Maybe your PSU's gone flaky. A bunch of other problems happening concurrently often point to that as the common denominator, especially after you swapped motherboards and still experienced issues.

Edit: Yeah, I'm betting it's the PSU, I just checked your other thread and you mentioned DiabloTek.

Well, I had second thoughts too and unassembled/re-assembled several more times swapping parts in and out. With a pretty new Apevia PS [recently pulled from a rig I upgraded so I know it works fine] I had all the same issues. Tested ram, cpu's, drives, with/without sound cards, usb2 cards etc. As long as I was off the VA6 things were okay.

For while I was running stable on a BCM GT133KT/Athlon 1.1 - same Diablotek. But hen I got two CMOS/checksum errors after cold reboots so I'm not taking any chances and will add a new PS to the shopping list...

All in all a bad few days here in the Retro Lab: Down a VA6, Maxtor 100gb, and MX300 and PS. Also managed to kill a short 1-connection IDE cable during an ill-advised "on the spot mod".

EDIT: I rewrote the middle part to reflect a change of events...

m1919 wrote:

...especially after you swapped motherboards and still experienced issues....

Actually until this evening I *hadn't* experienced problems with the new motherboard and the Diablotek - that just happened a few hours ago.

Looking back I'd say the PS started the road to corruption last Fall. It's tricky trying to isolate a problem when it turns out so many parts have failed or are on the fritz.

When I swapped in the BCM board over the weekend and it ran fine [or seemed to] I homed in on the VA6. But the CMOS issues just now confirm that whatever is wrong with the VA6, the "Diablo" is also looking very guilty too.

So and replacement VA6, Turtle beach Montego II clone and a PS are on on the way..

tincup wrote:

Actually until this evening I *hadn't* experienced problems with the new motherboard and the Diablotek - that just happened a fe […]
Show full quote

m1919 wrote:

...especially after you swapped motherboards and still experienced issues....

Actually until this evening I *hadn't* experienced problems with the new motherboard and the Diablotek - that just happened a few hours ago.

Looking back I'd say the PS started the road to corruption last Fall. It's tricky trying to isolate a problem when it turns out so many parts have failed or are on the fritz.

When I swapped in the BCM board over the weekend and it ran fine [or seemed to] I homed in on the VA6. But the CMOS issues just now confirm that whatever is wrong with the VA6, the "Diablo" is also looking very guilty too.

So and replacement VA6, Turtle beach Montego II clone and a PS are on on the way..

Considering how hard it is to find some of this stuff, especially since I'm interested in old workstation stuff, I just decided to bite the bullet and get something I could trust not to kill my hardware. The Antec Earthwatts line seems to go on sale a lot and the 380W model is more than enough to power most retro rigs. I think the current 380W is a Delta manufactured product, but the older stuff is Seasonic, you can't really go wrong either way. Tempted to get another couple of them the next time I see a decent sale.

I tweaked the bios last night before shutting her down. This morning no cmos problems. Still, I plan to like to swap out the PS - both for reasons of prudence you mention, and because I'm still not 100% sure things are right yet.

Try the card in a motherboard with a different chipset... anything that isn't Via. Those cards do not like Via boards. Sometimes they can be made to work with specific combinations of hardware and drivers, but just as often they behave exactly as you're seeing. That's the reason I use SB Live cards in my old Athlon systems (even though I really don't like the SB Live)... I simply could never get my Vortex cards to work in those boards.

I will try that. I have a P3B-F/P-533 rig and some SiS based motherboards I can test. None the less the MX300 [and a TB Montego I] had worked perfectly fine up to the meltdown.. we will see. The MX300 was never my favorite card since it was a real cpu hog but it does represent the Vortex2 in all it's flaming glory pretty well. We will see!

Since the initial meldown craziness has subsided I've been patiently back-checking all the parts and setups with a clear head.

The Athlon 1.1 really isn't too bad a setup and I'd almost consider it as my Voodoo5 platform, but I really want to get back to the Tualatin again, and a full ATX card with a more granular bios and tweakability than the GT133KT.

UPDATE: no dice on the BX rig so it's looking grim for the 'ol MX300.