Faulty motherboard or weak power supply?

[klintman]

Guys and gals,

I just put in a new soyo sy-5ehm motherboard with a k6-2 550 in a system that used to have a pentium 100. It has two hard drives and a cd rom. i've totally wiped both drives and am ready to install an os... but some point along the installation... the system hangs. I'm wondering if this is a faulty motherboard or is the power supply (230w) not able to handle everything?

Thanks.

[Sowulo]

Although most anything can cause them, crashes during the Windows install are most often the result of bad RAM.

[TRICKPLAYER]

also it can be the cpu, try the old p100 and see if it loads,

[klintman]

Hmmm... I took out the second hard drive. It still hangs. I tried installing Linux as well. Same thing. Half way through the install the screen would freeze.

I just purchased the ram in this system today. It was on sale too. :-)

Should I try flashing the bios or changing anything like that? Or just exchange the ram?

Thanks.

[klintman]

The p100 won't fit in a socket 7 board... besides, I'm using it in the computer that I'm typing on right now. So can't really pull it out since it's in use. :-)

So... you don't think it's the board, but probably the ram or the chip. Those are easy enough to replace. Do you think that the board may not be fully compatible with a k62-550? I've heard of boards that say they work with 550 but don't recommend it.

Thanks.

[freddy]

check the voltage on the CPU , if nessesarry try running the CPU at a lower rating ,at the moment u are at 5.5x100 ,,,drop it down to 3x100, and give it a try.

those CPUs NEED a good HSF , also check that the memory is ratted at PC100 , try 5.5x66 and see if that works,

had 2-3 recently crashing (customers) and in a lot of cases i,ve wound them down to 300.

dont forget if u are loading 95 then u will need a "patch" from AMD

p100 is socket 7 isnt it? ,,,,,,BUT different voltage


REMEMBER ,,,,,,,,,,,,,GOOD HSF


good luck freddy

[Platypus]

Like Freddy, I was going to suggest the AMD patch. If you are installing Win95 OSR2, it will hang or crash with an AMD of 350 MHz or over, as Freddy says, if this is the case try installing at 300 MHz. I think older versions of Linux also had AMD issues. The patch can be found on AMD's site and is for OSR2 only not original release 95.
Install the USB supplement first if you're using it, (not only for USB, it also enables AGP support) or it will wipe out some of the patch modifications.

If it's not 95, then the K6/II shouldn't stress a power supply unless the p/s is faulty. Check the soyo website for BIOS compatability, my SY-5EMA needed updating for 500 & above. Also if everything else is OK, try running at 500 in case it's a marginal chip. I gather there have been some cases of 550's working OK for some time, then starting to bomb out, but OK at 500.

[Ruslan]

As an addition to all what said above, I would suggest You try to disable L2 cashe in BIOS settings. Recently I had one PC with SOYO motherboard and similar symptoms. It turned out was bad L2 cashe. Check it. If the problem disappered - motherboard's on-board cashe is gone.

[Garak]

freddy, first generation p75's 90's and 100's where socket 5 rather than socket seven...

[freddy]

apologise Garak , but without getting in arguements , i seem to recall that the very early pentiums ie: p60 - p75 were slot 5 i have just done a quick look and ,,,as i couldnt be assed wading thru the intel site i spotted this article

http://users.erols.com/chare/cpu_proc.htm#p54c

those things are from the darker ages when u needed a morgage to buy a "guenuine" intel chip.


not starting a war ,,,,,just rattlin my brain a bit

freddy

[klintman]

Thanks!

Here's what happened. I brought back the memory and (which I bought on sale last week) and I found a 256 dimm for $5 more. That was cool. However, I wasn't sure it would work because it was pc133 (not certain about the compatibility/difference between pc66/pc100/pc133, so if someone could explain).

Anyway I put the dimm in... same problem. So I came back to the my post and saw the other responses. So I tried to set the processor to 500... that did it. Win98 installed without a hitch.

Thanks everyone for your insight.

[format c:]

I have the same board sitting here with a K6-500 cpu in it, this board is fast and I found it stable, I think your CPU is a marginal one but 500 mhz is respectable
What I like about this Soyo board is the One meg of cache memory

[Matridom]

Compatibility with dimms is pretty simple.. anything at a faster speed will work witout a hitch at the slower speeds. Now some OLD boards can only reconize 2 meg chips on a dimm.. so new ram modules will not work - being 4-8-16 and 32 megs to a chip.