System hangs after PIII upgrade

[jhopkins1969]

Hello all,

This is my first posting to a forum of any kind, so please bear with me and be gentle. Help is greatly appreciated.

I have a mainboard designated P2BXA, manufactured under the name OZZO, but OZZO corporation is defunct and surviving web resources are scant. The mainboard seems to be physically identical to Chaintech CT-6BTM model M101 (with U9 chip), but the Award BIOS date displayed on bootup does not match Chaintech's published BIOS dates. Chaintech declines to answer support questions on grounds that mainboard was "rubber-stamped" by OZZO.

Nevertheless, I used Chaintech's latest CT-6BTM BIOS upgrade that I needed to support hard drives larger than 30GB and also to support an upgrade from a PII @ 350 MHz to a Coppermine PIII @ 750 MHz with 100 MHz FSB (7.5 * 100 BIOS multipliers). Afterward, my 40 GB hard drive was supported, but my system consistently hangs when any 3D images are to be generated (as in "3D pipes" screen saver) and sometimes also hangs when 2D windows are displayed. The latest drivers for a Diamond Viper 770D AGP video card are installed. DirectX 8 is installed. 3D rendering in low-res VGA mode works fine. Turning off 3D hardware acceleration in normal display mode makes system even *more* unstable. Underclocking 750 MHz CPU to 350 MHz does not solve the problem. No device or resource conflicts in Windows 98 device manager. It's hard for me to tell if there is some contention for the system bus between the AGP and IDE devices that might (?) be causing the problem. Fresh installations of Windows 98 on a reformatted hard drive with minimal peripherals and with PIII 750 MHz installed does not solve the problem. In any event, reinstalling the original 350 MHz PII with original clock multipliers restores system stability and 3D rendering.

I suspect that I have ruled out software problems from the above, which seems to leave hardware and firmware (BIOS) as potential culprits. Help that leads to the solution of the problem greatly appreciated - $25 reward (on my honor, and negotiable, but please understand that I won't go much higher than that). For me, it's worth it to save the $110+ I spent on the PIII. I am undecided about compensating for referrals.

Thanks,

[lysergic]

Tough one. Because the bios worked and did not kill the board then it may very well be a board based on the chinatech design. The china tech board you listed does support a PIII 750 and since the bios after flashing also shows the chip posting at 750 you have a compatablity there. The problems you are describing sounds like they might have to do with the voltages the CPU is getting. Even though it looks the same as the chinatech board and may have been manufactured with the same process does not mean the same components such as a voltage regultor was used on both boards. The board might not be supplying the voltage required for the coppermine.

It could also be that the bios is not completely compatable here and it is tripping up on the cache of the coppermine as compared with the PII.

Or could be as simple as you have a bad cpu. Try the chip in another board and see if it is stable there.

Sorry could not be more help.

[jhopkins1969]

Thanks Lysergic,

That's more help than I've gotten anywhere else!!

I'll check the voltages out - I took it for granted so I didn't think to do this. The manual implies that the switching power supply gives a minimum of 1.8 volts when the Coppermine's nominal voltage is between 1.65 and 1.7 V, so maybe it's getting too much juice. I would hope that the BIOS update fixed that . . .

The comment you made about the cache is interesting. I would guess that one course of action is to shut off L2 in BIOS (ack)?

Luckily I do have a backup mainboard, but it's a bit of a clunker - i440LX, 66 MHz FSB. Manual jumper settings. It will have to do.

Thanks for the ideas, and I'll let you know how it turns out. Maybe you will make $25!

[lysergic]

I post to this board just as a break from work. Keep your money. As since I did not do the work myself I can not stand behind it and will not charge for that.

[jhopkins1969]

Hi,

(Unfortunately) the voltage being supplied to the PIII CPU is perfect.

Turning off the L2 cache prevents system bootup. The mainboard manual says as much, actually - PII requires the L2 cache to be active and I would assume that the same is also true for PIII.

My "other" mainboard doesn't support PIII at all - the screen stays blank and there is no nice "beep" during bootup. This snuffs my effort to check the CPU, at least temporarily.

Aside - the time and frustration that I have spent already has outweighed the cost of a nice mobo + 1.0 GHz Athlon + 128 MB DDR RAM combo.

Anyway, thanks for the advice.

[coolman88]

Hi people out there, bear with me this is my first time out here, I am looking for some help!!! I just bought an 800 P3 100mhz oem chip for my asus p2bf board and everything is fine, excecpt I'am geting a cpuid error and the error states bios upgrade not loaded 686 with a bunch of zeros, I think I'am missing the code in my bios which is an award modular 4.51pg. have 1013a bios installed already butt still get error, even flash bios serveral times, took out battery,and reset cmos. is there eeprom chip available or am I stuck cool88

[goodespeler]

Make sure the motherboards bus speed matched the processor bus speed.

[coolman88]

thanks for info my buss speed is also 100mhz,I can run all my programs butt I want to make sure I don't hit a problem later down the road. only have 30 day warranty, need somebody really familar, with asus p2bf m\boards

[Sowulo]

Originally posted by cool88:
thanks for info my buss speed is also 100mhz,I can run all my programs butt I want to make sure I don't hit a problem later down the road. only have 30 day warranty, need somebody really familar, with asus p2bf m\boards

Cool88. Please don't post the same question in more than one place/forum. Also, it would be better to post your original question as a new topic. You will get better attention/responses that way.

[FacQ]

Well radioactive..... Sad as it may seem, Sounds like it's time for a motherboard upgrade. I myself would never want any piece of hardware, ESPECIALLY a MOBO without manufacturer support. I just got rid of my Voodoo 3 3000 fer crying out loud!! That dang thing still would be enough card for my gaming rig, but I want good support for DirectX 8 and beyond. So, new mobo, anything but a no name. ASUS, Intel, MSI, Tyan, or Ooo, Ooo, Soyo. I like Soyo. But, yeah unstability sux. New Mobo dude. Use the $25 on the new mobo, your about 1/6 to 1/4 of the way there.