I have had some strange issues with a tyan 1854. For those not familiar with it, it is a combo socket 7 and slot 1 board with an apollo pro 133 MHz chipset. A while back I removed all the mounting hardware for the slot 1 so I could use a larger cooler on the socket 370 - a pentium III 1100. Ever since then I had problems powering off - a software *"shut down" would not kill it completely - it would start flashing the hard drive light and fans spinning slowly. I even pulled the motherboard out and went over - could not find anything wrong. Eventually I gutted most of it for other systems.

Fast forward - I recently decided to rebuild the system. No more shutoff problem. Then I run into another problem - it stops turning on. I take everything out - all the way down to pulling out the processor and could find anything wrong. I finally got it running again my resetting the BIOS. What?

I start testing it by playing half-life. Then more problems start cropping up. Turning on but not booting - no video. And then freezing up after booting. My first suspect was RAM - but that was not the problem. Fixed it by turning off AGP4x. I found some articles on the web about people with similar problems - a Tyan rep supposedly said the board was not tested with anything past a radeon 7xxx and was not designed to carry that much current.

I downgraded it from the 9600 back to the 9200, switched back to AGP4X and the system seem stable. I am going to test it a few more days - but I am not sure I trust it. Any thoughts?