Katmai500 wrote on 2020-08-17, 19:11:

An interesting development with BIOS P17. It seems that ONLY Pentium III Xeons work now. […]
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An interesting development with BIOS P17. It seems that ONLY Pentium III Xeons work now.

• No POST with a single Pentium II Xeon (450/512 or 450/2M)
• No POST with dual Pentium II Xeons (450/512)
• Pentium III Xeon 550/2M CPUs run at 500 MHz

Have you tried the same BIOS with your old VRM?

I looked up an Intel 697701-602 VRM on eBay:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/382465254071
and I noticed it shows these markings on the back of the PCB:
Vo 2.5V ADJ
Io: 20A

I wonder if it's the culprit in the issues you and/or red-ray are having.
Do your P2 Xeons run on 2.5V? I only saw 1 non-engineering sample entry at CPU World (which is a 1MB model) but at least some of the P2 Xeons are listed there as "2V" which I interpret to mean 2.0V.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-I ... 501M).html

Although it says "2.5V ADJ" I'm not sure that means it would really support a full range of VIDs from the CPU. By the way it's written it seems to imply it only wants to power 2.5V CPUs.
If it receives a VID that it doesn't support, it probably refuses to power the CPU. That's the usual behavior of the VRM controller chips on most slot-1 boards anyway.

However, based on this VRM working with red-ray's 550MHz 1MB, maybe I'm wrong about this.

red-ray wrote on 2020-06-19, 13:37:

I just got the same module, it works fine with my 550MHz 1MB Xeons

If it's like this one:
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-I ... 501M).html
which is listed as 2.0V, then it looks like maybe these VRMs *do* work with 2.0V CPUs. In which case my theory above wouldn't hold. I wonder what voltage it's putting out though.

but as I expected the 700MHz 1MB Xeons still fail with the 38 2F post failure.

CPU-World lists the 700MHz 1MB (and 2MB) Cascades as wanting 2.8V, while these VRMs are marked for 2.5V (in that eBay photo anyway).
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-I ... 001M).html

I'm surprised those VRMs would power it in that case, but maybe it's not achieving the required voltage to be stable.
They list the max power as 40W so the 20A spec does seem sufficient. The voltage output might be wrong though.

shamino wrote on 2020-08-20, 10:19:

CPU-World lists the 700MHz 1MB (and 2MB) Cascades as wanting 2.8V, not 2.5V. http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-III/Intel-Pen […]
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red-ray wrote on 2020-06-19, 13:37:

I just got the same module, it works fine with my 550MHz 1MB Xeons, but as I expected the 700MHz 1MB Xeons still fail with the 38 2F post failure.

CPU-World lists the 700MHz 1MB (and 2MB) Cascades as wanting 2.8V, not 2.5V.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-I ... 001M).html

I'm surprised those VRMs would power it in that case, but maybe it's not achieving the required voltage to be stable.
They list the max power as 40W so the 20A spec does seem sufficient. The voltage output might be wrong though.

No, a special BIOS is needed, see Re: My Ongoing Retro Rig Project - Xeon Prime

Katmai500 wrote on 2020-08-17, 19:11:

An interesting development with BIOS P17. It seems that ONLY Pentium III Xeons work now. […]
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Katmai500 wrote on 2019-07-05, 22:22:

Wow! Thank you. That worked perfectly and now my board supports Pentium III Xeon (Tanner) CPUs!

I also thought it would remove the 1MB L2 cache limit, but it looks like that’s still in place. 512K and 1M Xeons work fine, but 2M Xeons result in a cache disabled error. 😵

An interesting development with BIOS P17. It seems that ONLY Pentium III Xeons work now.

• No POST with a single Pentium II Xeon (450/512 or 450/2M)
• No POST with dual Pentium II Xeons (450/512)
• Pentium III Xeon 550/2M CPUs run at 500 MHz

Not being able to use PII Xeons is a disappointment. I tried flashing it again, but that didn't fix the problem. Now I need to track down an older BIOS to try to flash it back if I want to return this system to its original configuration.

Does anyone have a link to or copy of any older Gateway BIOS version?

• 7505904.exe 437 KB 6/15/99 Pentium II BIOS update 4M4SG0X0.15A.0029.P17 <- What I have now. Weird that it's even called "Pentium II BIOS Update" when it doesn't work with Pentium II Xeons
• 7505527.exe 411 KB 4/15/99 Pentium II BIOS update 4M4SG0X0.15A.0026.P15
• 7504834.exe 344 KB 12/15/98 Pentium II BIOS update 4M4SG0X0.15A.0020.P10

Sadly, don't recall ever finding any other live links to those filenames apart from the P17 one on DriverGuide.

However (and this may go nowhere!) I've been having another root around on Wayback and have come across a (Japanese) Gateway website where there are hundreds of files stored thru http rather than ftp and they have been successfully archived - problem is their naming convention is still numerical but completely different to the other Gateway site. So far I've managed to track down P17 again in the form of a self extracting floppy boot archive.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020215195631/ht … 80/00000280.exe

Problem is I can't figure an easy way to check if they kept older versions as well, as only P17 was linked thru html, but I'll keep digging just in case.

Another option might be to message this guy on Youtube who did a restoration of a Gateway GX-450XL (same motherboard) with the P10 bios - if he still has it maybe he could save you a copy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19rY-lwLIbE

Have anyone those Cascades supporting BIOS?

The Board runs but dissabled the Cache for security reason. Maybe anyone can insert the FSB100 Cascades codes to the standard Bios?

Its a bit dissapointing to have those great cpus and an Intel board dont want to work with it 😒

I got the Board with Siemens Branding. with Sound and Lan onboard

I finally managed to solve the issue I described on page 1! It wasn't a BIOS version problem at all. It was a CPU multiplier issue.

When I first installed the Pentium III Xeon 500 after upgrading to the P17 BIOS, I went into the special configuration mode of the BIOS using a jumper on the motherboard and set the CPU speed to 500 (5X multiplier). Then I must have totally forgot about this and later tried to run with a Pentium II Xeon 450, which would not POST at 500 MHz. This also explains why the 550 MHz Pentium III Xeons were only running at 500 MHz. I forgot you have to manually set the multiplier on this board! I just re-tested the Pentium II Xeon 450 and Pentium III Xeon 550 and after setting the multiplier to the correct setting for each and they both work correctly now! I got so used to automatically set multipliers from hardware of this era that I totally overlooked it.