ifrit05 wrote on 2023-11-23, 15:32:

In regards to GPU's, GeForce4 MX/Ti's work fantastic at 89MHz AGP speed.

Managed to run a GF Ti4200 card for months at 100MHz AGP by mistake in my Tualeron rig. Even that worked perfectly for months before I noticed it and changed the AGP divider back from 1/1 to 2/3 😀

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-11-24, 09:08:

Doing an initial "Power up" for a second or so is not necessarily an indication of failure. Some boards just do that, when the power supply is powered up - like you describe - for a second or 2.

Sorry, not sure that I got and understood it completely? Maybe I didn't express myself correctly. But this is how currently my PSU behaves:

1. I push the power switch
2. PSU starts up - I can hear cooler spinning
3. Green light on the motherboard turns on, all LEDs on the front panel also ignites
4. After around 1 second everything goes silent - PSU unit cooler, LEDs (actually not sure about mobo green LED)

And after this PC wouldn't react to any switch push (power, reset) until I "rebut" PSU with it's own O/I switcher.

One actually important thing I forget to mention earlier today.
Initially I observed the behaviour above only when AGP card was plugged-in. That where from all my dances around frequency derived.
But yesterday in the end of the evening I also unplugged video card and got the same thing. This made me order a new PSU.

Regarding type of PSU I currently have. I'm pretty sure that it's a generic no-name 300W unit with 20-pins connector and -5v wire.
Pretty old and (was) dusty.

So I've got the new PSU and now I'm completely puzzled.
It looks like this (and it's not about the video card at all anymore):
1. Only processor (slot 1), audio card (SB! Live) and a memory stick are plugged in
2. I connected main PSU connector to the mobo (and nothing else - should I?)
3. All front panel wires are disconnected (!) from the mobo
4. I turn on the PSU switcher and mobo immediately blinks with a green led (starts up) and goes off

I have no idea what it is, hopefully not result of my previous experiments.
Plan is to read through the motherboard manual if there are some tricky switcher (though it didn't behave this way from the very beginning), change BIOS batter (google says it might be the case) and google more.

Sad story so far.

UPD in like 10 minutes
I took mobo out of case - to see if there no issues with possible short circuits. I also unplugged the sound card.
- Same behavior.
I took out memory stick.
- Mobo still starts up from the PSU switcher - but now continues working! Good!
I plugged memory stick into another port
- Same. Starts up and continues working.

When I plugged in AGP card - mobo shuts down.

I'll continue my pursuit. I would like at least to get back to the "status quo" when mobo starts from the power switcher not "automatically"

UPDATE in 2 more minutes
Mobo immediately goes off also when I plug in a sound card into the PCI slot.
So it's about AGP at all - basically everything inside PCI or AGP (i tried different PCI slots) makes mobo to go off.

So another quick update here. I still have hope that someone will come up with a genius idea.
What I did so far:
- I replaced BIOS battery just in case
- I tried new PSU which is also 300W
- I set jumpers into a position suitable for my CPU but downclocked to 450Mhz

What I achieved so far:
- After I first time turn on the PSU is does initial check up (powers on for a second and slows down) and
- Apparently I occasionally enabled some kind of PSON mode - and managed to turn it off.
- So when there are no components connected to the mobo, only the memory stick & CPU - system starts up and works pretty stable
- I also tried to connect a second graphic card I have (with a passive cooling which I know consider important) - it was also stable for a while
- I even connected the screen and enjoyed the boot screen for 2 minutes until everything shut down (photo attached).

After this I wasn't be able to start it up properly again but at least now I have a hope that it's not a mobo issue with a short circuit.
Because otherwise I have no explanation how it can be stable for a while.

My theory is still around PSU. I'm looking for a 350W one but definitely I am open to any suggestions.

A quick update here. I wouldn’t say that I fixed the issue, but now system is running for 5-7 minutes and I shut it down (figuring out issues with floppy).
The behavior changes once today a 350w PSU arrived

Here I am again, I saw that you have a BIOS screen, this is good progress, I read the various resolution attempts, but honestly in the absence of photos, I didn't understand which cards and power supply it works with.
Certainly if you can achieve PC stability, I would exclude the use of problematic cards (which cause the PC to shut down).
Sometimes it can happen that the hardware works perfectly in one PC, but gives problems in another.

Hey everyone and PC@LIVE personally.

Let me try to be more specific. Today I put mobo and PSU back in case. I would say it runs pretty stable. Still afraid to jinx it but so far no unexpected shutdowns.

The config I ended up with looks this way:

• mobo ASUS p3b-f, the original card fro
  the beginning of the topic
• one stick of 128mb mhz ram
• 350W PSU LC350H
• Gigabyte GA-1280 GeForce2MX AGP. I still have Elsa eRazor next to me but I didn’t try it out again with 350W PSU to focus on floppy issue (see below)
• HDD and CD-ROM I plug in / plug out from time to time they don’t cause shut downs

So my conclusion to the thread would be:
300W for such a setup were not enough. Which is surprising but a fact.

Now I’m still on bios step with “floppy failure (40)” error, but it’s I think is another fascinating story.

Maybe the 300W wasn't delivering anything close to that.
I had it with a 939 board, where the ultra light PSU rated 500W was in fact delivering 300 at most.
Those cheapies were just death.

Can be the case Nexxen, but i tried out two different 300W PSU.
But anyway - hopefully this bridge is already passed.

Btw I don’t know if I have rights to mark thread as “solved” or someone from admins can

Hi, I'm glad you managed to solve the floppy disk problem, I think it's relatively simple, if you don't have a drive connected with the 34 PIN cable, you should enter the BIOS and store none instead of 1.44MB, for the rest in my opinion it's already good as it is, I have a very similar one (with more RAM).
Regarding power supplies, in the past the very cheap ones were very optimistic about Watts, a 300W could be able to reach at most about half (150+ or ​​-), 300 was the maximum peak, and perhaps even that was optimistic , while the real Watts did not go much higher than 150-200.

Sorry PC@LIVE if I mislead you - but I didn't solve the floppy problem yet 😀

I have a cable only with two connectors (one for mobo and one towards floppy). I connected twist side to floppy and put the "B" floppy into "none" in bios.
But it still throws "floppy failure (40)" error. Floppy itself makes a quiet buzzing noise and not even blink led. So I ordered a new one.

Regarding PSU - got it.

It could be a problem with the floppy drive, to be sure, you should try swapping it to another PC, if it works then it's a cable problem, or incorrect connection, but I don't think it's a problem with the MB, usually the drives they fail for I don't know what reason, but the opposite can also happen: they work perfectly even after many years, but it also depends on the floppy disks, if you use disks that are not perfect or with defects, they could cause reading problems in the long run.

Got it! Will keep you posted. I think new floppy will arrive some day next week.

Hey-ho here!

Just to close this topic completely - the machine is up and running under Windows 98SE. Though I still to do a lot - drivers, software, even mouse is not yet properly connected - I think most of the problems in regards with make it work are behind.

To sum it up

PSU
I spent way a lot of time trying different jumpers combinations, plugging in and out graphic card, sound card and memory stick just to get into BIOS. Apparently no-name 300W power supply unit is not enough for a P III setup.
I ended up with 350W PSU named LC350H. And so far it works.

Floppy
After I was able to see the energy star logo and got into BIOS I got “floppy disk(s) fail (40)” error. A couple of tries with different cable connection - but it didn’t even blink with led.
Long story short - never underestimate chance for even a straightforward component to fail. I found another floppy and that one started up perfectly.

Windows 98 setup and cd-rom
I was thinking that I’m almost there. I inserted Win98 floppy disk and it showed me an option to setup OS from CD.
Right after it became weird:

• if I follow the path with floppy - it installs a couple of drivers, locates CD-Rom at D:/ and right after tells me that there is “No Windows 98 setup files found on a CD”. When I try to navigate to D:/ and run “dir”, for examples - it doesn’t even blink CD led and gives error CDR101: not ready reading drive D. Cd-rom is meanwhile perfectly visible in BIOS.
• if I set Cd as a primary boot device - it lights up the led and runs disk for a while. After this it falls back to floppy.

I was confused by the fact CD is “partially” working. And I had so many such weird theories. Of course I tried all possible combinations with primary / secondary ide and master / slave positions.
Long story short: it was IDE cable. Which was brand new from Amazon, by the way.

After I changed cable all went smoothly.

At the end I installed windows98 and now ready to close this chapter.

Thanks everyone for help.

Well congratulations, having solved these small problems, it is very important, sometimes simple problems make you waste a lot of time, regarding the CD cable, it occurs to me that you could have bought the one with 80 wires, for those PCs you need the 40 wire one, the MB controller goes to a maximum of 33, while for the faster ones, from 66 onwards you need a cable with 80 wires.
If you are done with the HW work, I would recommend installing some diagnostic software, for example CPU-Z for Windows 98, it can give you detailed information about your PC, and includes in the latest versions, a bench program, the results can be compared with other similar PCs.

Thanks! Will do this for sure.

Also It’s still running on 450Mhz only, so will try to go up to 600 after done with other things.

Btw is there a relevant forum section here where I can just boast with my rig and post updates? 😀

Well in my opinion, you could use your own topic (this too???), or if you want to involve more users, you could write on:
What retro activity did you get up to today?

System Specs description is "Showcase your Retro PC / Build logs."

My similar sytem also did not want to start, using Abit BH6-II motherboard. Actually sometimes started, other times not or frozen. Than I changed my old PSU to a new EVGA 500 W1. Since computer always starting. Than freezings still existed, than I realised I had to change the ATA to SATA converter to the one which has master/slave switch. Than runs fine and i can max out the HPT366 controller’s ATA66 max speed with SSD. Now just i need to buy a new processor, because the current one with 133FSB I cannot overclock further, windows not booting already with 140FSB. So get a CPU with 100MHz FSB and run at 133FSB. 3dfx Voodoo 4 takes well 89MHz AGP speed, even very useful for it, because gives extra bandwith and speed. Meanwhile i am trying to figure out, why i cannot load at 140MHz FSB, maybe my Voodoo or the Infenon SDram 133MHz CL3 RAM or something else.