First post, by eeJay
Hi guys,
I've been dealing with this unstable motherboard for a few days now and can't figure out what's wrong with it.
The CPU is a 486 DX2 66 Mhz (5 V).
It has a heatsink and an active fan (noisy at startup, but working) cooling it.
Installed are 2 sticks of 72 pin RAM, 8 MB each.
There are 256K of L2 cache installed and properly detected.
VGA card : Trident 8900C/CL/0 (ISA)
Sound card: Sound Blaster 16 CT 2290
Symptoms: certain games either soft crash (error notifications across the screen, larger letters, goes back to command prompt), freeze or the entire system restarts after a few minutes of playing. Or leaving the PC idling in game.
The game that displays this behavior the quickest is Tyrian 2000. The same happens with Raptor and Terminal Velocity, but maybe it takes a bit longer. Actually, Terminal Velocity also hanged during setup and I had to repeat the install about 3 times until it finished successfully.
Then again, I haven't noticed this instability with other games - Wacky Wheels, Jazz Jackrabbit. Also not with PhilComputerLabs bench games- Doom and Quake. I even played Death Rally (this machine is definitely too slow for it), and it ran fine (that is, it didn't crash).
What I've tried with no luck:
- Checked all the jumpers; they are set OK.
- Used Memtest86+ (tested with version 2.00 and 4.00), passes with no errors.
- Swapped out the RAM anyway with a single stick of 16 MB as well as 2 sticks (32 MB total) RAM.
32 MB actually made the symptoms in Tyrian even worse: this one level I started got successfully completed (end animation) within about 3 seconds after entering it. Also, there were a lot of blank screens/PC freezes in game with this memory configuration.
- Removed everything except for the Super I/O card and the video card.
- Set up a fresh DOS 6.22 installation from a SD card (bypassing the hard drive).
I would be very grateful for any ideas. I can provide photos of the motherboard in the coming days if necessary.
Thank you.