Post beeps on ASUS P3C-D

Hello,

I just had an HP P3C-D board, case and psu donated to me earlier today withought the rest of the components. I was told b the previous owner that the setup ran fine for him prior to giving it to me. He was running a P-III 550 CPU and SDRAM in the setup. I am lucky enough to have a P-III 550 CPU lying around here and had attempted to use that and a 128mb PC-133 SDRAM to test the setup.

When I power up the unit there are post beeps (1-3-3-1) indicating to check "28 Autosize DRAM". There is nothing on the display. I reseated the riser card for the SDRAM and reseated the CPU and tested with 3 different vid cards with the same issue. I had also tested 3 different SDRAM, also with the same issue. I had also tested with a P-III667 CPU and dito. CMOS was cleared several times as indicated with dip 7 on the mobo throughout the testing process.

The donor is going to get me the P-III 550 CPU he had running in the unit and give that to me also. I am feeling pretty fortunate, and will be extremely happy if I can get this dually setup running. Hopefully this will be an OC'd dual 733 crunching proteins when I am done.

Any insight for resolution would be appreciated.

RPM

Looks like the reason for the post beep errors is I am not using "SPD" SDRAM. Just called HP and they do not carry the RAM anymore. Looks like this dually will be down and out untill I either find some affordable SPD SDRAM or break down and get some RD RAM. Either way I am not sure if it will be worth the time and money??

Thanks anyway.

RPM

One last note:

I have been looking into this setup quite thoroughly and came to the following conclusions:

The board has 3 RIMM slots. 1 is populated with an SDRAM riser card, the other two slots are empty and must be populated with C-RIMM's in order for the SDRAM to be detected properly.

I bought 2 C-RIMM's yesterday on ebay for under $10.00 CAD and will hopefully have them within a coupple weeks to test further.

I should be receiving the second P-III 550 cpu within the upcoming week to run this rig in SMP configuration.

I do have one last question though to anyone that has owned an HP P3C-D Mobo with 100fsb CPU's. Were you able to adjust the FSB to 133? I have already had the one P-III 550 CPU that I have here run at 733 withought any mods and running default voltage on a different mobo and am hoping to have the same luck with the other one I will be receiving and run both of them at 733 on the P3C-D.

It would be nice to have a Dual 1.46Ghz unit up and running for $10.00 and if not 1.1Ghz will be fine untill I can get another pair of P-III's for a reasonable price.

tia

RPM

You may not be able to overclock with the HP version of the P3C-D (HP didn't allow OC). There was a thread a while back where someone was trying to get the ASUS BIOS onto it, but the BIOSes are actually different sizes (2Mbit and 4Mbit I believe). Unfortunately, search won't find anything with any combination of p3c or p3c-d (which i find hard to believe ) so that's not much help.

You do need the C-RIMMS with the riser. There is also a CT-RIMM which, unlike the C-RIMMS, has a chip and some resistors on it. If I recall correctly, you needed the CT-RIMM when running two RIMMS, as ASUS claimed you couldn't use RIMMS in all three slots. However, ASUS is an idiot and you can use all three slots. I ran 3 X 256Mb PC1066 in mine with no errors @ 140fsb.

As far as SDRAM in the riser, it's a little picky - it'll take up to 256Mb per slot (largest single stick I tried) but some sticks will work and some won't. You certainly don't need to buy it from HP. They may have programed their version of the BIOS to only run at slow timings etc. You just need to try some different sticks after you get your C-RIMMS.

When you get it running, you'll be pleased with the performance (much better if you get RDRAM sometime - like, night and day difference). Mine ran 2x 1.4GHz tualatins and was almost as good as my current rig. And actually, the only reason I ever got rid of it was that I needed more memory than can be put in a P3C-D.

I have found a lot of positive feedback on the P3C-D mobo. Hopefully my order for the CRIMMS goes smoothly and I will at least have 1.1ghz between both of the 550's. I will possibly upgrade if I can find some tualatins for a reasonable price.

Well I got the 2 CRIMMS in and got the system up and running withought any issues with a single 550 P-III and standard SDRAM.

The second CPU is not available but I will be looking to install 2 Tualatins if I can find them for a reasonable price and if not I will be looking for a couple higher mhz slot 1 P-III's.

I had the Asus branded P3C-D. I used Rambus because I didn't have any SDRAM at the time, and I usually only ran 1 processor since I used that computer for testing purposes. I never used any CPU terminaotrs, or the Crimms. Since I never used them it makes me wonder why other people need them.

Zero-Limit, you say you ran PC1066 in it. How is that possible, isn't that a different amount of pins than the 16bit stuff.

They can run 133FSB, but I never personally did. The highest I ever ran was on a slotket with a P3 1ghz coppermine, 10x107. I ran that everyday for a few months. It was quite a bit faster than dual P2 400's.

From what I've heard there isn't too much of a difference between PC800 and PC100, but when you are using that riser card in the P3C-D you take a big hit on performance, so as Zero-Limit said, it's a day and night difference. We might not be able to tell memory bandwith and clock speed now since we have 6gb/s+ and 3ghz+, but when you are at 1ghz and lower you can tell.

Foxie3a said:

Zero-Limit, you say you ran PC1066 in it. How is that possible, isn't that a different amount of pins than the 16bit stuff.

Click to expand...

PC1066 is/was available in both 184pin 16-bit and 232pin 32-bit types. Obviously the PC3-D won't be using the extra OC overhead, that just happened to be what I had for it. No potential bottleneck that way .

Ok, I had to settle with 2 P-III 450's but everything appears to running smooth with windows xp and 192 mb of sd ram. Total $$'s put in to this system so far is $37. Not too bad so far.

I do have one issue and am not sure if it is an issue or not but need some insight. After inserting both of the 450's the system powered up withought any issue but gave no indication that there are 2 cpu's installed. I checked the bios as well and it shows CPU P-III 450. After loading a fresh install of XP PRO I checked under the Processors in device manager and it is only showing one CPU.

Can anyone provide some insight to let me know if this is normal or not?

mine said "Intel Pentium 2 400 (2)" ... Or something to that effect. If it's not telling you you have two at the post, then Windows won't see it either. In the device manager it'll show two processors.

Are both of the processors the same core? Maybe the steppings are too far off from eachother?

Keep in mind that's based on the i820. A good chipset, but with a faulty MCH (memory controller hub) and it is not recommended that you run SDRAM on it. RDRAM is good 'tho.

Under Device Management - Computer it should say "ACPI Multiproccessor PC"

Make sure MPS is set to 1.4 in BIOS too.

Pssst...It was the faulty MTH (Memory Translator Hub) and its ECC function that screwed up the reputation of both the i820 and i840. It caused major stability issues.

ASUS's SDRAM to RDRAM adapter card for the ASUS P3C-D didn't have ECC enabled and hence, it was perfectly fine with SDRAM.

I know...I own four P3C-D mobos with three of those adapters.
(no problems with either SDRAM or RDRAM...But there is no ECC function for SDRAM).

I'm selling them off now.

stmok said:

I'm selling them off now.
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Click to expand...

We try keeping for sale stuff in the classifieds section. All you need is 100 posts. The mods won't like seeing that link, I recommend getting rid of it.

I didn't know that the i820/840 was known to have a bad MCH. I didn't even know it officially supported SDRAM. I thought that it only worked with Rambus.

Ooops! OK, fixed.

Its not MCH...But MTH! (This chip does the actual translating of RDRAM signals to SDRAM). It sits between the MCH and Memory slots.

On the ASUS P3C-D, the MTH is a chip on the RDRAM TO SDRAM adapter. The adapter sits on the third slot closest to the AGP slot (as I recall).

The MTH is was the fly in i820/i840's soup...Then you had a$$wipes like Tom's Hardware Guide blow it into ridiculous proportions...As you know there was nothing wrong with i820/i840 with RDRAM...But it is too late...Two chipsets scarred for life.

stmok said:

Ooops! OK, fixed.

Its not MCH...But MTH!

Click to expand...

Oops, I made that same mistake.

But you're right - two perfectly good chipsets that were never really used. They were undoubtably the best dual PIII chipsets made.