First post, by AngieAndretti
I saved this Asus P5A v.1.06 board from eWaste. The original CPU that was installed was a K6-2 550. I also tried the board with a known-good K6-2 450.
The PC boots 98SE reliably but it cannot complete a 3DMark 2000 benchmark, always crashing out at some point with an error that some random 3DMark file is corrupted.
I tried the board with a Pentium MMX 233 and it's rock-solid; It can loop for hours. I also overclocked the Pentium to 100x3 and it's still rock-solid.
I underclocked the K6-2 450 to 300MHz, same frequency as what works with the Pentium; Still crashes. The only setting that differs when swapping between the two CPU's now is the VCORE (2.3v vs 2.8v) but one works and the other crashes the benchmark.
I've now re-capped the whole board and the results haven't changed. Still works fine w/ 300MHz Pentium and crashes w/ 300MHz K6-2.
Oh, and the board has the latest BIOS available, which does support all CPU's tested.
This is now a real head-scratcher for me at this point. What should I try next?