in use I added a battery, just so it would keep date and time, didn't change any other bios settings.

This board has options in the bios for setting the cpu and also a 10 dipswitches for setting cpu freq, cpu multiplier, agp ratio, and softmenu enable/disable.
So the board was set to the correct freq/mul for the pII-350, 100MHz 3.5x

Now with the post card in the first pci slot, the bios starts reporting the wrong cpu.
It reported a 500MHz pentium II, a 466, etc...
No it's not just the bios that reports this, also in windows, it gives the wrong results. for the pII-500 reported by the bios, windows XP mentions a 466 celeron.

So I'm still thinking something is off with this pci slot.

Now last thing I try is place a rtl8139 nic in that same first pci slot and it works.
I just gets detected by windows, network activity works, gets dhcp, etc... no strange bios cpu speed weirdness whatsoever.

and while i'm typing this I go off to try the VGA in the first pci slot again, and hello, the bloody thing works, though it ends up hanging in windows after it shows the desktop. (also hangs when the card is in another pci slot, same with same chipset yet different pci vga card. argh., doesn't hang with the agp card)
stick the port 80 post code card back in the first slot ... and the cpu speed weirdness is there again.

So...

Why does only the first slot with the port 80 post card inserted mess with the cpu speed, and any other card, that I tried (pcivga s3-765, nic rtl8139), doesn't mess with it?
Could this just be dying capacitors on the board ?
Did I forget to sacrifice the correct goat to the computer gods ?

enjoy 😀