Third caps-swap...

[purrkur]

I have just completed my third BP6 cap-swapping. This third board is a bit strange in that it looked like new when I got it (i.e. caps all look new and none are visibly broken) but it was definitely unstable. It would lock up randomly every now and then even when I wasn't loading the system.

This system couldn't run my 366's at 550, although it would run them at 95MHz FSB without any issues

In any case, I have swapped out a whole bunch of caps (more than 20) and clobbered the system together again. I also took some advice from a few regulars who swear that the BX needs a fan. I removed my large cooler, reintroduced the greenie with some goo to go and slapped a fan on that sucker.

It is up and running again. I tested it a bit first at 366MHz just to see it go through its paces. All voltages look fine and the system made it from startup to reboot without problems.

I haven't had any luck running it at 550MHz though. I have tried several things and the last thing I tried was to tweak BIOS a bit and up the CPU voltage to 2.05 volts. That brought me some luck. I got it up and running for awhile but while I was doing some work it hung all over again. I have also tried lowering the voltage to 1.95V just to see what happens and in every other startup it will only report 1 cpu.

What I am going to do now is to try 91MHz at default voltage to see if it gives me grief. If it does then it might be my components that are bothering me (since at 91MHz I am overclocking the PCI bus). In that case I will try 92MHz fsb to see if it makes any difference. I had 95MHz working before so we will see what happens. Right now it is happily doing work at 500MHz.

So I got myself a BP6 in a running state which makes me happy. Now I just have to get it stable so I can reliably use it!

Btw, I noticed one funny thing. In BIOS, I don't get any fan speed readings. However, the sensors program in Linux gives me a readout just fine. Anybody seen something like this before?

Sigh. As I was about to post this the BP6 hung again. Here comes 92MHz...

[davd_bob]

Purrkur,
You said here comes 92 then no more...did we loose you?

Anyway, sounds like a componant issue. Im pretty sure the caps are ok and as long as you went with equal or higher rated uf and/or volt ratings.

Just a test, try one CPU and see if you can get 100FSB. Various posts imply that a single CPU will OC higher then DUAL. Who knows, you may end up with a 333@620. lol.

[purrkur]

Purrkur,
You said here comes 92 then no more...did we loose you?

Sorry guys, didn't mean to leave you hanging.

From the looks of it, the board seems to be a dud. Even at 2x366 and default voltage the board will work for a while and then hang, just like it did before the mods. I really thought the stability problem was a caps problem but now that seems unlikely. Not sure what I will do now. Maybe try one celly and a different PS with all components removed except graphics is probably the way to go.

So all in all, I don't have a running BP6 at the moment. Problem is that the time I have to do this type of stuff is very limited so if things don't work they might end up collecting dust...

[davd_bob]

I moved a BP6 from one site to another, pulled dual 366 and replaced with a single 500. The board always hangs in the bios page that shows temps and such but after the move it went really flakey. Tried resetting bios, booting while holding Insert, changing ram then the cpu. nothing worked.

Pulled the cmos battery, powered up then off. Replaced the battery and the board has been fine ever since(except that one bios page). Of course it still only has one active temp sensor. Maybe you have a componant that would benifit from a quick power up with the battery removed. I don't know of any risks to anything in doing that little manuver, but it is pretty quick and physically easy.

good luck.
David

[purrkur]

I moved a BP6 from one site to another, pulled dual 366 and replaced with a single 500. The board always hangs in the bios page that shows temps and such but after the move it went really flakey. Tried resetting bios, booting while holding Insert, changing ram then the cpu. nothing worked.

Pulled the cmos battery, powered up then off. Replaced the battery and the board has been fine ever since(except that one bios page). Of course it still only has one active temp sensor. Maybe you have a componant that would benifit from a quick power up with the battery removed. I don't know of any risks to anything in doing that little manuver, but it is pretty quick and physically easy.

good luck.
David

Thanks for the advice David. I know that the battery in this particular board is flat and I have spares. I was really hoping that this board would work out for me because I have one broken BP6 already and another that actually works but has one broken ZIF socket.

I haven't given up on it yet. I am just giving it some thought on what my next steps should be so it is obviously great to get feedback from everybody here before doing work on it again. So far I have come up with the following plan:

1. Your battery trick + replacing the dud with a live one.
2. removing NIC and soundcard while testing
3. Running on a single 256 MB stick and swapping the ones I have around a bit to see if any single one is poor. I got plenty of memory to test with lying around so it shouldn't be a problem.
4. Trying another power supply. I got one lying around so it shouldn't take me too long to fix.

I'll keep you posted!

[purrkur]

Ugh! It has been awhile and I haven't kept you posted like I said I would!

have been extremely busy. My wife and I are having a hard time making ends meet timewise with two full time jobs, two kids and all things that need to be taken care of. When I have finally had some time off I have been doing stuff that I am not used to doing such as programming which has been good fun.

My BP6 has been collecting dust on the floor and so I decided that I needed to give it some love. In my previous posts I had mentioned that I wasn't sure about the overall stability of the machine but after poking about a bit I figured that my Debian Linux installation was giving me issues. So a reinstall was in order because I couldn't be bothered locating the issues since I wasn't sure about the hardware.The disk in the machine is a 40GB Seagate disk that I bought brand new when they hit the market for the first time. The installation is as old as that and further, to that, I have moved this disk with the current Debian installation between four different machines. This is the first time it gets the hickups which is nothing short of amazing considering the beating my 2nd system gets on a regular basis (it is used for testing mainly which means that screwing it up is something I try to do every once in a while).

Well, having two insecurities (hardware and OS), I decided to go for the reinstall to reduce it to one. I installed Debian once again and now the system is up and running again. It was, however, a bit noisy so It has not been up and running because of that. The other day I bought three different fan speed reducers (using a single resistor to slow things down) and I have plugged them in with the desired effect.

I am writing this on my BP6. I have managed to get it stable but I can say that my 366's do not reach 550MHz reliably. The system will boot at 550MHz without issues if I raise the voltage to 2.05 volts but under continuous load it will eventually hang. I am now running it at 523MHz (95MHz fsb)@2.0 volts and I have put it through its paces without as much as a hickup (at least so far).

I think that my 366's aren't up for the job. They haven't been able to run reliably at 100MHz for an extended period regardless of cooling (I now have a fan on the BX and it makes no difference) and regardless of board (I have tried three different ones). So for these I will just run them at 523MHz which is good enough for the time being. If I end up finding two decent 366's on Ebay then I might buy them or I might put in my 400's to see how they handle being overclocked. However, that depends on time. I also have a few experiments to check out which I want to spend some time on.

Anyways, it is time to update my sig....