So my 2 "untested" motherboard arrived today:
I was quite worried because another member had pointed out that it looked like they had been worked on before. The seller is indeed selling of bucketloads of old "untested" gear so could possibly be returns or broken parts from and old IT company...
I tried the interesting one first and sure enough it was dead. Only went through 2 or 3 post codes then stopped. Something about "cache or memory count".
I took 1 of the included sticks out and it did the same. However when I swapped it into the other slot we got much further with the posting!
It was now stopping on "init display" but it was actually outputting a blank screen to my monitor now.. I tried a few things before thinking that if it had memory issues before, and the display uses that memory also then perhaps a different stick would sort it out...
Great success!!
Oh and during the fault finding I did have to peek under the heatsink to see what I was dealing with. I wast thinking P100 or similar as I could only see the ceramic edge but:
That will do nicely! 😀
Going to try and grab one of those NOS Biege MATX cases and make a nice little MATX win95/DOS machine.(Although installing 98 on it now for stress testing)
The other board actually worked straight after a bios reset. Generic intel board with a 1.8ghz P4 CPU.