First post, by bloodem
- Rank
- Oldbie
I found this board for what was basically the price of a cup of coffee, so I was very happy to see it working perfectly (or so I thought) when I initially tested it a few months ago.
Well, I decided to play with it again a few weeks ago, and to my surprise it failed to POST, in fact the POST diagnostic card gets stuck at "0D" with the default AWARD BIOS, which means "Initializing video interface".
But... how could this be? When I initially tested this motherboard, it worked like a charm...
And then it hit me: I had initially tested it with an ISA video card, as opposed to the VLB card that I was using now.
So I grabbed a Tseng ET4000AX ISA card from the shelf and, sure enough, it did POST without any problems.
Anyway, long story short, in the past few weeks I basically tried EVERYTHING:
- multiple BIOS versions, tested all AMI and AWARD versions that I found here on VOGONS and other websites.
- multiple CPUs, 5V and 3.3V, from both Intel and AMD.
- multiple VLB video cards that are otherwise in perfect working order (S3, Cirrus Logic, Avance Logic, ARK Logic)
- multiple VLB I/O controllers, they don't work either
- double, triple and quadruple checked all jumpers.
- played with cache timings, replaced cache chips, removed cache chips/disabled cache altogether.
- tested with VLB 0/1 wait states
- tested caps in circuit + removed and tested a few random caps as well - no issues: ESR, VLOSS and capacitance is within specs.
At this point I'm fairly sure that this is, in fact, a hardware problem. The board doesn't have any visible damage, it's in very good condition, all traces look good both on the front and back.
So I'm hoping that maybe someone else has had this issue and could point me in the right direction. 😀
I'm also attaching some pics, maybe someone will notice something that I haven't.
1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k