Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 09:01:

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves, but also kill any hardware it is installed in or are just plain dangerous to use).

Like my recently deceased Gigabyte motherboard which is almost at that point. It still starts and soft-resets, but won't ever POST successfully anymore, but I did notice it does still recognize when all the memory slots are left empty so I could still use it to test dodgy DDR3 memory modules.

Do not junk that mainboard yet - it's not dead! Like I said, there's a known issue with gigabyte LGA1150 and LGA2011 boards of that generation corrupting CMOS.

Try this:

- remove the CMOS battery
- power the system on
- turn the system off by holding the power button for 45 seconds (50 to make sure - it's important, this triggers a soft CMOS clear on gigabyte boards, just like on laptops!)
- put the CMOS clear jumper in the "clear" position and wait 10 seconds
- power the board on - it should not POST because of the Clear CMOS jumper
- power it off by holding the power button for 45 seconds again
- wait 10 seconds and turn it back on - it should POST. Put the CMOS battery back in while it's running. If the RTC battery holder is under your video card, then put it back in before this last step.

If that didn't work, the actual EEPROM is corrupted and you can re-flash the bios using a thumb drive - there's a how to in the manual. Like I said, my brother in law had a Z77 gigabyte board that did this randomly - a CMOS clear by the method I described above usually worked, and when it didn't he could re-flash the bios using a thumb drive. At one point Gigabyte released a BIOS revision for this board and it stopped corrupting CMOS.

I do have one dead gigabyte board - a late model KT400A. It has a short someware. It was working when I stored it, it's possible some crud got where it's not supposed to be or a capacitor dried up and shorted. I did like their KT400 and KT600 boards - they were among the few boards that let you select the CPU multiplier in BIOS. Not all GA boards with this chipset will let you do this, but the fancier ones with the golden northbridge heatsink and active cooling will. Great for pairing with an Athlon XP-M or Geode.

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-14, 23:19:

You keep talking about brands. "shit" companies such as ECS and PCChips have made some great quality boards over the years, desp […]
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Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 19:57:

Interesting.. Some times dog brand such as EliteGroup, ASSrock, PcChips, QDI, Acorp ect just tend to die way less, and most of t […]
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Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:21:

At least I respect the opinion of others if they enjoyed it and telling this to them on this thread is a very futile attempt.

BTW, I have a noname S3 Trio3D/2X 8MB PCI card that has very good image quality (aside from the brightness bug which can be easily dealt with) and it can handle PCI bus clocks that are out of spec unlike my Compaq S3 ViRGE/GX (which suffers from occasional palette corruption if the PCI bus clock is above 33 MHz). Currently using it on my Socket 7 computer along with a single Voodoo2 12MB card from InnoVision.

Interesting.. Some times dog brand such as EliteGroup, ASSrock, PcChips, QDI, Acorp ect just tend to die way less, and most of the time they just work, meanwhile good brands such as ABIT, ASUS (dont cosider ASUS premium, but they usually use expensive Rubycon caps) . But normally premium brands work better from what i saw. I think is not good to use overall parts that need to be on less clock speed (for example PCI bus, sometimes from OC the bus rises, better to have a way of not rising the bus in the first place), not on more, and you may end up with some broken parts, usually HDD may get affected and other problems. Some cheaper parts dont have even CPU protection, that does not mean, when an quality board hard shut down to prevent damage, the cheap one wont care, and then ur system my fry, or die from overvolting for example..

HanSolo wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:32:

I still don't get how you define 'high quality'. What are your objective criteria?

If you have Diamond cards compare them, to no name cards, just by putting them next to eatch other, you will see the Diamond card is better build.
Even the parts on the quality brand and PCB look and even feel better when you touch it with hand..

There was also in the past from the "good" brands as ppl claim they are fine, like PChips that used fake cache modules on their 386/ 486 boards. Ypu see the board have cache on it, BUT there are no traces there LMAO.. Brands such as AOpen, Gigabyte (depends on the model) , ASUS (they use most of the time the best brand Rubycon) use high quality caps, specially most AOpen and ASUS boards use mostly Rubycon caps, AOpen uses most of the time mix between ruby and crap ones, other times only Rubycon. Gigabyte boards even in Slot 1 (the more high end only) have DUAL BIOS and better caps and even CPU overvoltage protection.. Wonder why ATi and MatroX cards are one of the very best to par with 3Dfx Voodoo I and II, simple as their cards are of very high build quality and the chipset as well provide better 2D quality, but the components on the PCB will help even further for the image quality.

For you and others that claim about quality and stuff.. Take for example 3.5 inch Floppy drives, normally brands aside from TEAC and panasonic are garbage, SONY also have fine drives, but rest brands are just bad and dont read anyhing.

So you and the rest that claim, there is no difference.. The Hercules Terminator S3 card, is clear it have better PCB, better caps that last way longer, and does not show crap image quality.. While the NOname S3 is clear the PCB is cheap and nasty, and there are caps that are dry AF, and normally on so old cards these electrolytic caps are very dead, and will produce very bad image quality. It is clear they did even cheap out on memory size, you need to find memory chips now, while on the more premium card with the way more premium PCB that is not the case..
I bet every single component aside from the main chipset, is WAY more cheaper on the UNDERdog "branded" S3 card, compared to the Hercules Terminator.
Also there appears to be feature connectors on both cards, but the Terminator card have x2 more connectors on it and an jumper to set something...

IMG_20181224_110751.jpg
IMG_20181224_123546.jpg

Now these
The Gigabyte have superior quality to this garbage Gainward board. Allbig caps are Sanyo quality caps, no need to mention the Dual BIOS that the other board and many lacks, CPU overvoltage protection, speaker and 4 slots of memory supporting max of 1GB SDram total, compared to 700MB on the green board. The Gigabyte have also way more capacitors, more mosfets (keep in mind this board is mostly for Pentium II, while the gainward supports up to 700MHz vs like 450MHz means Gigabyte did overbuild their board)..

IMG_20171015_164135.jpg
IMG_20160325_134909.jpg

Brawndo wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:45:

I could be wrong, but it's possible the BIOS wouldn't support ISA even if you did solder a connector on, in which case you'd need a modified BIOS for it to work.

It is still an option prob, sadly they did not bother to solder an ISA slot..

You keep talking about brands. "shit" companies such as ECS and PCChips have made some great quality boards over the years, despite the fact that they generally make garbage. The ECS KV2 Extreme is one such board, and another is the K7VTA3 (certain revisions at least). PCChips makes the M519? or something, a pretty speedy and fairly reliable socket 3 motherboard - despite some boards using fake L2 cache.

On the other hand Asus, a company lots of collectors and enthusiasts keep parsing, made and sold as many poor quality boards as good quality ones. Am I to take it a brand is considered good if most of their products are better then average? Well then we're in trouble.. By that logic Asus is a "meh" brand - at least when it comes to motherboards. When it comes to video cards, they're a disaster. Dead ROG Strix RX Vega 64. Dead HD 280x. 3x Dead Geforce 4 Ti 4600s. Dead DirectCU II TOP GTX 680. Dead 8800GTX. All these cards were working when I got them. The Vega64, 680 and 280x were bought when they were new. The vega lasted 11 months. Then RMA. The replacement card died after a little over a year. No overclocking - very well ventilated case (cooler master HAF XB). The 280x started to show artifacts. Had to replace the BIOS with an updated one that dropped the clocks. It lasted 4 years in a living room PC that was used for movies and netflix 99% of the time. The 680 lasted the warranty period then died - blown mosfet - took traces with it. And so on. The P5B (ooooh I'm gonna get so much flack for this) is a dumpster fire from start to finish. 5 or 6 revisions, all quite different. Some can't feed faster video cards like a Voodoo 3. Others can't run the more power hungry CPUs (Early cyrix, fast K6-3's, etc) and compared to it's Acorp counterpart with the same chipset, they keep dying. I have 5 P5B boards, only one works and I'm afraid to use it in a build. All their socket 7 era boards are rubbish. The P55T2P4 is a mediocre board - it's extremely picky about SDRAM modules (runs OK with most SIMMs tho), it can't deliver enough power to the PCI slots for a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI and is unstable with a PCI Banshee... VRMs get phenomenally hot even with a 166mHz pentium 1 MMX... and I have 3 dead ones in a box. Found quite a few of these, built systems with them, then traded them off. This model was pretty common in my neck of the woods and I found quite a few of them - most in working order. Asus socket A era stuff is complete trash. The only board that stands out is the A7V8X-X but some of these loose a memory channel and are affected by capacitor plague. The P4P800-X/Deluxe/VM series has issues writing or reading from EEPROM using the stock winbond chips they come with and sometimes corrupt BIOS. Replacing the stock EEPROM with Amtel chips I got on ebay fixed my boards as they started dying one by one. They do make exceptional boards as well, but only later generations.

Now the good - the P5K-WS is amazing, and so is the P6T Deluxe. Most of their mid-high end boards from that generation on are very good, but the lower end stuff is horrendous and overpriced. The Asus Crosshair series are some of the most feature ritch boards I've ever used. Their gaming laptops are also very good and rather well priced - even the cheaper ones are at least decent - despite inadequate cooling. Hell, my old TUG Gaming FA506IV frequently got to 95C during gaming, and despite that it's still around - my kid is using it now - and I roasted that sucker for over 2 years. The battery on it is incredible as well. 2.5 years of usage and battery health is 80%. I also had a couple of G751 laptops a few years ago - a G751JT and a G751JY - and I loved those machines. My current daily driver is a G713QY and I love it. I tried Lenovo, MSI and Acer laptops but something's always missing. For lenovo it's performance and driver support. I bought a 15" model (can't remember model number) with a GTX 1060 and an I5 CPU and although I was impressed with the cooling and build quality, performance and driver support was a joke. The 1060 performed like a 1050ti... MSI's laptops feel cheap - at least the one I had witch was a mid-high end model with a GTX 1070 and a 17" screen. Cheap feeling plastic, horrible trackpad with integrated buttons, bendy keyboard... performance was great, and so was cooling. The screen wasn't great either. Some TN panel that looked really washed out compared to other laptops and some desktop monitors. Acer's Preadator line I did like a lot, but they don't seem to include large capacity batteries in their gaming laptops, so after only a few months I traded my predator 17 for... an Asus TUF with similar specs. Acer only provided a 50wh battery witch was good for 3-4 hours of work. The little TUF gaming came with a 90wh battery witch lasted for over 7 hours of work. Hell my current ROG G713QY has 7 to 9 hours of battery life - tough to find a 17" laptop with a better battery or nicer build.

Abit is generally considered a great brand - and is in fact one of my favorites. Their motherboards are some of the most feature ritch and capable of their time - but they used rubbish components. Cheap caps and no-name VRMs and FETs on some models you can't even find equivalents for.

No idea what you have against asrock - they make some of the most robust motherboards of any manufacturer - and that spans across many platforms and generations. All the asrock boards in my collection work flawlessly. Build quality and layout is better then even on their budget models like the K7S41GX. Asrock Z68 and Z77 boards are amazing. Asus level features, incredible reliability and low price. I have a H55 Asrock mATX motherboard that I got like 4 or 5 years ago witch I beat the SHIT out of... i5 750 overclocked to 4.1GHz witch crazy voltage.... I used 1833 and 2133Mhz ddr3 in the thing.... i7 860 overclocked to 4.316Ghz - an all on a puny budget Asrock H55M witch is still going! My mon is using it, together with said i7 860 (stock clocks this time), 8Gb of 2133MHz DDR3 running at 1600MHz and a GTX 460. Had some great fun with my Z77 Extreme 3 back in the day. I remember pushing a 2500k to 4.4Ghz on that board...

Biostar is another brand that makes very good quality mainboards. The MB8433UUD-A is already legendary. They have some amazing socket 7 (8500TUD-A), socket A and AM3 motherboards as well. Sure, their current models look cheap and extremely chinese - "racing"? Really? Are they marketing them to 10 year olds? Some of the best Biostar motherboards I've ever used are the A780L3, TA790GX and a X370GTN. The A780L3 was used as a test board for many years, intensively while I still had my shop open. It still works great. It's on a shelf with a Phenom II X3 installed in the socket.

MSI build pretty dodgy boards back in the day. Their early 90's stuff is pretty good. In fact one of my favorite socket 3 motherboards is the MSI MS-4144 - I have two of these - one purchased from a recycling center, the other came in a complete build with a POD83 - they both work flawlessly. Hell, the one from the recycling center was sitting outside in dirt and rain in a pile of other boards for god knows how long. I also liked their Z77 boards - used to own a z77a-g45 back in the day and I was pretty happy with it. My favorite MSI board has to be the p35 platinum - boy was this baby overbuilt. I had loads of fun overclocking my Q6600 then my Q9550. But their socket a to early LGA775 boards are horrendous. Poor features on most, crappy design, crappy components.

Gigabyte is... OK? For the most part? Don't have much to say about their motherboards - I'd characterize them as unremarkable. I've had good experience with them from a reliability point of view, and they always seem to be well priced, but they are not exciting. My oldest Gigabyte board is a (no surprise here) socket 3 GA486AM/S. Good little board - fast, compatible, stable, hell, even the soldered DALLAS RTC chip it came with is still holding a charge believe it or not! I'm a fan of their newer boards - they seem very well built and have great layout and features. Great pricing too. Right now my media center PC is using a Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite and man do I like this thing. Built like a tank, It took my 5700G to 4.7GHz without complaints or complications, it could even drive the iGPU easily to 2.4Ghz. I did have some minor issues with a GA-X79-UD5 back in the day - it liked to corrupt cmos settings for some reason. If I left my PC off for more then 48 hours it would often corrupt cmos and I had to go into bios and load the OC profile I made. My brother in law had similar CMOS related issues with a GA-Z77X-UD5H.

Gainward and Palit... you were trashing gainward back there but I have a sizeable collection of Gainward / Palit / PC Partner boards and they all work flawlessly. Palit cards in particular are incredibly well built although their 2000's stuff looks a bit dodgy - AND Palit is an OEM for other brands as well. If I'm not mistaking Galaxy's Hall of Fame GTX 980 was in fact manufactured by palit. I have palit video cards from the '80's - I think my oldest palit card is a WDC Paradise with 256k of ram. I also have an ET4000AX made by them, as well as a couple of Geforce 3 Ti200, several FX series cards and so on - all working. Hell, I have some cheap Geforce 2 MX palit cards that have been thrown around my shop, used for testing when AGP was still relevant, overclocked for poops and giggles, and they still work. As for Gainward I have a Voodoo 2 card made by them and a Voodoo 4.

My point is most manufacturers have good and bad products, calling a brand good or bad is irrelevant. But what do I know, there's people on this forum who swear by the P5B and here I am sitting on four dead P5B's.

Well, erm, that escalated quickly? 😁
My humble remark on the whole brand issue: Be nice. Don't denigrate people's acquisitions. Some don't have the time, skill or money to get the great stuff. It's not a competition, anyway.
Asus somehow got to me, don't quite know why. Maybe good marketing. But my brother's Gf256 was shite. Fond memories of Abit and MSI.
Major brands and Asus in particular: Maybe we underestimate how much of a rabbit hole places like this are for "normal" people. So, having solid support pages with manual, divers or bios is a definite plus, remote of the actual hardware.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-14, 22:26:

So my memory is a bit cloudy on this (no pun intended), but in the years before these Hama modules (I never heard of them before […]
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Cuttoon wrote on 2022-05-13, 13:52:

Interesting, thanks. I'd wonder why they don't just discard defective ones right away instead of marking them, but I don't have […]
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dormcat wrote on 2022-05-13, 13:21:

IIRC those horizontal bars are marks of defective chips. Not to mention those oxidized contacts.

Interesting, thanks. I'd wonder why they don't just discard defective ones right away instead of marking them, but I don't have any better explanation. Maybe they mislabeled them legitimately at first, crossed that out and sold them at a discount then?
Oxidized contacts, or the gold plating simply fell off and then the copper started to oxidize. Also, the designation on the package is in quotes. It's a Gesamtkunstwerk.

dormcat wrote on 2022-05-13, 13:21:

SDRAM from e-waste are often in better shape than this one.

I've accumulated dozens of RAM modules over the years, some of them from dubious sources and treated with little respect. All of those are in better shape.

So my memory is a bit cloudy on this (no pun intended), but in the years before these Hama modules (I never heard of them before btw) there were actually companies that acquired defective memory, retested it at (for instance) lower densities and/or lower speeds (so testing 64MB chips tested defective as 16MB and if it worked as a 16MB chip they'd sell it as such (numbers are hypothetical btw, it's just to illustrate)) because memory was expensive back then.
I wouldn't have been surprised if these modules were basically made in this same spirit or by some similar company.
Though, it wouldn't really explain why the DIMM itself (especially the contacts) seem to badly damaged. It's almost as if the module is an old worn out one or something.

I have a hard time believing the module inside that package is really newly produced 😜

Interesting, though not very practical except perhaps as a curiosity of some sort? I mean would such a module even work?

I'm going with chrismes' suggestion here: Leaving it sealed. Still contemplating a high profile public impaling, though.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-15, 05:36:

pan069 wrote on 2022-05-15, 05:31:

Brickpad wrote on 2022-05-15, 03:40:

Found this unbelievable score on EBay for $45 and free shipping! Seller's listing stated unit was untested and no HDD. For $45 it was worth the gamble and it paid off. It's in excellent condition and works perfectly. Even has the original hard drive sled. Only thing that needed replacing was the dead BR2350 with a CR2032.

Cool looking case. Whats inside?

That's half the fun of mystery eBay cases 🤣, the other half is opening it up and finding something rare or unusual.

Box says VL2 4/50. So, given the looks, that the "energy star" was worth advertising it with a sticker, lack of CD drive and that $45 is a good deal, i'd venture the guess it contains a 486 with DX2-50 CPU?

Brickpad wrote on 2022-05-15, 15:11:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2022-05-15, 07:36:

Brickpad wrote on 2022-05-15, 03:40:

Only thing that needed replacing was the dead BR2350 with a CR2032.

BRxxxx is rechargable, CRxxxx is not. Be careful!

I think that's the LiR-type that's rechargeable. I've looked everywhere and can't find any information about the BR-type coin cells as being rechargeable. I have a cross-reference sheet that shows a CR2032 and BR2032 (same as BR2325, just a smaller diameter and thicker) as interchangeable as well. Also, the cell would have "rechargeable" stamped into it.

Are BR2032 and CR2032 the same?
However, there are two main models on the market today: the CR2032 batteries and the BR2032 ones. The main difference between these two types resides in their electrode. While similar, the BR2032 uses carbon monofluoride as the positive electrode. The CR2032 uses manganese dioxide for the positive electrode.

Very interesting. I've gotten some bad information on this from somewhere then.
Thanks!
(At some point, i was actually trying to find out, if there is a CR2032 sized rechargeable battery, so one doesn't need to mess around with diodes or removal of some resistors for example...)

GigAHerZ wrote on 2022-05-15, 15:29:

Very interesting. I've gotten some bad information on this from somewhere then.
Thanks!
(At some point, i was actually trying to find out, if there is a CR2032 sized rechargeable battery, so one doesn't need to mess around with diodes or removal of some resistors for example...)

There is. It's the LiR2032 - https://batteryspecialists.com.au/blogs/news/ … atteries-cr2032

Hopefully that'll clear things up. 😀

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-15, 15:20:

Do not junk that mainboard yet - it's not dead! Like I said, there's a known issue with gigabyte LGA1150 and LGA2011 boards of t […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 09:01:

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves, but also kill any hardware it is installed in or are just plain dangerous to use).

Like my recently deceased Gigabyte motherboard which is almost at that point. It still starts and soft-resets, but won't ever POST successfully anymore, but I did notice it does still recognize when all the memory slots are left empty so I could still use it to test dodgy DDR3 memory modules.

Do not junk that mainboard yet - it's not dead! Like I said, there's a known issue with gigabyte LGA1150 and LGA2011 boards of that generation corrupting CMOS.

Try this:

- remove the CMOS battery
- power the system on
- turn the system off by holding the power button for 45 seconds (50 to make sure - it's important, this triggers a soft CMOS clear on gigabyte boards, just like on laptops!)
- put the CMOS clear jumper in the "clear" position and wait 10 seconds
- power the board on - it should not POST because of the Clear CMOS jumper
- power it off by holding the power button for 45 seconds again
- wait 10 seconds and turn it back on - it should POST. Put the CMOS battery back in while it's running. If the RTC battery holder is under your video card, then put it back in before this last step.

If that didn't work, the actual EEPROM is corrupted and you can re-flash the bios using a thumb drive - there's a how to in the manual. Like I said, my brother in law had a Z77 gigabyte board that did this randomly - a CMOS clear by the method I described above usually worked, and when it didn't he could re-flash the bios using a thumb drive. At one point Gigabyte released a BIOS revision for this board and it stopped corrupting CMOS.

I do have one dead gigabyte board - a late model KT400A. It has a short someware. It was working when I stored it, it's possible some crud got where it's not supposed to be or a capacitor dried up and shorted. I did like their KT400 and KT600 boards - they were among the few boards that let you select the CPU multiplier in BIOS. Not all GA boards with this chipset will let you do this, but the fancier ones with the golden northbridge heatsink and active cooling will. Great for pairing with an Athlon XP-M or Geode.

Darn it, if I knew these steps earlier I might be able to rescue the two GA-K8VM800M I had. 🙄

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 16:53:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-05-14, 16:44:

SETBLASTER wrote on 2022-05-14, 16:27:

7 bucks for all this […]
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7 bucks for all this

i wanted this board badly because it supports up to athlon XP 2600
also has the P4 power connector
and also has an empy slot for ISA, that i can add it

with a pioneer dvd-rw and a 9400 gt graphics card

That's a fantastic deal. That MSI board will make a great platform for some retro fun.

Sadly it lacks the ISA slot.. I hate when they have printed the f**king ISA on the PCBm but yet no one bothered to install one... Not sure if someone try, can solder ISA slot there...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LujwK8wvzCY

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-15, 15:20:

Do not junk that mainboard yet - it's not dead! Like I said, there's a known issue with gigabyte LGA1150 and LGA2011 boards of t […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 09:01:

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves, but also kill any hardware it is installed in or are just plain dangerous to use).

Like my recently deceased Gigabyte motherboard which is almost at that point. It still starts and soft-resets, but won't ever POST successfully anymore, but I did notice it does still recognize when all the memory slots are left empty so I could still use it to test dodgy DDR3 memory modules.

Do not junk that mainboard yet - it's not dead! Like I said, there's a known issue with gigabyte LGA1150 and LGA2011 boards of that generation corrupting CMOS.

Try this:

- remove the CMOS battery
- power the system on
- turn the system off by holding the power button for 45 seconds (50 to make sure - it's important, this triggers a soft CMOS clear on gigabyte boards, just like on laptops!)
- put the CMOS clear jumper in the "clear" position and wait 10 seconds
- power the board on - it should not POST because of the Clear CMOS jumper
- power it off by holding the power button for 45 seconds again
- wait 10 seconds and turn it back on - it should POST. Put the CMOS battery back in while it's running. If the RTC battery holder is under your video card, then put it back in before this last step.

If that didn't work, the actual EEPROM is corrupted and you can re-flash the bios using a thumb drive - there's a how to in the manual. Like I said, my brother in law had a Z77 gigabyte board that did this randomly - a CMOS clear by the method I described above usually worked, and when it didn't he could re-flash the bios using a thumb drive. At one point Gigabyte released a BIOS revision for this board and it stopped corrupting CMOS.

I do have one dead gigabyte board - a late model KT400A. It has a short someware. It was working when I stored it, it's possible some crud got where it's not supposed to be or a capacitor dried up and shorted. I did like their KT400 and KT600 boards - they were among the few boards that let you select the CPU multiplier in BIOS. Not all GA boards with this chipset will let you do this, but the fancier ones with the golden northbridge heatsink and active cooling will. Great for pairing with an Athlon XP-M or Geode.

Cheers. I've tried looking for info on this, but have been unable to find anything useful except the standard troubleshooting stuff which i already spend a couple hours on until I decided to throw in the towel.
What you're describing seems like a thing I can try. It's indeed an LGA 1150 board though unfortunately I've already since completely dismantled the system (it needed a good clean anyway, 🤣).
Where did you find this info btw? I mean I'm not even getting anything on the display and it's stuck in some kind of infinite boot loop. If I then turn it off using the power button (pressing it down for 4 seconds) it will sometimes (after like 5 seconds or so?) power on again after which it will just get stuck again in the same boot loop.

There's no mention of a fix for this on the main BIOS page for the board.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2022-05-15, 15:29:

(At some point, i was actually trying to find out, if there is a CR2032 sized rechargeable battery, so one doesn't need to mess around with diodes or removal of some resistors for example...)

LiR2032 and ML2032 are both rechargeable

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 17:05:

Cheers. I've tried looking for info on this, but have been unable to find anything useful except the standard troubleshooting st […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-15, 15:20:

Do not junk that mainboard yet - it's not dead! Like I said, there's a known issue with gigabyte LGA1150 and LGA2011 boards of t […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote on 2022-05-15, 09:01:

For me junk is literally that, a part that is so bad that it's best to bin it (like parts that are not just defective themselves, but also kill any hardware it is installed in or are just plain dangerous to use).

Like my recently deceased Gigabyte motherboard which is almost at that point. It still starts and soft-resets, but won't ever POST successfully anymore, but I did notice it does still recognize when all the memory slots are left empty so I could still use it to test dodgy DDR3 memory modules.

Do not junk that mainboard yet - it's not dead! Like I said, there's a known issue with gigabyte LGA1150 and LGA2011 boards of that generation corrupting CMOS.

Try this:

- remove the CMOS battery
- power the system on
- turn the system off by holding the power button for 45 seconds (50 to make sure - it's important, this triggers a soft CMOS clear on gigabyte boards, just like on laptops!)
- put the CMOS clear jumper in the "clear" position and wait 10 seconds
- power the board on - it should not POST because of the Clear CMOS jumper
- power it off by holding the power button for 45 seconds again
- wait 10 seconds and turn it back on - it should POST. Put the CMOS battery back in while it's running. If the RTC battery holder is under your video card, then put it back in before this last step.

If that didn't work, the actual EEPROM is corrupted and you can re-flash the bios using a thumb drive - there's a how to in the manual. Like I said, my brother in law had a Z77 gigabyte board that did this randomly - a CMOS clear by the method I described above usually worked, and when it didn't he could re-flash the bios using a thumb drive. At one point Gigabyte released a BIOS revision for this board and it stopped corrupting CMOS.

I do have one dead gigabyte board - a late model KT400A. It has a short someware. It was working when I stored it, it's possible some crud got where it's not supposed to be or a capacitor dried up and shorted. I did like their KT400 and KT600 boards - they were among the few boards that let you select the CPU multiplier in BIOS. Not all GA boards with this chipset will let you do this, but the fancier ones with the golden northbridge heatsink and active cooling will. Great for pairing with an Athlon XP-M or Geode.

Cheers. I've tried looking for info on this, but have been unable to find anything useful except the standard troubleshooting stuff which i already spend a couple hours on until I decided to throw in the towel.
What you're describing seems like a thing I can try. It's indeed an LGA 1150 board though unfortunately I've already since completely dismantled the system (it needed a good clean anyway, 🤣).
Where did you find this info btw? I mean I'm not even getting anything on the display and it's stuck in some kind of infinite boot loop. If I then turn it off using the power button (pressing it down for 4 seconds) it will sometimes (after like 5 seconds or so?) power on again after which it will just get stuck again in the same boot loop.

There's no mention of a fix for this on the main BIOS page for the board.

Gigabyte forums. Came across it It a while ago, trying to troubleshoot my brother in law's pc. I've since then used this method on several "dead" GA boards with good results.

When it didn't I would re-flash the bios. POST loop means the board is trying to initialize something and failing. In the case of all gigabyte z77 boards exhibiting this behavior (any model) it's ram. I verified this with a pci diagnostic card. My x79 had dual bios, and instead of looping it would reboot, post and display "overclocking failed!" and restore cmos defaults

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-14, 23:19:

The P4P800-X/Deluxe/VM series has issues writing or reading from EEPROM using the stock winbond chips they come with and sometimes corrupt BIOS. Replacing the stock EEPROM with Amtel chips I got on ebay fixed my boards as they started dying one by one. They do make exceptional boards as well, but only later generations

So that's why I kept getting dead P4P800 boards left and right 🤣, now it makes sense.

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 19:57:

HanSolo wrote on 2022-05-14, 17:32:

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-05-14, 15:34:

Well tell that to ppl that think Compaq, Dimond, Elsa, Creative, Number 9, MatroX and others high quality cards, are same like UNDERdog garbage ones such as Super, Axle and whatever NOname you can think of, as they are not clearly...

I still don't get how you define 'high quality'. What are your objective criteria?

So you and the rest that claim, there is no difference.. [...]

I did not claim anything. That was my first post on that topic and I simply wanted to know how you define quality since you mention that constantly.

In my opinion you are mixing up several things but I'm not interested in disputing other people's world views if they don't affect me 😀

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-14, 23:19:

The P4P800-X/Deluxe/VM series has issues writing or reading from EEPROM using the stock winbond chips they come with and sometimes corrupt BIOS. Replacing the stock EEPROM with Amtel chips I got on ebay fixed my boards as they started dying one by one. They do make exceptional boards as well, but only later generations.

Now that was really interesting!
Any more specific hints on which chips these are/exactly where to find them Amtel chips perhaps ?
(as I have no idea what to search for... 😊 )

bestemor wrote on 2022-05-16, 21:49:

Now that was really interesting! Any more specific hints on which chips these are/exactly where to find them Amtel chips perhap […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-14, 23:19:

The P4P800-X/Deluxe/VM series has issues writing or reading from EEPROM using the stock winbond chips they come with and sometimes corrupt BIOS. Replacing the stock EEPROM with Amtel chips I got on ebay fixed my boards as they started dying one by one. They do make exceptional boards as well, but only later generations.

Now that was really interesting!
Any more specific hints on which chips these are/exactly where to find them Amtel chips perhaps ?
(as I have no idea what to search for... 😊 )

I thought Socket3 meant Atmel. I never heard of Amtel.

Me neither... 😆
Hence the need for some more info.

Amtel, winbond etc are chip makers.

I have not heard of Amtel making sockets.

Cheers,

Even Google thinks you mean Atmel when I google Amtel EEPROM 😀

I don't think anyone suggested they make sockets. Socket3 is the member we were replying to

debs3759 wrote on 2022-05-16, 21:55:

bestemor wrote on 2022-05-16, 21:49:

Now that was really interesting! Any more specific hints on which chips these are/exactly where to find them Amtel chips perhap […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2022-05-14, 23:19:

The P4P800-X/Deluxe/VM series has issues writing or reading from EEPROM using the stock winbond chips they come with and sometimes corrupt BIOS. Replacing the stock EEPROM with Amtel chips I got on ebay fixed my boards as they started dying one by one. They do make exceptional boards as well, but only later generations.

Now that was really interesting!
Any more specific hints on which chips these are/exactly where to find them Amtel chips perhaps ?
(as I have no idea what to search for... 😊 )

I thought Socket3 meant Atmel. I never heard of Amtel.

yea, i mistyped

Happy owner of a FX 5900 Ultra! 😁

Very nice addition for occasional use in an athlon xp multiboot system.

Got myself a set of cheapo speakers for testing purposes. It was said to be a backup and left mostly unused. The audio quality is serviceable at best, it'll be alright for the purpose. No discoloration, but judging by the smell the previous owners were chain smokers. I'd leave it on the balcony for the night if the weather wasn't rainy.

99p eBay win, no detail at all apart from "3x old graphics cards 1x sound card 1x ethernet card 1x USB card 1x processor. Untested." Let's see what it all is when it turns up!