First post, by neonblurb
I recently built a Pentium III Slot 1 machine which went through a number of upgrades, after which I found the system was running really poorly and would not stay up for longer than a few minutes at a time. Through a gradual process of elimination, I managed to figure out that the issue was to do with the Slotket adapter I was using, an MS6905 Ver 2. Swapping it for an Asus S370-DL completely fixed all the issues I was having, but I'd like to see if anyone in the community has seen something similar to my experience so I can try to figure out what went wrong with the MSI slotket and learn fromshare my experience with this kind of issue.
My basic setup:
- Asus P3V4X motherboard running latest official 1006.004 BIOS (not the oezmen modified one)
- Pentium III 1000 EB (Coppermine) SL52R running through slotket
- 1 GB PC133 RAM (2x 512MB)
- CF to IDE adapter
- GeForce FX 5200 AGP
After mixing and matching components, I found that the system was much more stable after swapping the RAM for a set of 3x 128MB PC100 sticks I used with a prior 440BX build whether I ran these at 100 or 133, but I was still having severe instability. I was at least able to get XP to install this way and get the system to boot after a couple of attempts, but shortly afterwards it would hang.
The glitches I was seeing were mostly:
- File access related glitches - the system would fail to read files from known good media (e.g. Windows XP install CD which had worked in the same drive in the past)
- Errors extracting known good ZIP or RAR archives - the program would claim a specific file in the archive was corrupt, always the same one, although this archive was known to be good
- Hanging after a certain amount of file access attempts - the system would still be running, the mouse cursor would move, etc. but absolutely no disk access would happen often leading to minor file system corruption after a reboot
I did try switching the CPU as well for a second SL52R I had, which gave exactly the same issues, so I think it's very unlikely it was just a bad CPU in this csae. Switching to a standard Slot 1 PIII 550MHz (Katmai SL3FJ) after this gave me a completely stable system which was what finally confirmed to me that it was the slotket. Other things I tried in addition to switching the RAM: I tried a number of different AGP video cards including S3, 3dfx and later GeForce models, I also ran with no other cards installed in the system and also tried using a number of different CF cards from different manufacturers, types and sizes. I even tried swapping my 235W power supply for a newer 500w Thermaltake unit. Another oddity was that the system would be basically stable under DOS and would never hang prior to Windows starting up in the boot sequence -the hangs would only happen under Windows XP. Memtest ran through perfectly well on the 1 GB of RAM, and the system was stable throughout the long testing cycle.
In terms of the slotket itself, I'm fairly confident the jumpers were set correctly for my CPU (everything on Auto basically) although the only instructions I could find were for the 2.3 revision, while I have a 2.0. Everything looked fine in BIOS: CPU was being detected fine, I was getting a reasonable thermal diode reading, I was able to set the frequency, and it was picking up and running at the correct voltage (1.75V). I did try overvolting slightly to 1.8V to see if it would improve stability at all, but saw no change. I also flipped pretty much every setting in the BIOS to the most conservative value but it made no difference, and I was having the same issues with an earlier BIOS revision. I suspect the particular version of the slotket I was using was just not stable with higher clocked/later Coppermine models running at 133 MHz, although I wasn't able to find anything to that effect online.
My questions to anyone who might have experienced something similar are:
- What might be causing the underlying instability?
- Why would it have improved after swapping out the RAM?
I'm just hoping to learn from this and maybe pass on my experience in case anyone else is having or has had a similar issue.
Thanks!
