First post, by Skyscraper
Pentium Pro CPUs are NOT flat!
Im tinkering with a Intel pr440fx motherboard with two vanilla Pentium Pro 200 CPUs
Everything seemed great, the board posted at the first attempt, found both CPUs and so on.
I installed Dos 6.22 just to see that the board was working and everything went smooth.
Then I installed NT4 and things just fell apart. It took me several attempts just to get NT installed.
Random lockups, strange behavior, disks stopped working and so on.
I changed IDE-cables, disks, the PSU, memory, Video Card, added fans you name it! Still the same problems.
Then I removed the heatsink from CPU2, I had used lots of Artic Silver since the CPU is large but it diddnt cover more than a tiny part of the CPU.
I checked how flat the CPU heat spreader was with a metallic ruler, its not even close to flat.
10$ worth of Artic Silver 5 seems to have fixed the issue, I really need to get some cheap thermal paste for these kind of projects.
Several hours of hunting Gremlins just to find out that the issue was the first thing I should have checked.
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.