Hey everyone, after getting all my parts together I thought today would be good to start the build. My motherboard is a ECS P6BXT-A+ REV 1.3B (Intel 440BX chipset).

First I grabbed my Coppermine slocket adapter (no jumpers on board, automatic and supports what I have, also you can not use two CPUs at the same time on the board, just an fyi.) and then put my Pentium iii 850MHz 256MB 100MHz FSB CPU into the adapter to then insert into the slot 1 on the board.

I have the adapter because my board supports up to 550Mhz or something on the Socket 370 one but my Slot 1 can go up to 850MHz according (basically a dual board) to a chart someone showed me for my exact revision (1.3x): https://web.archive.org/web/20011222053511/ht … port_table2.htm .

Now my RAM is PC-133 256 x 2 MB 168-pin DIMM SDRAM with no ECC (dual sided chips). And my GPU is a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 AGP 128MB 8x card.

First I put the board down, plugged in the CPU and RAM (slot 1 and 2 marked) and then the GPU into the AGP slot.

I have a new PSU which is a semi-modular 550 watt 20+4 pin molex PSU by StarTech, pretty overkill but I got it cheap new in box, I will come back to this later. Now all I plugged in for the power cables from the case to the MB was just the DC power cable as it is all I would need to test, everything else was just LED and whatnot.

Now the thing is, I know there is positive (red) and ground (black) on the board for the power pins, I just do not know which side is which, it did not specify on the board but for the other connections it did, so what I did what just plug the cable in to how the others were with negative and positive positions (red on left, and black/ground on right from front facing position, worked in the future). I made sure the PSU was set to my country's voltage standard (115V) on the back of it and then turned on the switch.

On the MB, a red LED turns of signifying that the board itself works which is nice, but only when I press the jumper power button on my case to start it, I get no detected screen.

I have the GPU hooked via VGA to a LCD, even tested a CRT just to make sure it was not the monitor itself.

I might be wrong but it seemed to run a little fast according to the CPU cooler fan but maybe I am wrong and it's normal, my first old-school build basically as well.

I also pulled out the CPU to see if it would power on to begin with and it did, that was strange to me because I have read topics where people discussed that usually the CPU is the brain to get the PC turned on to begin with.

Now back to the PSU, I do not know if the watts are too high, running the board too fast, I didn't smell any smoke at all so that's good on the bright side, nor any black damaged spots, the board is pretty darn clean too.

Now when it comes to jumpers, I have set multiple combos. I tried clear CMOS and then FSB setting which were the two important factors. I have a 66MHz and 100MHz setting for the FSB and both didn't get the screen to show, the fan ran the same for both settings too. I have no multiplier jumpers set either so I don't know if I need those jumpers because it should just work out of the gate with proper configs for the FSB. Here is a link to my MB jumpers config: https://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/archive/Ecs%20 … p6bxtaplusj.pdf .

Now I have just incase ordered some new PC-100 2 x 256MB 168-pin DIMM SDRAM coming in the mail as my board only natively supports PC-100 (but the RAM I used before was PC-133 and I am pretty sure it's backwards compatible with PC-100 DIMMs). The reason why I ordered these is because a lot of the time black screens can be caused due to RAM, I also before swapped the sticks around and even used one but nothing happened.

Now the last thing I can think of is the AGP slot, my MB shows that it supports modes 1x and 2x but I was told online for my exact card that the voltages would be fine to run on that slot as my AGP is an 8x for the Geforce 4 Ti 4200.

Another thing I will try is to run onboard video but I ordered a female to female VGA coupler as my onboard port is a male and so are my monitor connectors so I will test that with my RAM when it comes in.

And lastly I do not have an internal PC speaker, should I just use it for some form of beep code or is it not worth my time, trying not to spend money on something that I am probably not going to use in the future as I am not playing early 386 DOS

I am very confused and do not know what I am doing wrong, if I could have some guidance for my build that would be great as I have spent lots of time and a decent amount of money for this project, it's been a big learning curve for me going back to some retro tech.

Cheers everyone, have a good day/night 😀