Big Problem with self built laptop

I orderd a MSI S260 and when I first got it (it was just a shell, no cpu, ram, hard drive, or wireless) I plugged the baby in and turned it on. Since there was nothing in it really only some leds would light up and that would be it, even the moniter didn't even turn on. I found it strange that the moniter did not turn on but I didnt really think anything of it, i just assumed that the motherboard didnt fully turn on. Now when I popped my CPU, RAM, and hard drive in there, i could hear the fan working, and the hard drive working, and even the dvd writer opened and closed and read the cd. But again the moniter didn't turn on! I hooked it up to my crt and still nothing. I don't have a clue what happened. I might have fried the board by doing the pin mod (where u turn a 400mhz dothan into a 533... i had a 1.6 in there that i pin modded to 2.13) but it's been done MANY times by many people and I was VERY careful, when i opened the laptop up and took out the chip the wire was snug in the socket and it was also in the correct pin holes. I don't know whats up, i doubt that i fried my board using the pin mod, i think the motherboard of the laptop was screwed up to begin with and that why when i originally turned it on (without anything) my moniter didnt turn on.

I made sure that all the conenctions were correct for the moniter, unplugged everything and plugged it back in, but i experienced the same problem. I placed my stick of ram in the other socket, same problem. At this point I don't know what's broken. Any suggestions?

Maybe try removing the pin-mod and see if it will boot ? You could also attempt to find the bios reset function for that particular motherboard. Some of them will reset bios if you remove the power / battery and hold the power button for 30 seconds. Replace batter / power and boot back up. If that fails, you can remove power and battery, locate the cmos battery on the mobo, and disconnect it for about 30 seconds. What chip are you using the pin mod on ? Perhaps you have exceeded the chips fucntional clock speed and causing it to not post ? Powering on but no video does NOT really mean that the video is bad, the machine is simply failing to post. With no CPU and no memory a machine will NOT post, that is why you got no video when you first tried to power it up. If bios resetting fails, try re-seating memory, try different memory, try re-seating the cpu.

Hope any of this helps you,

J.

i unplugged the cmos battery for 1minute, took out the pin mod, reseated cpu, no post. Put in two sticks of 512, no post.

Could I have fried the mobo and my chip doing the pin mod? Or could I only fry my board doing that?

the chip i was using the pin mod with is a 1.6 2m sl7eg 400mhzfsb dothan... My msi uses the 915 chipset, so it should have worked without a hitch.

I don't think you fried your chip or your motherboard because of the pin mod, as my first attempt at doing the pin mod I thought the side of the chip was the top and thus I had the mod rotated 90 degrees... the computer turned on for 2 seconds and then abruptly turned off. after I realized what was wrong I modded the correct pins and I haven't had any problems since.


Well according to intel everything looks like it should work...
http://indigo.intel.com/compare_cpu/showchart.aspx?mmID=7690&familyID=7&culture=en-US

Hey take out the battery (not the cmos the main) and unplug the power and hold down the power button for 20-30 seconds and the cmos should be reset.


apparently there looks like you have Integrated graphics AND pci express according to intel's site at least... is it possible that there is a jumper to choose between the integrated graphics and the pci express graphics?

ok i got the laptop to post (it turns out there are jumpers to manually set the fsb speed) but THESE jumpers pose a very big problem. The PIN mod doesn't WORK! I tried multiple jumper settings and each time either it wouldnt post or it would recognize my chip as a 1.6... I'm going to redo the pin mod with a fresh piece of wire and see how it works out.

sorry i cant help you but maybe you can help me, do the MSI barebones us the stock hs&f or do they have there own? thanks, gl with your problem

just set the jumper to 533 mhz and don't worry about it, it should not effect the pin mod...

i also checked into your sspec of your proc and everything checked out perfectly fine there...

here's an extera pinout pic for extera refrence if you need it...


you should be jumping pins c16 to b16 OR you can also get the same result jumping pins c15 to c16.

ALSO some types of wire have a micro film coating on them which can prevent low voltage shorts... try scratching up the wire just in case it has some type of coating on it.

wfarid said:

ok i got the laptop to post (it turns out there are jumpers to manually set the fsb speed) but THESE jumpers pose a very big problem. The PIN mod doesn't WORK! I tried multiple jumper settings and each time either it wouldnt post or it would recognize my chip as a 1.6... I'm going to redo the pin mod with a fresh piece of wire and see how it works out.

Click to expand...

Aha. you have jumpers. try the jumpers without the pin mod. you may be pleasantly suprised. I've heard of this working on some models.

*edit* Hrmm. A little googling shows i may be wrong on that. I'd give it a shot anyway though.

J.

^^^ as far as I know intel started making the Front side bus backwards compatable with slower FSB processors while still retaining the Higher FSB. which means that the processor bus and the FSB are independent and setting one does not affect the other just as long as the FSB is FASTER OR EQUAL in speed to the processor bus it should work.

thats a rough pic of the hsf that comes with the msi s260 (aka 1012 if ur getting the barbones). It uses and lg fan which i found kinda strange. The really great part about is the ventilliation--its one of the best i've seen in ANY notebook... Very well done on msi's part. Btw I lapped that heatsink a bit so if it's shiny thats because of me (if you want a better pic go to the msi website and click on the msi 1012 and then click on the installation pdf). I got the barebones (no chip, ram, hd, wireless card) for $673 shipped from pagecomputers.com . It comes with an sd card reader, which was a pleasant surprise, u.fl anteneas (if u do get a wireless card get the atheros mini pci a/b/g 5004x) and a dvd burner. The laptop is all white so its pretty sexy looking. I tried doing the jumpers without the pin mod--it didnt work. I also tried doing the pin mod with the jumpers set at 533-- didn't post. but when i set the jumpers back down to 400 it recognized my chip as a 1.6... Ill play around with the pin mod some more and try the other grounding pin. I'll keep you guys posted.

hey thanks for the help man, as reading the manual i saw this. the left side is the jumper settings for a 533 dothan and the right is the 400fsb. dont know if you tried that but thought id throw it in there

I think theoritically you guys are totally right. I should just set the jumpers to 533 and then do the pin mod and it should work. And if I do the pin mod right, the chip shouldn't function in the 400mhz mode. However, this isn't the case. The laptop doesnt post at 533mhz jumper settings but it does work @ 400mhz and it recognizes my chip as a 1.6. I tried the different grounding pin, tried scratching up the wire, tried making the wire longer and nothing! At this point I don't know what to do, ill look into doing the actual pins themselves. I'll also looking into flashing the laptop with a new bios, although I doubt that will make a difference....


it's worked for too many people, so if it doesn't work for me i'm going to be pretty ****ed.

you should not have to loop the pins themselves... that won't change anything... I am going to look into the Intel whitepapers on your chipset this evening, maybe I can figure something out...

If you lived a little closer to me I would have let ya borrow my 533mhz chip to see if that would work or not but a few thousand miles is a little much...

have you checked for bent pins on the processor?

ok i'm just making a little chart to see if we missed an option...

533mhz set with pin mod --> don't post
533mhz set without pin mod ? <--- did you try this one?
400mhz set with pin mod -->don't post
400mhz set without pin mod --> runs at 400mhz


ya know it took me 3 tries to get the pinmod to work on my computer... the first time I wasn't looking at the letters and numbers on sides of the socket and I had the mod rotated... and the second time I fogot to tighten down the socket locking screw...

533mhz set with pin mod ---> no post
533mhz set without pin mod -> no post
400mhz set with pin mod ---> post but recognizes it as a 1.6
400mhz set without pin mod->posts recognizing the chip as 1.6

the pins on the chip are perfect, no bent pins or anything. The msi s260/1012 uses the 915gm chipset BUT it uses ddr ram and not ddr2. It can handle a max speed of 400mhz ddr ram (up to 2 gigs of it though). Could that possibly pose a problem? I don't think it should, but who knows.

i found this, although it still doesn't solve the problem or answer any questions... http://www.msicomputer.com/NB/pr/NBfaq.asp

update: i tried doing both grounds at once, and i still had the same problem... At this point I don't know what to do. It could just be me doing the pin mod wrong or something hardware wise with the msi...

http://www.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts/305264.htm

i'm still working on it... i got buisy and my dialsuck is being stupid... this is the whitepaper i'm looking into... feel free to look yourself... starting page 309 i think...


***EDIT***

OK after through investigation... this is the only thing I can find that could even remotelly cause the problem (most likelly not)


Ok you know the 4 pin dip switches right (the ones that switch between 533 and 400)... well I found something that remotelly resembles those jumper settings and it seems that only 3 of them are needed to set the FSB The fourth Switch seems to be for something else...




I warn you that I might not be correct as most of theese things are taken at a fairly high risk because those whitepapers can be a little hard to interperate if your not an intel engineer...


ok looking at the screenshot it seems that the first 3 switches are for the FSB and the 4th is for something else (I DON"T REALLY KNOW BECAUSE THERE ARE LIKE 8 DIFFERENT THINGS THAT COULD BE THROWN IN THERE)

What I want you to do is put the switches in the 400mhz position and then start from left to right and flip them all to the 533mhz position except for the far right switch because it may be setting a setting that is causing your computer not to boot (for example enabling DDR2 or Disabling support for processors with 2 megs of cache)


there was a list down the page and the two circled are just examples of bad things that could cause your computer not to boot...



This is it... this is the last possible thing I can possibly think of... other than a simple mistake like thinking the side of the cpu is the top (THERE ARE NUMBERS AND LETTERS MARKED ON THE MOTHERBOARD JUST IN CASE YOU DIDEN'T NOTICE) or like forgetting to tighten the locking screw... other than that I feel sorry for ya man...


*****EDIT #2*****

ok after re re looking everthing over... I don't think that this is even for the 4 switch thing... First of all it says that the tri switch speed selector is only for the GMS and i'm pretty sure that you have the GM and unless MSI swapped the first two pins... msi schematic for the right pin combination VS the intel whitepaper schematic is different for the 400mhz but it is the same for 533mhz. If you felt like a dare devil you could still try it but I don't gaurentee anything...



also I was reading the very unimpressive manual downloadable online and I got the idea that maybe the comp won't boot if the cpu fan ain't plugged in... again I'm just TOSSING IDEAS AT YA, but I'm running low on Ideas...

yea i tried various jumper combos , it didnt work. Although u are right, u dont need to set all the jumpers to the right positions to get it to post, the problem is getting the pin mod to work. thanks for the help, i guess we know now that the pin mod doesn't work for msi whitebooks. I think the main reason is b/c they use ddr ram, although i don't know how that factors in.

yea i just bought a 2.0, 533mfsb, 2megs cache for 195 off ebay. Thats not bad considering I paid 140 for my 1.6... oh and a really off topic question, my laptop has 2 gigs of ram, so is it ok if i just disable the pagefile?

I don't really think that it's possible to disable the pagefile... no matter even if you have 20 gigs o ram... i'm pretty sure windows moves parts of the pagefile onto the ram automatically and that is for system recources required to run a certian program and then there are the actual programs themselves that load up into the ram (they get their own individual spots on the ram now instead of being just part of one big file)...

the swapfile has been eliminated but the pagefile remains...



let's put it this way...
I have 2 gigs of ram also and currently I'm running a 1GB VIRTUAL RAM DRIVE... when I check the windows pagefile it says that my pagefile is consuming 1.2GB but only 100 megs of that are on the harddrive... Yet my lappie is as fast loading stuff as any other computer out there.

If you go into the 3d mark team forum... there is a stickey in there with a registry hack (the threads about mods you can do to improve your score) which will force windows to put more of the paging file on the ram than on the drive...



I am really interested in seeing if the comp will boot with the 533mhz chip... IF IT DOES BOOT AS A 533MHZ CHIP INSTEAD OF A 400MHZ CHIP THEN THAT MEANS SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH YOUR PIN MOD (or your 1.6 can't get to 2.1 and thus is running at 400 instead of 533)...