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Help! Dual slot 2 Xeon won't power-up with dual 2.8 V Cascade PIII's installed

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First post, by feipoa

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Has anyone run into this issue before? I'm testing a Dell Precision Workstation 610 motherboard, which is a dual slot 2, 440GX motherboard. The motherboard has jumper settings officially up to 550 MHz, though two reserved jumpers support 600 and 650 MHz.

If I install a pair of 450/512K 2.0 V PII Xeons (Tanners), the system works fine. If I install a pair of 700/2M or 700/1M 2.8 V PIII Xeons (Cascades), the screen stays blank at power-on. Doesn't matter if I have the jumper set for 450 or 650 MHz. If I install a single 700/2M 2.8 V Cascade and a terminator card in the second slot, the system works just fine. Note that Tanner chips are based on the Katmai core and Cascades on the Coppermine core.

Has anyone run into this before and if so how did you circumvent this problem? Is 2.8 V drawing too much current for the onboard VRMs? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_P … microprocessors , the 700/2M chips dissipate less power than the 450/512K chips.

I'm also curious why the Cascade chips request a higher voltage from the VID table compared to the Tanners, didn't the coppermine chips run at lower voltage than the Katmai's?

Lastly, I was wondering if the 900/2M chips which sport 5V/12V would work on this board? Why did Intel make the cartridges demand such a high voltage? The VID table only goes up to 3.4 V. Would there be some logic on the motherboard which switches power over to the 5V or 12V plane?

Thanks!

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 1 of 3, by Horun

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Am probably way off but the P2/P3 era is when they really started including S spec in BIOS so if a certain CPU was not in the BIOS table of supported cpu, the board would just play dead. Remember editing BIOS just to get by that that, and most OEM were way worse than retail boards for same issue.
Do not know about the voltage issues... yes am just guessing based on P2/P3 issues....

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 3, by feipoa

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But if that were the case, wouldn't even using one Cascade chip not work? One works, just not two installed simultaneously.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 3 of 3, by shamino

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I have a dual slot-2 HP Kayak (440GX), but I've never been able to attempt installing two of the 700MHz 2MB Cascades CPUs in it. I know it works fine with one.
I remember reading in an HP forum thread some posts from people who were having problems using two of them. Those old threads are deleted nowadays, but what I remember people saying was that the system was still booting but was not performing properly, like the BIOS wasn't initializing the CPUs correctly.
So I guess I can say that I have vague, indirect familiarity with a similar problem, but not exactly the same as what you're having.

As far as the voltage, I suspect the Cascades have some voltage regulation in the cartridge (even in the 2.8V models, which were maybe intended for compatibility). Not sure of that though.

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