Motherboard Woes

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December 17th, 2002, 12:12 AM
yarg

Abit BE6-II v2 Woes

Okay, from the top. Please stick with me! :D

My computer in general is pretty old. I bought it for $600 about 4-5 years ago from one of my mom's co-workers who built it himself and was planning on building a new one. Anyway, when I got this thing, here were the specs:

P2-233
Asus P2L97 mobo
64MB RAM
4GB Maxtor hdd
8MB Diamond Stealth II G460 vid
SB PCI 64 sound card
Generic 16x (or so?) cdrom

Now, it's pretty much an entirely different machine, comprised of all different components besides the case (with an exception of the motherboard, which I'll get to in a sec). Because I'm still in high school and don't have a steady job, I began simply upgrading a component at a time as I had the cash available. After everything was initially upgraded over a period of about a year or so, I had the following components:

P2-400
Abit BE6-II v2 mobo
128MB RAM
30GB WD Caviar 7200 hdd
16MB Voodoo3 AGP
SB!Live Value sound card
Acer 4x4x32 cdrw
100MB Zip Drive
New ATX power supply (fan's bearings crapped out in old one)
(I know, very mediocre by today's standards, but a step up)

For some time this suited me quite nicely for the games and apps I ran. Then, a few months after I purchased the mobo, troubles began..

For some reason the machine began rebooting for no apparent reason by seemingly insignificant tasks, such as scrolling in webpages, switching tasks, and (god forbid) playing any sort of Glide (or in software mode when I could make it to the config screen before a dreaded reboot for that matter) game. I determined by the process of elimination the problem to be with the video card. The same problem occured with a 16MB PCI Voodoo Banshee I had laying around or any other modern video card. These problems occurred in Windows varients and also in Linux.

At first my solution was to simply slap in my old Diamond Stealth II G460 which for some reason worked just fine, other than the fact that the card sucked for gaming. Eventually I had my friend's dad, a MCP and general computer nerd take a look at it. He found nothing evidently incorrect about the hardware connections and software settings that would cause this, and suggested I hit Abit RMA up with the problem to see what they say about it.

Now the problem is I bought the board from some ho-dunk merchant on Pricewatch, and stupidly neglected to save the receipt of the transaction, packaging, etc. which of course the RMA system needs along with the serial number and all of that because I (stupidly) never anticipated such an issue.

I believe the board may still be under warantee, but Abit never responded to my emails and I was unable to go through the RMA process because of the above reasons. For the past few months I have been coping with the problem by putting my old Asus mobo back in here, which doesn't have a problem with modern vid cards. I did somehow manage to damage the slot where the floppy drive ribbon cable connects, but that's another story. I currently have the proc clocked at 333Mhz, because it's as high as the board will alow.

I was just letting the case rest for awhile, until I noticed other members around AO getting help with their seemingly complex and impossible problems, so I decided to give you guys a shot to see if anyone else has had similar problems with Abit, or better yet, knows of a solution. Sorry about the length, btw. :)
December 23rd, 2002, 03:06 AM
phishphreek

Quote:

I currently have the proc clocked at 333Mhz, because it's as high as the board will alow.

Do you have sufficient cooling for the overclocking?

If your PC overheats, it will reboot on you.

Another thing i would look at is power mgt. features of the bios.
I've seen that cause a problem.

Have you checked for bios updates at the manufacturer website?

That often will cure many problems such as this one.
December 23rd, 2002, 07:44 AM
atl2ptown

Well you obviously not overclocking becuase it is a 400 mhx cpu, however the power settings could affect it. You might want to take a look at all of the cpu settings in the BIOS. A lot of time simply switching things around will fix problems. It doesnt sound to me like you have a faulty board though so I wouldnt sweat that. However if the system runs fine with the older diamond card which i have by the way..you might want to look at the drivers that are installed with the voodoo cards. I would try dl updated drivers and see what happens. Good LUck.

semper fi do or die
December 23rd, 2002, 08:10 AM
yarg

phish:

Quote:

Do you have sufficient cooling for the overclocking?

The Abit board is fairly new, and the proc is 400Mhz, there was no attempt made at overclocking it. Also, the board was equipped with soft jumpers, allowing the BIOS to detect and configure the proc without any intervention.

I'll have to slap that mobo back in here sometime during my break and investigate the running temps. It's been such a long time ago, I can't recall whether I ruled that out as the problem or not, but it's worth checking.

atl2ptown:

Quote:

You might want to take a look at all of the cpu settings in the BIOS. A lot of time simply switching things around will fix problems

Quote:

you might want to look at the drivers that are installed with the voodoo cards

I have tried several sets of drivers. Since 3dfx went under there has been a slew of home made drivers, many I've found at voodoofiles. The thing is, it behaves the same way in Linux, and even at the command prompt (in a Windows 98 based scenario)

Right now I'm running on my old Asus board. It does as well as can be expected, but of course its age is showing, and my hard drive seems sluggish. Not to mention that one of these days I'll be wishing I could use the floppy drive. ;)
December 23rd, 2002, 01:40 PM
Und3ertak3r

HAd untold problems with a New Mobo and a Ti 4200 card... Reset the BIOS settings to Default.. and started again.. solved.. You may need to full reset and load default settings to be sure of correct factory default.. (iv had some strange probs from customers)..

Cheers
December 23rd, 2002, 02:06 PM
Noia

Do you have a land connection or any thing like that? coz I had problems with the somp re-booting, I though it was the temp, but it couldn't have been, so I went through my system and found out the Macig packet's and Power of ->LAN was active.....disabeled them and voila, no more problems... :D

- Noia
December 23rd, 2002, 08:58 PM
yarg

You've all have some good suggestions, some of which I can't believe I never thought of. :)

Und3ertak3r:

Quote:

You may need to full reset and load default settings to be sure of correct factory default

I believe there was two settings that I reset. One of them was "Load BIOS Defaults" or something along those lines, and the other "Reset Factory Setting." I am barely awake and don't have the board in to check, but I have tried it. I have also tried newer (and older) flash revisions.

Noia:

Quote:

Do you have a land connection or any thing like that? coz I had problems with the somp re-booting, I though it was the temp, but it couldn't have been, so I went through my system and found out the Macig packet's and Power of ->LAN was active.....disabeled them and voila, no more problems...

Hmm, now that I think about it, that may have been enabled, even though I have no particular use for it. My LAN only consists of two computers right now, this one and the dial-up gateway. ;)

Also, to throw something out there that someone might also be able to confirm. The metal spacers I used to install the board onto the bracket.. if not used a certain way, could I somehow ground out the motherboard and cause these wacky problems? I'll have to try some plastic spacers if anyone can confirm.

I'll try some of the suggestions later on today when I get a chance. Thanks for the help so far!
December 24th, 2002, 10:18 AM
Terr

You may also want to consider that perhaps your new motherboard is more demanding on the power supply, and problems in the PSU may be now coming to the surface. Perhaps checking the voltages according to the motherboard--or even taking a multimeter and measuring the outputs manually--may shed some light on the problem.
December 24th, 2002, 01:08 PM
mrleachy

this may not be exactly what is causing it but based on what you have said i would take a very god look at your AGP settings and also at your AGp slot to make sure it isnt damaged or incorrectly set up, im only suggesting this because youve tried PCI cards with no problems, also i'll have to add that overheating with a voodoo 3 is near enough to impossible

i have one (PCI) ina dell optiplex with awful cooling and never had a problem with it at all, i even ran it with a cyrix when i first got it (yuck!), i would defenitely have a good look at the AGP slot on the board because it sounds like it may be defective

then if al else fails you can always run the system with the case off and see if that fixes you rproblems if you are sure its overheating
December 24th, 2002, 07:55 PM
yarg

Thanks to all of you who have given your suggestions so far!

I put the mobo back in last night, mainly to tinker around with it and try some of your suggestions. Apparently, the problem seems worse than I thought.

It goes through the POST screen without much incident, but when the HPT370 controller tries initializing the hard drive it sits there. After a few minutes of sitting on the "Detecting..." screen, I tapped space bar, and it moved right on through (why should tapping the keyboard speed up this process?) It won't move past the "Detecting..." screen without input from the keyboard. Odd?

Then it goes on to where the MBR normally takes it from there, the screen blinks a couple of times, turns black, then the cpu fan shut off. I tapped the keyboard a couple of times there, and each tap caused the fan to spin slowly for a few seconds, then stop. :) The cpu fan incident was corrected by plugging it into the Fan 2 slot, but I never progressed any further. Tapping the keyboard causes the screen to blink, turn black, or reset.

I tried running the hard drive from the Primary IDE controller on the board, rather than the on-board HTP370 RAID controller, but the screen blinking, turning black, etc. still continued, and it never showed any intention of booting past the CMOS screen. I reset all BIOS settings to Fail Safe, which didn't help matters any. Voltage and temperature looked in the norm, so I guess I'm back to square one. Perhaps there's more "wrong" with this board than I bargained for? :confused:

I should have saved that damn box and receipt. :( On the bright side, I was able to work the bent pin for the floppy drive back into position on this old Asus.