Nice board; can you imagine having such a high end system in 1995, pre-Windows 95?

Check the back of the board behind the SIMM slots for any traces that may e scratched through. It would always looks to the system as if there is no RAM even when there is.

Although the BIOS would be agnostic to cache at this stage, it is possible if one of the cache chips is bad it is holding an address or data line high or low like a short circuit.

I have had both of these happen in the real world.

In my experience ASUS boards of this era that use Dallas RTC exhibit a really strange behavior when the battery is almost depleted, sometimes not POSTing at all. As soon as I desolder it and do the CR2032 mod they usually start working properly.

Also, not long ago I got a P55TP4XE which had a couple of leaking and totally out of spec capacitors near the cache, but this may be anecdotal evidence.

The "I'm too cheap or in too much of a hurry to buy a battery holder" dallas mod goes like, perform trepanning as per normal, saw the top off a 500ml waterbottle with the neck the same size as a CR2032, push a drawing pin (thumbtack) through the cap, solder your black wire to that, then strip the end of the red wire, wrap it around the end of the neck you sawed off, and screw the cap down trapping the strands against the + side of the CR2032 and the - side against the drawing pin. Then solder ends into exposed contacts in Dallas.

Edit: the I can't find a water bottle or IPA/peroxide bottle version goes, get a sprung clothespeg/clothespin, push thumbtacks through opposite sides of jaws, solder to ends of those, clamp cr 2032 between them, wrap metal bits with tape so they don't rattle onto anything they shouldn't.

Then the, "no no, you really don't understand how cheap I am and I don't have a clothespin or thumbtacks." version goes, snap a popsicle stick in half, strip 2" off the end of your wires, wind it round the end of each bit of popsicle stick several times and twist the end back to the wire, at the other end, wrap an elastic band around it multiple times, clamp cr2032 between, insulate with tape, peeled off sticky label, whatever. Expect the elastic band to perish and fail in a few months though. Possibly the popsicle stick will have enough spring to bind it with thread or something.

Thank you all for the input. The traces and capacitors look fine. Swapping the cache did nothing. I also tried powering on the board with no RAM installed and got the same beep code.

Guess the dead battery might be the problem, I've read about other boards too that won't boot when the battery is empty.

I'd rather not do any soldering myself and leave it to someone else to mod it. It does look like a nice board but in the Pentium class the GA-586AX is my favorite right now.

Don't know where you are physically located but I'd take it to a VCF event or VCF repair workshop if one is nearby

jakethompson1 wrote on 2024-03-08, 21:55:

Don't know where you are physically located but I'd take it to a VCF event or VCF repair workshop if one is nearby

That's also a good option, but since I don't plan to keep it anyways I'll let the new owner decide what to do with it.