Any Abit BX6 2.0 owners out there? \ VOGONS

Any Abit BX6 2.0 owners out there?

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First post, by McMick

Posted on 2012-02-03, 10:11

McMick Offline

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I have one of these boards and it's giving me lots of problems.

I built the system in 1998 or 1999. It started life with 1GB of RAM but immediately there were problems so it wound up with 768MB of RAM.

Recently the system was retired by the customer I built it for and he gave it to me "instead of just throwing it out". It has a P3-700 on a slotket adapter. That's no longer detecting. I had another P3-800 on a slotket and that wouldn't detect either. Finally I shoved in a P3-500 Slot 1 and it allowed me to boot. It's set to run at normal speed and voltage. The board seems completely stable in Windows XP.

The second thing is, the 768MB is only showing up as 512MB. If I put any individual RAM stick into the first slot, it shows up fine as 256MB. But if I put any stick into any other slot, even all by itself, it only shows up as 128MB. My BIOS version is from April 26, 2000 which is weird in itself since the last one on the Abit website is from December 8, 1999. The RAM is PC-133 of unknown manufacture, but has Micron 48LC8M8A2 chips on it, 8 chips per side, 2 sides, and I'm pretty certain it's low density.

UPDATE: If I put a 128MB stick into the first slot, then I can put a 256MB into any other slot and shows up properly, for a total of 384MB. Recall that if I put a 256MB module, by itself, in any slot besides the first, it shows up as 128MB. What gives?

Reply 1 of 7, by Tetrium

Posted on 2012-02-03, 11:51

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Try another PSU??

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Reply 2 of 7, by iulianv

Posted on 2012-02-03, 14:31

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That's weird... 48LC8M8A2 is 64Mbit (8MByte) in size, so 16 chips of that model would make an 128MB DIMM - it's strange that such a module is seen as 256MB when plugged into the first slot.

Reply 3 of 7, by swaaye

Posted on 2012-02-03, 15:11

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The first thing that comes to mind is that almost all Abit boards of that time used capacitors that were defective and went bad after a few years. The symptoms can be anything from failure to unpredictable weirdness. Even if they're not bursting they can be bad. Look up the brand name on them.

Reply 4 of 7, by sklawz

Posted on 2012-02-03, 15:35

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swaaye wrote:
The first thing that comes to mind is that almost all Abit boards of that time used capacitors that were defective and went bad after a few years. The symptoms can be anything from failure to unpredictable weirdness. Even if they're not bursting they can be bad. Look up the brand name on them.

I agree 😀 I got an ABIT board in the year 2000, a SLOT-A that came with their GPL incompliant GENTUS linux. Can't remember the name, K7 something or other, anyhow it was dead within 1 year with burst caps. The first symptom of the failure was the RTC clock going backward at random intervals 🤣.

cya!

edit: fix quote

Reply 5 of 7, by gwb

Posted on 2012-02-03, 16:50

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swaaye wrote:
The first thing that comes to mind is that almost all Abit boards of that time used capacitors that were defective and went bad after a few years. The symptoms can be anything from failure to unpredictable weirdness. Even if they're not bursting they can be bad. Look up the brand name on them.

x2, I was going to suggest looking for bad caps

Reply 6 of 7, by McMick

Posted on 2012-02-03, 17:38

McMick Offline

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I can't see anything wrong with the caps, but I know it's a possibility. At any rate, with 3 128MB DIMMs in the first 3 slots and 1 256MB DIMM in the 4th slot, it shows 640MB so I'm going to call it good. It's stable with the P3-500 and that's all I care about at this point. Thanks for the suggestions!

Reply 7 of 7, by bushwack

Posted on 2012-02-05, 15:50

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Ah, the legendary BX6 R2. I still have one fully operational, but it's not the original one I ran in the late 90's.

Running the Slocket, give a slight voltage boost (try next bin or two) on the Slocket itself and the motherboard if that alone doesn't help . Try cleaning the pins on the Slocket adapter also.

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