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Am I Looking at a Dead Pentium 3 Board?

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Route44

Member
Joined
Nov 10, 2005
Location
Southern New Jersey
Okay guys I will try to keep shorter than War and Peace. My second rig is 6+ years old ASUS TUL2-C mobo w/P3 Tualatain 1.2 MHz cpu and 512 megs of PC133 RAM (Limited due to Intel's 815 chipset). This has been rock solid but in the last three 6 months I have been experiencing stability issues. MemTest showed no errors two months ago. Lately I have had two 0x35 error crashes and according to MS it means a driver has caused serious issues and may have damaged RAM. (No infections; system was clean) Whether it is memory, vid mem, etc. it isn't clear. On the second crash my system could not display on my monitor thus I couldn't even get into my BIOS nor did it load to Windows. Award BIOS beeps meant the video controller and/or video card was shot. So...

1. Borrowed three AGP cards from a buddy of mine because there was a very good chance my video card and even possibly my AGP slot was fried. The first one gave me the error codes when I powered on but the second actually allowed me to boot to the BIOS without the errors.

2. But when I get to the BIOS there are many settings that I couldn't change. I never ran into this before and one of them was the CPU frequency which was auto set by the board at 1.44 MHz. One problem: My cpu is a 1.2 MHz. The board overclocked and I had nothing to do with it. I couldn't access the v.core either.

3. This is a jumperless board. I have always had it set in the jumperless mode -- always. But what I failed to realize was that after I cleared the old CMOS and then decided to go with a new CMOS I accidently put the tab where it disabled the jumper free setting. Only when it is in the jumperless position can one set the BIOS manually; otherwise the board does alot of things for you and you can't change them.

4. So thinking that possibly my video card isn't shot I put my card back in and when I rebooted sure enough I could get into the BIOS. However, this could only happen when the jumper free was disabled. If I put it back to jumper free, again where I have had it for 6+ years, the same error beeps would occur and no video whatsoever. Weird.

5. So I decided to go with the jumperless disabled, set BIOS settings that I could, and see if I could get into Windows. Nothing doing.

6. It gets to the first screen, HD and CD Drive load and are recognized but the Floppy fails in which I am automatically back to the BIOS.

7. I disabled the floppy in the BIOS. No go because I still get the failure message on the first screen that pops up after exiting BIOS. I physically disconnect the floppy's power source and cable. Still no go.

8. I have tried every configurration you can think of. I read on the BIOS forwards and backwards. I could even flash the very last updated BIOS ASUS has for this board, if I only could get into Windows and more importantly I need my floppy drive for this.

9. So I reconnected my floppy and when I did no power whatsoever. The mobo led light is on but right now the system seems dead. I disconnected the floppy wondering if that might have been the cause but still no power.

I wish there was some way to know for certain if the mobo is dead. Something majorily isn't right. I really hate to have to spend money on another rig because we don't have it right now, but my family is in need of a second PC.

Any other thoughts or suggestions or am I looking at a dead motherboard and I need to bury it while playing taps? Thanks for taking the time reading this.
 
Also inspect the caps for bulging or leaking.

+1

And check 'em closely, too, since they aren't always obviously bad. I've had to replace caps on several of those boards (well... the CUSL2, but it's pretty much the same board).
 
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