Sounds like a shorting/grounding issue - does the original case have appropriately tall standoffs installed?

I think the brass standoffs are shorter than the built in raised aluminum ones that are part of the case. Not by much mind you, so they are getting unscrewed and I will just use the built in ones to see if that fixes it. Slightly less secure but o well. This has been a good test of my patience the past couple hot days at least!

Going to set it up on a cardboard box just long enough to get 98se loaded up and some benchmarks ran. Pretty sure at this point that the board is damaged in some way inside. 10+ years of bad caps will do that I guess 🙁 inconsistent fan twitches, random lack of response whatsoever, then boots into the bios at random no problem.

After a full month of battling this board, this project is not feasible. Will continue to build up a p4 cpu library and grab another P4S Dragon to finish this, for now I need to give up on it before the motherboard kills me. Sorry everybody

Hi!

You might find my other thread about low Voodoo 2 SLI performance on P4 systems interesting. I'm working on a paper about V2 SLI scaling and had lots of issues with the P4.

It really seems that V2 (and maybe V3) isn't meant for P4. I had zero issues with Super Socket 7, Slot 1 and S370 platform.

My tests showed that only a 3.2 GHz P4 is able to, in only a few benchmarks to distance itself from a P3 Tualatin 1400. This was really only the case in Unreal. In many other CPU limited situations the Tualatin was not able to be matched.

A Slot 1 machine with a S370 adapter and a fast (899, 900 or 1000 MHz) Coppermine is a serious V2 SLI beast. Once you go beyond 800 x 600 everything is limited by V2 cards anyway.

This is a totally random suggestion, but make sure one of the silver barrel shaped clock crystal things doesn't have it's legs twisted so they can touch each other.
My P4S Dragon was doing that no-boot, fan twitch behavior, and this turned out to be the reason. I had the thing for like a year before I noticed it.
Last ditch idea, take out the battery and try washing the board. Maybe there's some conductive debris somewhere. Obviously it needs to dry 100% thoroughly before you hook power back up to it.

Thank you Mau1wurf! Interesting thread indeed. It seems to me from reading lots of posts around here that the 1.4ghz Tualatin is the ultimate Voodoo platform when paired with a slocketed BX board.
shamino: Good suggestions! I lack a dishwasher, would just running it under water do fine? I have always been hesitant and paranoid with washing electronics. This board has over 88,000 power on hours under it's belt and ran for years with an entire line of popped cpu caps. As long as it boots into the bios every now and then I just can not help but continue to try to get it working.

Well if you use a BX440 you would be overclocking the FSB quite hard. Personally I would go for a 815 chipset board.

For BX440 a 100 MHz FSB Coppermine does just fine. A 700 or 800 MHz model should be more than enough 😀

Using a BX board with 133mhz fsb results in a 89mhz agp bus speed..... it is stressing the board but the graphics card even more. Not every card likes it or can handle it.

And not every BX board can handle the lower voltage of the tualatin correctly so it may overvolt it a bit too. Lots of these combo`s work stable (Asus P3B-F is a good candidate) but the easiest and most trouble free way is to use a Tualatin board imho.

Only reason to have more cpu power is maybe a voodoo 5, voodoo2 sli and voodoo3 runs perfect on a BX board around 600mhz. When 600-800mhz is to slow for a game, the v2 sli/v3 will probably be too slow also...

Ah ok, makes sense. Would you happen to have any experience overclocking slocketed celerons? Will they run stably at 100mhz fsb speed? I think im going to end up giving my buddy the v3 to go with his BX rig. Along with an Aopen slocket w/533mhz celeron. At this point everything I have is agp 4x + or pre-agp. Socket 7 in particular REALLY hates me.

ODwilly wrote:

I lack a dishwasher, would just running it under water do fine? I have always been hesitant and paranoid with washing electronics. This board has over 88,000 power on hours under it's belt and ran for years with an entire line of popped cpu caps. As long as it boots into the bios every now and then I just can not help but continue to try to get it working.

Just running it under water should work fine. Dishwashers worry me, so I've just used a sink or shower. It's preferred to use distilled water or alcohol (higher concentration is better), but many times I've just used tap water and it was fine. I've sometimes soaked a board in "simple green" before rinsing, but I'm not sure how useful that is. I can understand the hesitation, it's easier to do with boards you don't care much about. 😀
Bad capacitors can cause stress on other components, so it's possible the board has suffered from that, but I'm not sure this behavior can be explained by that.

After a fan twitch, does the PSU have to be unplugged to reset it? If so, something is definitely shorting. The PSU is shutting itself off to prevent an overload. If that's the case, look in all the PCI slots, etc and see if you notice any debris. Also make sure there aren't any pins bent or anything touching that shouldn't be. Since it's intermittent, it would have to be something subtle.

At times it does require the PSU to be unplugged to reset. Other times it will be unplugged/plugged back in and not even have a fan twitch. I think I will try out the alcohol, as our tap water is high in all sorts of minerals. Thank you for the advice, I had just about written this board off for dead. Watch it be a stray cat hair from my long haired Himalayan Siamese mix xD

shamino wrote:

I can understand the hesitation, it's easier to do with boards you have lots of spare backups for

There ftfy 😁

Update: Cleaned the board, seems to be ok now. Ran into another problem, Voodoo 3 is a STB systems card. It checked out great a month back in this very board, been sitting on a shelf in an anti-static bag since then. Plug it in to the Soyo, boot it up and there is a Orange screen! After 3 seconds the bios comes up and there is a really subtle greying of white letters in a kinda pattern. Tested a GF2, it comes up fine. Did my Voodoo just die or what?