VOGONS


First post, by GabrielKnight123

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Hi all, im having stability issues with my AOpen AP58 motherboard at first I thought it was my hard drive so I replaced it with one that has a S.M.A.R.T as Good with no bad clusters and a cap limit of 32GB its a 40GB hard drive (the bios cant see anything over 32GB), im using 2 sticks of SD ram 32mb x2 and a Cyrix 6x86 -PR233 75MHz Bus 2.5x 2.9Volts CPU, sometimes at dos at bootup it will crash when I select and use settings like EMS or a mouse and I have had it freeze before at post, is this just a bad chipset on the motherboard (SiS)? I dont have any shadowing in the bios selected but I have the default for memory settings as I dont know how to set them up. im running a memtest86+ right now on the ram but from memory I already did this and they passed.

Reply 1 of 3, by GabrielKnight123

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I just ran Memtest86+ and the ram passed

Reply 2 of 3, by dionb

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SiS chipsets were much maligned, but usually unjustly. The problem was they were almost always implemented on low-cost corner-cutting boards for low-end bottom feeder systems (PC Chips & co in particular). AOpen was (along with Gigabyte) one of the few quality manufacturers to use their So7 chipsets. Which was a shame as the chipsets were excellent, particularly the 5582 here, which equaled the excellent clock-for-clock performance of the i430TX, but added official support for higher bus speeds (up to 83MHz) and a bigger cacheable area.

Nothing wrong with the chipset. In terms of hardware I'd sooner mistrust the old hot-running 6x86: try dropping the multiplier and see what happens. If that solves the instability, it's 100% CPU. Other than that, check the caps on the board. This is a 1998 board and AOpen was one of the first motherboard manufacturers to switch to the awful Taiwanese clone capacitors that sparked the capacitor plague. I had an AX6BC made in late 1998 that failed on me within months (in early 1999) due to that.

Reply 3 of 3, by GabrielKnight123

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I bet you're right about the capacitors because I was using this board for a while when installing dos/win3.11/win98se a few times getting a boot manager to work and it worked well for many days till now and if I have it turned on and retry a few times to load the problems where is freezes/crashes its ok again so I will put this board aside and try one day to replace the caps. Was intel chipsets good in the day of AT motherboards with a pentium 200MHz CPU? The board im talking about is a (Luckystar?) 5i-VX1E Rev 1.1