First post, by MrSmiley381
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Good morning from scenic and foggy northeast Ohio, everyone. I started a Super Socket 7 project and I've been having loads of fun. Perhaps you folks can help me troubleshoot why I can't even get my machines to POST.
Primary Machine (New Build, old parts):
Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W Gold
Gigabyte GA-5AX Revision 4.1 (Super Socket 7)
128 MB PC133 RAM, single stick
AMD K6-3+ 450ACZ
Backup Tester (HP 4550Z, all original parts):
100W PSU
Asus MEB-VM (Socket 370)
64 MB PC100 RAM, two sticks (Total 128 MB)
Celeron 466 MHz
IDE Hard Drive
IDE CD Drive
Floppy Drive
RAGE IIC AGP onboard chipset
W98 SE
Problem GPU:
3dfx Voodoo 5 AGP, Revision A, 1.06 BIOS (according to sticker)
You'll notice in the primary machine that I didn't list any parts aside from motherboard/CPU/RAM/PSU. I'm really trying to get it to POST before anything else. The backup machine is something I got off Craigslist a while back and it's a tiny little thing with barely any clearance for me to work, but another available tool is better than nothing. I also got a Matrox AGP GPU on loan from a friend and that actually got the GA-5AX to POST and even install Windows before the machine mutilated the OS drive.
So with those initial notes out of the way, I would like to describe the issue. Whenever I try the GPU is either machine, I get a long beep followed by two or three short beeps. It's probably three, but the speaker doesn't always sound like it's separating the beeps. I'm also at wit's end over this thing so I'm probably not hearing anything right. Regardless, this should indicate that there's something wrong with the GPU's seating, its RAM, or its BIOS. Maybe the capacitors. But whenever I boot the machine, the fans on the card kick on just fine.
Things I've tried so far:
Reseating the GPU. No change.
Removing as much hardware from the GA-5AX as possible. Nope.
Disabling video RAM shadowing on the GA-5AX. Nothing.
Using a Seraphic recovery boot disk with the 1.06 BIOS in the HP machine. No idea if it did anything because it was running blind and not even successfully POSTing.
Any idea what I could spot or test on the board to troubleshoot it? The eBay seller said it last worked in 2015 before he pulled it from the machine. The board is incredibly clean. I'm a little boggled at this point.
I can provide more details as I'm sure I've overlooked quite a lot in this initial post. The good news is that I live right behind a Micro Center so I can grab just about any newer equipment I could need for testing. I appreciate any insight on this.
I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.