Daaf wrote:Tonight I finally found some time to boot up what hopefully will (soon) be my Windos 98 system for the first time, but unfortuna […]
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Tonight I finally found some time to boot up what hopefully will (soon) be my Windos 98 system for the first time, but unfortunately the system won't post. When switching on the PSU the CPU fan starts spinning immediately and the standby indicator LED on the motherboard is lit, so according to the manual both the PCI bus connectors and the memory modules should have power. The strange thing is the fan starts spinning immediately when swithching on the PSU, even without switching on the system with the connected powerswitch I snatched out of an other ATX case.
The motherboard has a speaker, but it won't beep and won't display a picture, both when I connect the monitor to a videocard or the VGA connection on the motherboard. I tried replacing the Tualatin (SL6BY) CPU with a Coppermine CPU I have, but it won't post either and the motherboard doesn't sound an error beep message with it either. Removing one and eventually both memory modules doesn't cause an error beep message either, the same goes for placing a memory module in another bank. I connected the PSU to my slot 1 motherboard and it boots without any problems. I tried placing the bios reset jumper in it's configure position, but the system won't post, beep or do anything different then before.
The PSU is a Corsair RM750x and according to a review on Tom's Hardware I found online it should provide the following amps on it's rails:
3.3V 25A
5V 25A
12V 62.5A
5VSB 3A
-12V 0.8A
I 'm not sure if that's enough for a Tualatin system? As mentioned in the title the motherboard is an Intel D815EEA2, the CPU is a Tualatin SL6BY. Is there anything I've overlooked during my failed attempt at trouble shooting and getting the system to boot?
Have you done a visual inspection of the board to check for any damages? Things to look out for are obviously the caps first, and then look for things like scratches on the PCB, bend pins, dislodged or missing components and things like rust or stains. Basically anything that shouldn't be there when it was new and left the factory 😜
The D815EEA2 may not support your particular Tualatin due to its BIOS (iirc Intel actually disabled use of some CPU in later versions of their BIOS on some of these boards), but the Coppermine would probably have worked.
Which Coppermine did you try out in the board?
Try with some spare ±700MHz spare Coppermine, as to exclude the possibility of the BIOS being (part of) the problem.
Also, I had this particular issue with my D815EEA (the non-Tualatin version of your board) with a 800MHz CPU. After a while, this rig would display symptoms very similar to yours (would basically act dead, even though I didn't even touch anything from the inside of it), except for the "boot up right away" part as I can't recollect if mine did this or didn't.
This ended up being a problem with the CPU HSF, which was a very large aluminium heatsink. Perhaps it was too large and would not sit completely level on the very small CPU die area. But anyway, this problem seemed to be gone for good after I had exchanged this CPU HSF with a smaller one (s7/ss7 sized heatsink) made out of copper. This may be worth trying out once you start troubleshooting with a lower clocked Coppermine.
Iirc there are some Dutch Vogoners living in the south of The Netherlands. Unfortunately for you I'm not one of them 😜
But I would recommend trying this on your own. Remember that many of us are not hardware engineers by profession and we simply learned by doing (and by sometimes messing up). It comes with the territory to experiment and explore first and maybe ask help later when you get stuck somewhere 😜