HELP FOR NEWBIE W/SOLTEK 75DRV4

[Guest]

Hello,

I am hoping some of you more experienced hardware hacks can help me out.
I have recently put together the following system:

Soltek 75DRV4 motherboard
Athlon XP1700 w/Volcano 6 Cu+ Fan
256MB Crucial 2100
40G Maxtor ATA 133
Visiontek GeForce2 GTS
300W Power

The only things I changed in the BIOS were increasing the CPU clock from 133 to 147 and the CPU Vcore to 1.800V (problem???)
I installed Windows 2000 Professional and it was running great for about a week. Then it started freezing up on the windows desktop. Now, it often freezes when it makes it to the Windows 2000 screen (with the progress bar). I changed the CPU clock back to 133 (default) and took all of the cards out except for the video card and I still have the problem. I tried re-installing the OS and WHEN IT WAS ON THE WINDOWS 2000 BLUE SETUP SCREEN W/SETUP DISK #1, THE BOTTOM STATUS LINE HAD THE FUNKY CHARACTERS ")..a)..a F F" (this sequence repeated a couple of times) AND THEN IT FROZE!?!

Did I screw up the motherboard, memory or CPU??? Please write back with your thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks in advance,
Kevin

p.s. I tested the video card in my other machine and it works fine (unfortunately I can't do the same for the CPU and memory because they are not compatible)

 

[niconx]

what are your cpu/case/room temperatures? have you checked to see what the cpu core voltage is with software (hardware settings can often be a few .0# off). Try underclocking it to 100MHz fsb and see if you still have probs. If you do then you probably did burn the CPU. I did this once with an athlon 1.33GHz and biostar mainboard , my core was like 1.9V LOL. But my system DID work for a few days like that!

 

[Guest]

Thanks for response niconx.

Looks like things have gone from bad to worse. I tried resetting the dip switches for the fsb back to 100MHz and still have problems. Now, however, the machine does not even make it out of POST. I get one long beep followed by two short beeps. Looking on the Soltek website, I found the following in their "Error Messages" section for the Award EliteBIOS:

"Beep"
'Currently the only beep code indicates that a video error has occurred and the BIOS cannot initialize the video screen to display any additional information. This beep code consists of a single long beep followed by two short beeps.'

So it appears I have a video problem. However, as I mentioned before, I took the video card out and it runs fine in my other machine. So do you think the motherboard is toast? (don't understand what would cause it...)

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[niconx]

i doubt you really have a video problem, i would bet its the cpu hands down. got any spare socket A cpus laying around? you might wanna pull off the heatsink and check to see if the core is cracked too <=c|

 

[Guest]

unfortunately, no spare socket A's hangin around to test with. i took the heatsink off and cleaned the processor off. how can i tell if the core is cracked? (a physical crack you mean?) the only thing that looks different on the chip from when i installed it (maybe...) is that the left side of the chip has about 1/8-1/4 inch dark purple element (not on surface) and there is a tiny little square on the bottom right of the chip that looks like a little maze.

 

[Guest]

looking at other AMD processors, the purple element seems to be normal (i guess it used to set the chip). as far as the little square maze at the bottom right of the chip, i am not sure...

 

[niconx]

well they little maze thing is normal but the purple element does not sound right. are you talking about melted parafin wax, this is supposed to be blue though, it melts over the side of the cpu core onto the ceramic/organic part of the chip. if your concerned about the video you can swap in an old pci video card to test it if you have one, or steal one from somebody else.

 

[svol]

You also might want to try a different CPU, maybe you maxed it when OC'ing and damaged it somehow. And can you make a foto of the CPU so we can analyse it more easely, if that is possible?

<b>THGC:</b> before: :frown: , after: .

 

[Guest]

svol,

unfortunately, i have a pretty cheap digital camera and the resolution stinks so it wouldn't do you much good. I am going to bring the CPU over to my buddies place this weekend and test it out on his system. Then I will know for sure if it is the CPU or something on the mobo.

Thanks