socket 478 mobo won't always boot

[smoke]

Had a look at the caps. Didn't see anything... but visibility was generally
not good, and those next to the CPU were quite obscured.

Flashlight!

Have you tried stripping it down to CPU/RAM/Video and clearing CMOS?

[stevenaaus]

Might give it go. There's a chance I never got it so bare.

(ATM more interested in my new fic503+...
Dual Seagate 1.6gig HDDs(win98, slakware 7(kernel 2.2, kde 1.1), knoppix 4.0 (kernel 2.6.11, gcc-4.0))
Voodoo 4 AND Voodoo 2.
k6-III 400 .. wihch well for a while at 450! but started to bomb..probablynot a good enough fan)

[stevenaaus]

Well, I guess I'm not going to pull it down unless it gets worse.
I'm just doing too much work on it.

Fingers crossed - at the moment it's been very reliable

[stevenaaus]

For anyone else with this board/problem, I have to say it seems
to be slowly getting better - less and less boot-ups are failing :>
I don't know much about electronics, so I can't say why. It ~is~ now
summer here, but if ambient temp was a factor, you'd expect to see more failed
boot-ups when it's cold, something i've never noticed.

<rant>
Now, if only I can upgrade this shitty processor. A 2400mhz processor, with a
128k cache - what a joke %/ - At least with it has a quad pumped memory bus.

Another thing that's started to bug me about PC's is the ATX case design,
and in particular, the lack of thermal zones. The Apple G5 uses low
speed fans and thermal zones to move heat away from the CPU, but
- in another relic of the original IBM PC - AT and ATX cases have only
one or two fans having to move a huge amount of air, and hence have
to be fast and relatively noisy.
</rant>

yahoo-com-au, user: stevenaaus

[tazwegion]

You speak of thermal zones... as I'm unfamiliar with this concept & Apple G5's (intrenals) perhaps you'd be so kind as to elaborate please?

One thing I did notice however with G5's is the extensive use of mesh steel in the case's construction... in your instance PSU's with a large (slow'n'quiet) 120mm fan are a great means of venting hot air, as is a cold air induction solid tube/port (to CPU) used extensively on the FOXcoNN cases I've seen lately, an aftermarket 'AirRAM' which is esstentially a flexible intake port retails locally for around $20.00 AUD

<rant>
My current SS7 case project... a former AT server case will have a 90mm exhaust port added to the top of the case... a 120mm fan intake @ the base of the front & ???mm fan intake/exhaust on the side perspex window...
</rant>

Perhaps you could modify you existing case in a similar way to deal with the excess heat created by the Intel processor

[stevenaaus]

(Caveat: I'm no apple expert: (and we're fairly off topic ;->))
The thermal zones are just partitions inside the case that allow for individual fans to cool separate zones
or parts, especially the cpu. And like everything apple does with Steve Jobs, it's just well designed, I think.

> Perhaps you could modify you existing case in a similar way to deal with the excess heat created by the Intel processor
I'm not really into case modding. The fans are there and they're noisy, but it's my fault for buying a cheap ass box.
I ~did~ listen to it, but I guess the ambient noise was more than I thought :-<

Taz:
> My current SS7 case project...
How many boxes do you have !?!
* Whats the availability of amd processors like the slot a athlons and the k6+ chips like in australia in your experience.I'm from qld - and took me years to find a slot a cpu+board, got my k6-iii/400 in tasmania! , and I still haven't seen a k6+.
* It seems to me that Google ignores these forums! That's a bit of a bummer.

[stevenaaus]

Update.. Spoke too soon. It's winter here now, and the board is taking more tries (on average) to boot up..
And starting to p*** me off. I actually pulled the whole thing apart.. reseating the cpu and all jumpers,
without any change - though I enjoyed getting my hands dirty on a socket 478 chip.

[stevenaaus]

Appears I've solved this problem and the solution wasn't so hard. Because
this is my only DDR board, I never had the chance to swap the memory out. But,
(to play the Q4 demo, *cough*) I bought another stick of 256 DDR266, and had
been using it for a few weeks when it occured to me to pull out the old stick.
Well, the old stick had DDR400 written on it! This was news to me as sisoft
sandra had said it was DDR266. Perhaps this is a faulty stick and someone at
Compaq thought would work ok at a lower speed, which I guess it did, except it
also had problems at boot up. This is still a ~little~ unusual as I had already
tried to manually specify the DDR speed rather than have the bios ask the
memory for it's rated speed.

[stevenaaus]

Do I ever get bored with being wrong?
This board is still not booting cleanly - memory wasn't the problem.