Update (for documenting purposes):
First of all - a recap: the title of this thread is misleading. What first looked as faulty bios turned out to be the wrong bios flashed on an eeprom with insufficent ram. After that was settled, bios settings couldn't be saved and the problem lied somewhere between the battery and the vbat pin on the southbridge chip. Probably beneath it!

I got a new identical board from ebay, but wanted to use this faulty board as a practice board for repairing. Got myself one of those Andonstar microscopes and some ChipQuik low-melt solder and started removing the southbrige (vt82c586b). Not exactly easy as a first step, but I removed it eventually. Unfortunately, I broke one of the pins in the process. I have ordered a new one.

The culprit was immediately visible - a corroded via trace on the 3v line from the battery that needed fixing using a single strand of copper wire. Now there's continuity all the way from the battery to the vt82c586b southbridge chip!

Still to early to tell if it's been completely fixed until I got the replacement chip, but I'm not giving up. I've spent too much money on it already! 😀

There are a number of SS7 motherboards where a later BIOS update required replacing the original 128k EEPROM with a 256k one (if you look at Jan Steunebrink's page you'll see several where this is the case) so that's most likely what happened with yours.

This board had a 256k eeprom from the start, at least when looking at all the available bios versions from 1.0 and onwards. There was a 128k eeprom installed with a bios of another board ID.

I'm guessing the mobo failed some time ago (the corroded trace), someone tried to fix it and installed another eeprom in the process.

Cyanopsis,

I came in here looking for some info about this QDI board running K6 2/3"+" series CPU's and boy... what a read! You are resilient with your efforts.

Did you ever get in the new chip and get the board working?

I am wondering, I have the same board and am having issues getting the "+" series CPU's to work.
Do you have any experience/luck with getting them to work on yours? If so, what BIOS did you run?

I'm on steunebrink's V3.0SL.
PC will boot with my 2+ in it and say "new CPU installed. Pres Del to enter BIOS or any key to continue"
If I try to change any of the CPU settings (multi/voltage) and save/restart, the voltage regulator (C120) gets blazing hot and the PC won't start.
I end up having to place a K6 2 non-plus in to get it going again.
However, if I don't change any settings and "continue" the PC starts with a new message of "Now the system is running at the safe speed" (6 x 60fsb @ 360mhz cpu).
It'll get into windows and run... but the moment it has to restart, same issue.

Cheers