Don't know about the P5A but I read a few years ago that alot of Socket 7 boards had lower wattage than needed to the AGP port. Something like 5amp vs. 6amp regulators.

Back then I had a FIC 503+ board and a AGP Monster Fusion setup with no issue but dumped that quickly for a Abit BE6-II and a Celeron 366@550.

Auzner wrote:

Google "Asus P5A power issue" and there are 105k results which primarily discuss AGP problems back in 2000-2002. Looks like it may never work, the board has a design flaw and cannot provide proper in-spec power.

There seem to be sooo many issues with this board indeed and most of them are power and AGP issues. I can imagine a geforce 4mx460 can draw too much power but the rage 128pro is even worse. It won't even complete a 3Dmark2000 benchmark while the geforce4mx card does when i use the ALI AGP utility and set everything to "safe" (AGP 1x mode and fastwrite disabled) but the ATI card still locks up even with these settings.
I don't mind using the voodoo card but i do mind the fact that this board is so extremely picky , maybe i should get another mainboard 😕 😵

I have any more updates i'll post them here , tonight i will try a couple more things but when those things also don't work i give up and stick with voodoo3.

Auzner wrote:

Google "Asus P5A power issue" and there are 105k results which primarily discuss AGP problems back in 2000-2002. Looks like it may never work, the board has a design flaw and cannot provide proper in-spec power.

Google ANY motherboard and even more hits will come up. In my search it came up with 40k hits for the P5A when searching for "Asus P5A power issue" , 37k when changing ''p5a'' into ''p2b'' and 110k after changing ''P2B'' into Asus ''P3B-F''. Please don't spread bullshit...

I have over 15 ss7 boards and had about 10+ more that i sold off. The P5A, GA-5AX, AX59Pro are about the best boards you can get for super socket 7. Yes, there were many agp problems early on but later drivers fixed almost all the agp issues on all these boards. Some cards (like my gf2 Ti) can be less compatible but overall all my tested cards work great (i have almost every Nvidia series agp card tested on these boards, from riva128 to geforce 5).

There are some ss7 boards (like early fic pa-2013 boards) that had linear voltage regulators for agp, they could not handle cards like v3-3000 and could even burn out. The P5A is not one of them.

Please don't talk about ''so many design flaws'' when you know nothing about it and just look at the ''105k google hits''. The only ''flaw'' on the P5A and P5A-B is the fact that they do not support k6+ MOBILE cpu's on boards with revision 1.05 or higher (Lower versions do not have an issue).

My favorite P5A is working fine with a GF2 GTS and v2 sli setup, with a k6-3+ clocked at 550mhz.

meljor wrote:

Google ANY motherboard and even more hits will come up. In my search it came up with 40k hits for the P5A when searching for "As […]
Show full quote

Google ANY motherboard and even more hits will come up. In my search it came up with 40k hits for the P5A when searching for "Asus P5A power issue" , 37k when changing ''p5a'' into ''p2b'' and 110k after changing ''P2B'' into Asus ''P3B-F''. Please don't spread bullshit...

I have over 15 ss7 boards and had about 10+ more that i sold off. The P5A, GA-5AX, AX59Pro are about the best boards you can get for super socket 7. Yes, there were many agp problems early on but later drivers fixed almost all the agp issues on all these boards. Some cards (like my gf2 Ti) can be less compatible but overall all my tested cards work great (i have almost every Nvidia series agp card tested on these boards, from riva128 to geforce 5).

There are some ss7 boards (like early fic pa-2013 boards) that had linear voltage regulators for agp, they could not handle cards like v3-3000 and could even burn out. The P5A is not one of them.

Please don't talk about ''so many design flaws'' when you know nothing about it and just look at the ''105k google hits''. The only ''flaw'' on the P5A and P5A-B is the fact that they do not support k6+ MOBILE cpu's on boards with revision 1.05 or higher (Lower versions do not have an issue).

My favorite P5A is working fine with a GF2 GTS and v2 sli setup, with a k6-3+ clocked at 550mhz.

First of all, calm down dude.

Ok, now that we have counter anecdotes, what is the solution here? Give Oldtech one of your AGP video cards?

Auzner wrote:

If you have solder and reflow equipment a weekend could be spent modding the board.

My suggestion was going to say see what pin compatible vregs can be swapped in for a better power system. But that's a lot of work too. What are the parts? I have not seen a sharp enough photo.

I have now officially given up. The ATI rage 128 pro wasn't able to finish even 1 run of 3dmark2000 and i've tried litterally every bios setting, software version and chipset driver i could find. I litteray spent 8 hours or so on this. checked every jumper setting, memtested the ram, reinstalled windows98 like 10 times, tried every possible driver... i'm at a loss.

The geforce 4 MX460 did somewhat work after i used driver 40.71 and setting pci latency timer in the bios to 32 instead of 0 but it still didn't finish 3dmark2001 (it did finish 3dmark2000 and i can now run games) but all later drivers either just wrecked my windows installation or didnt allow me to use 3d applications. I also found that 2 of the 5 memory sticks i had were faulty when i ran memtest so i replaced those but unfortunately that didnt solve anything.

From what i've seen the speed difference between the GF and voodoo card isn't that big, in some games the voodoo card is better (UT in glide mode for example) , in others like GTA3 the GF is a little bit faster . Tte ati rage was terribly slow but that could be the incompatibility of it all.

So in theory i could use the geforce card since it does run now but i still feel it doesnt run as it should so for now i'll stick to the voodoo card.

edit: Wtf, i just put the voodoo card back in and now that also freezes the system, even when installing win98. When i look at the bios i see the 12v voltage line at 12,9v and sometimes jumping to 13v , could it be that some capacitor on the mainboard is dead and that makes the system so unstable??

Oldtech81 wrote:

edit: Wtf, i just put the voodoo card back in and now that also freezes the system, even when installing win98. When i look at the bios i see the 12v voltage line at 12,9v and sometimes jumping to 13v , could it be that some capacitor on the mainboard is dead and that makes the system so unstable??

This is a sign that the 3.3V/5V rail is on it's last leg and is being overloaded. Are the 3.3V-5V ratings showing OK?
Might be time to try a different PSU

3.3 and 5v are spot on. I've already tried a different PSU but that didnt resolve the stability issues.

At the moment i have the voodoo 3 installed and even in win98 it sometimes freezes while everything seems to be ok. Hdd is new (SSD), ram is ok, bios settings are ok, windows installation is clean, latest drivers etc.
i start to suspect the mainboard or cpu is running on its last legs.

FYI: With the GA-6BXC slot 1 motherboard there was a revision which added the 'Voodoo Jumpers'. Without these jumpers the AGP had its own VRM and that VRM could not supply enough current for a Voodoo 3. With these jumpers bridged the 3,3V rail of the PSU got directly connected to the AGP slot, and a Voodoo 3 could be used. Just to illustrate: When an onboard VRM is used for the AGP slot, the PSU rating is not the bottleneck.

@Auzner: You missed my point completely. It was not about the amount of hits, it was about the fact that Google will always give you a crazy amount of hits, nomatter which board or even which subject. Other well known good boards like the p3b-f get even more hits.

Let me give you a hint here: after page 2 the subject already changes and sure you can still find some pages about the board but most will not be about what you exactly searched for... nomatter what you search on google, if you can't find it on the 1st page your changes are getting rapidly slimmer of finding what you search for.

If you like a good opinion about something then read multiple forums/reviews and talk to people that really had hand-on experiences, after this you can draw your conclusions and STILL it might not be valid. But with putting nonsense on this forum you are not making it easier for the next guy that needs information.

To the real problem here: I have several P5A's and P5A-B's and do not recognise these problems. My guess is the board is damaged somehow or needs a recap. Something more simple like exchanging ram, cpu, videocard and psu should be tried first ofcourse.

meljor wrote:

@Auzner: You missed my point completely. It was not about the amount of hits, it was about the fact that Google will always give […]
Show full quote

@Auzner: You missed my point completely. It was not about the amount of hits, it was about the fact that Google will always give you a crazy amount of hits, nomatter which board or even which subject. Other well known good boards like the p3b-f get even more hits.

Let me give you a hint here: after page 2 the subject already changes and sure you can still find some pages about the board but most will not be about what you exactly searched for... nomatter what you search on google, if you can't find it on the 1st page your changes are getting rapidly slimmer of finding what you search for.

If you like a good opinion about something then read multiple forums/reviews and talk to people that really had hand-on experiences, after this you can draw your conclusions and STILL it might not be valid. But with putting nonsense on this forum you are not making it easier for the next guy that needs information.

To the real problem here: I have several P5A's and P5A-B's and do not recognise these problems. My guess is the board is damaged somehow or needs a recap. Something more simple like exchanging ram, cpu, videocard and psu should be tried first ofcourse.

You're really fucking rude and most of that was tried on page 1. Glad your copy of the board works with AGP cards of no specifically mentioned models.

Auzner wrote:

meljor wrote:

@Auzner: You missed my point completely. It was not about the amount of hits, it was about the fact that Google will always give […]
Show full quote

@Auzner: You missed my point completely. It was not about the amount of hits, it was about the fact that Google will always give you a crazy amount of hits, nomatter which board or even which subject. Other well known good boards like the p3b-f get even more hits.

Let me give you a hint here: after page 2 the subject already changes and sure you can still find some pages about the board but most will not be about what you exactly searched for... nomatter what you search on google, if you can't find it on the 1st page your changes are getting rapidly slimmer of finding what you search for.

If you like a good opinion about something then read multiple forums/reviews and talk to people that really had hand-on experiences, after this you can draw your conclusions and STILL it might not be valid. But with putting nonsense on this forum you are not making it easier for the next guy that needs information.

To the real problem here: I have several P5A's and P5A-B's and do not recognise these problems. My guess is the board is damaged somehow or needs a recap. Something more simple like exchanging ram, cpu, videocard and psu should be tried first ofcourse.

You're really fucking rude and most of that was tried on page 1. Glad your copy of the board works with AGP cards of no specifically mentioned models.

No, he's not really fucking rude. He even shared his own findings with Oldtech81 even though he has totally no obligation to do so.
I'd tend to agree with Meljor about good opinions. The real deal >>>>> a google search.
And google search is a whole different topic by itself 😵

Oldtech81 wrote:

3.3 and 5v are spot on. I've already tried a different PSU but that didnt resolve the stability issues.

At the moment i have the voodoo 3 installed and even in win98 it sometimes freezes while everything seems to be ok. Hdd is new (SSD), ram is ok, bios settings are ok, windows installation is clean, latest drivers etc.
i start to suspect the mainboard or cpu is running on its last legs.

What happens if you use a PCI graphics card? Ideal would be if you could exchange the V3-3000 AGP for a V3 3000 PCI, but you may not have all these laying around.

Tetrium wrote:

No, he's not really fucking rude. He even shared his own findings with Oldtech81 even though he has totally no obligation to do so.
I'd tend to agree with Meljor about good opinions. The real deal >>>>> a google search.
And google search is a whole different topic by itself 😵

You're both threadshitting.

I was being hyperbolic about the results because I had already read into several forums of folks discussing power issues. There must be some figurehead or meme event I missed out on somewhere to make this such a big deal. I "missed the point" because one was never made, there were just contrary numbers posted concluded with I'm bullshitting. And yes, it is rude, to call someone full of shit, tell them they know nothing, and that they make things difficult. Do you want to teach and help people, or tell them they're worthless, and proceed to talk about your own toys in a very generalist fashion?

* Good opinions are not fact-based knowledge for troubleshooting technical issues
* "Recap"--that's a 'cannot ever be right or wrong' deus ex machina answer
* P5A works well with the right drivers. Ok which drivers? Do you have a GF4 MX460 AGP to try or a card known to be a similar PCB and component layout or power draw? GF2 Ti is not the same. Riva128 is not the same. While we are nitpicking numbers, "GeForce 5" is incorrect and is actually called "GeForce FX."
* P5A does not have AGP power problems. Ok, what is the power system on it? How is it delivered?
* We're talking about power and vregs of other boards, share the IC part numbers or upload high res photos of the regions
* I'd argue that on forums, corrected non-sense is more valuable than multi-paragraph diatribes

Auzner wrote:

Google "Asus P5A power issue" and there are 105k results which primarily discuss AGP problems back in 2000-2002. Looks like it may never work, the board has a design flaw and cannot provide proper in-spec power.

Before posting this I had skimmed quite a few discussion boards. Because I did not divulge details of that, I've apparently caused an upset as I did not mean to be taken absolutely literal. So here are some of the links to peruse. And I should have said "may never work in its current state," because my follow up post was a suggestion to mod the board. Which I would be glad to offer more advice on otherwise I would have not brought it up.

http://www.sharkyforums.com/showthread.php?63 … Asus-P5A-series
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/asus-p5a … ith-agp.696490/
Re: Asus P5A AGP Questions
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/112156-30-asus-problems
https://www.pcper.com/news/Motherboards/Hardw … shback-Asus-P5A
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.c … sus/GTv8IwyBi9I
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread … us-P5A-B-please
http://www.sysopt.com/showthread.php?48198-As … A-B-AGP-Problem
https://forums.techguy.org/threads/asus-p5a-a … problem.104577/
http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/threads/1 … sa-Erazor-3-Pro

Auzner wrote:

You're both threadshitting. […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote:

No, he's not really fucking rude. He even shared his own findings with Oldtech81 even though he has totally no obligation to do so.
I'd tend to agree with Meljor about good opinions. The real deal >>>>> a google search.
And google search is a whole different topic by itself 😵

You're both threadshitting.

I was being hyperbolic about the results because I had already read into several forums of folks discussing power issues. There must be some figurehead or meme event I missed out on somewhere to make this such a big deal. I "missed the point" because one was never made, there were just contrary numbers posted concluded with I'm bullshitting. And yes, it is rude, to call someone full of shit, tell them they know nothing, and that they make things difficult. Do you want to teach and help people, or tell them they're worthless, and proceed to talk about your own toys in a very generalist fashion?

* Good opinions are not fact-based knowledge for troubleshooting technical issues
* "Recap"--that's a 'cannot ever be right or wrong' deus ex machina answer
* P5A works well with the right drivers. Ok which drivers? Do you have a GF4 MX460 AGP to try or a card known to be a similar PCB and component layout or power draw? GF2 Ti is not the same. Riva128 is not the same. While we are nitpicking numbers, "GeForce 5" is incorrect and is actually called "GeForce FX."
* P5A does not have AGP power problems. Ok, what is the power system on it? How is it delivered?
* We're talking about power and vregs of other boards, share the IC part numbers or upload high res photos of the regions
* I'd argue that on forums, corrected non-sense is more valuable than multi-paragraph diatribes

Auzner wrote:

Google "Asus P5A power issue" and there are 105k results which primarily discuss AGP problems back in 2000-2002. Looks like it may never work, the board has a design flaw and cannot provide proper in-spec power.

Before posting this I had skimmed quite a few discussion boards. Because I did not divulge details of that, I've apparently caused an upset as I did not mean to be taken absolutely literal. So here are some of the links to peruse. And I should have said "may never work in its current state," because my follow up post was a suggestion to mod the board. Which I would be glad to offer more advice on otherwise I would have not brought it up.

http://www.sharkyforums.com/showthread.php?63 … Asus-P5A-series
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/asus-p5a … ith-agp.696490/
Re: Asus P5A AGP Questions
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/112156-30-asus-problems
https://www.pcper.com/news/Motherboards/Hardw … shback-Asus-P5A
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.c … sus/GTv8IwyBi9I
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread … us-P5A-B-please
http://www.sysopt.com/showthread.php?48198-As … A-B-AGP-Problem
https://forums.techguy.org/threads/asus-p5a-a … problem.104577/
http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/threads/1 … sa-Erazor-3-Pro

He didn't call someone full of shit, he never said that you knew nothing, he is not thread-shitting (I actually had to look this one up) and neither am I.
I'd suggest you don't use so many hyperboles since this seems to be the cause of your confusion and you stop accusing people who are trying to be constructive here. Meljor was correct about the google thingy and you were not. Everybody makes mistakes and the point is to learn from them 😀
Without the ability to learn from mistakes, this whole tinkering with old parts would've not existed here in the first place 🤣

If you want to point out flaws in the information Meljor is providing, then please do so by pointing out the facts instead of fabricating suggestive accusations (or hyperboling them).

If we want to know if the old AGP power supply is the main issue here, we will need (for instance) good pics of the board in question so we can rule more stuff out. It may work with his board, it may not work with his board and reading a million google search results will probably yield less info then actually having a look at the board itself. Some people circumvent these AGP problems altogether by using a PCI graphics card.

Apologies for only skimming. My big question is - does the 3.3V AGP slot actually run off the 3.3V rail, or does it take 5V or 12V and generate 3.3 with an onboard VRM?

Gerwin touched on this a bit - I also have Slot 1 board that derives 3.3V from the 5V rail. As this is SS7 (and therefore, of the time) - it is quite possible that 3.3V is derived from a VRM hooked up to the +5V or +12V rail.

This being the case - putting the beefiest power supply ever created won't make any difference because the draw in the AGP slot is going to be limited by the 3.3V VRM on the board.

Tetrium wrote:

Oldtech81 wrote:

3.3 and 5v are spot on. I've already tried a different PSU but that didnt resolve the stability issues.

At the moment i have the voodoo 3 installed and even in win98 it sometimes freezes while everything seems to be ok. Hdd is new (SSD), ram is ok, bios settings are ok, windows installation is clean, latest drivers etc.
i start to suspect the mainboard or cpu is running on its last legs.

What happens if you use a PCI graphics card? Ideal would be if you could exchange the V3-3000 AGP for a V3 3000 PCI, but you may not have all these laying around.

In fact i don't have any PCI video cards but the system is now stable with the voodoo3 , don't know what caused the freeze i had before with the voodoo card because its now gone. Other 2 cards are still not working 100% but i'll just leave it since the ati card performs worse and the gf card is clearly bottlenecked by the CPU so no real gains here. Might do a recap of the board some day to see if that fixes things or just get another board .

Not even trying to be rude, no need for that.

It's the '' Looks like it may never work, the board has a design flaw and cannot provide proper in-spec power'' part and the part about the enormous amount of hits that i was not ok with.
Your correction makes it a lot better.

The ''recap'' option is a ''last resort'' one and hopefully the problem is much easier to solve. But these boards are getting old and caps have to be replaced more and more... it becomes part of this hobby i guess.

The right drivers for the P5A? Agp driver 1.72 and up have giving me great results, older ones can be unstable. Also Nvidia drivers 7.xx and higher should be fine.

The reason i'm beeing firm about the fact that the P5A does not have agp power problems: I did many benchmarks (games and 3dmark) with this board and tested out many of my Nvidia agp cards at the time, later comparing results to Matrox and 3DFX as well.

Benchmarked: TNT1, TNT2 ultra, Geforce 2MX, Geforce2 GTS, Geforce2 Ti, Geforce3 Ti 200 and Ti 500, Geforce4 MX440 and MX460 (medion version), Geforce4 ti4200 and 4600 and Geforce FX5200, FX5500 and FX5950. Also used in those tests were: Matrox G200 and G400max, 3DFX voodoo1, banshee, v2, v3, v4 and voodoo5.

Now, all of these cards behaved perfectly fine except for an ASUS GF2 Ti that locked up nomatter what i tried but works fine on a p3b-f system.

So i like to think that i did my fair share of testing with these boards to have an opinion (also did a lot on the P5A-B version).

I am not saying these boards can not give troubles or are perfect, just saying that they should be able to run most of the agp cards stable enough.

CkRtech wrote:

Apologies for only skimming. My big question is - does the 3.3V AGP slot actually run off the 3.3V rail, or does it take 5V or 12V and generate 3.3 with an onboard VRM?

Gerwin touched on this a bit - I also have Slot 1 board that derives 3.3V from the 5V rail. As this is SS7 (and therefore, of the time) - it is quite possible that 3.3V is derived from a VRM hooked up to the +5V or +12V rail.

This being the case - putting the beefiest power supply ever created won't make any difference because the draw in the AGP slot is going to be limited by the 3.3V VRM on the board.

I just measured it on a P5A rev1.04 motherboard, and compared it with an AGP slot pinout.
Voltage Regulator Q5 near the VID jumpers is the one connected to AGP contacts 9a/9b "VCC 3.3". The 3,3 Volt points of the ATX connector do not go to contacts 9a/9b "VCC 3.3". The PSU 3,3V rail does NOT supply 3,3V to the AGP card.

gerwin wrote:

The PSU 3,3V rail does NOT supply 3,3V to the AGP card.

That's per the AGP spec.

What is the part number on that chip (U14/Q5)?

I made a picture of it, as the VRM next to it may also be involved.