Sigh

drasnordrasnor Starship OperatorHawthorne, CA Icrontian
edited January 2004 in Folding@Home
The dual MP2000+ decided it has had enough of it's graphics card a couple days ago. It's at my house, waiting for me to come home and work on it this weekend. For now, it's offline and so my production is going to be about halved for this week.

That machine is starting to get on my nerves. It's probably my sister's fault. It always is. At least the ATI FireGL (forgot the designation, its on the 8500 core though) is still under warranty. According to my sister, the machine shows a blank blue screen when power is applied.

At least I'll have an opportunity to look at that malfunctioning DIMM slot to see if it's just dirty or it's genuinely fubar.

-drasnor :fold:

Comments

  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited November 2003
    Man, that sucks, d00d! I hope you get it straightened out soon.:) About a month ago, I had my 9700 pro croak on me and I had to rma it back to newegg. I'm presently getting ready to order a 9800 pro as a replacement though.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    This has been going simultaneously in Gen Hardware, but here's a status update:

    The graphics card, an ATi FireGL 8800, is just fine.
    One out of two Athlon MP2000+ processors are fine, the other is fubar.
    The system board, a Tyan Tiger MP (2460), is fubar.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • MrBillMrBill Missouri Member
    edited November 2003
    I thought I read about this somewhere else on the forums....


    Hope you get it all up and running again soon! :)
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    Yeah, me too. Is the Tyan at least under Warranty still?? Their long warranties are one thing nice about them. In this case, they do not hav to know that a defective CPU was also involved unless obvious things happened. I will NOT ask if you R&R'd the CMOS cell, this has been known to leave a board thinking it is a SINGLE CPU baord and the BIOS can get confused under those circumstances (two CPUs IN, one set in BIOS), ESPECIALLY if it has dead or almost dead CMOS cell in it. Result??? BIOS never posts, pulling one CPU works, but board will post with EITHER of the two CPUs in socket for CPU0 but NOT post when CPU0 and CPU1 are BOTH populated.

    FIX: New CMOS cell, reprogram BIOS to accept TWO CPUs, POSt time! If works, no board RAM and possibly no CPU RMA either. Oh, since board did not post, video card sits there showing the background and no info, but BIOS tried-- it might have been trying to say "program me, PLEASE!"

    John.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    What happened, according to my sister (it's technically her machine, though it folds for me) is that one day it just stopped booting up. You'd turn on the power and the fans would all spin up, but no POST and no video. Before that, it had been having intermittent problems with random shutdowns that seemed to be fixed by depopulating the first RAM bank. I tested each CPU individually in a cheap nForce2 board by trying to POST and boot Knoppix, and though both CPU's would POST, only one of the two CPU's would boot it.

    I went back and tried just the good CPU in the Tyan board, and it wouldn't give video or POST in either CPU socket.

    So you're saying Tyan will check my BIOS to see if I've been screwing with it? Good thing I haven't.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    No, saying a new CMOS battery and resetting CMOS programming in Setup might help. A dead CMOS cell can leave a box with invalid CMOS settings, although so can a malfunction that a BIOS cannot resolve. Try pulling CMOS cell before RMAing, typically those battery things are about $2.00 each US. BIOS might have "just tried harder" until it locked. No, not saying Tyan would say you messed with BIOS, saying that is first thing a tech troubleshooting a mobo SHOULD try (battery change).

    John.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    That's bizarre. I've only ever had to change clock batteries on a 386, a couple 486's, and a couple of 68k Mac's. The newest system I've ever had to change the battery on was my Power Macintosh 6500, but it doesn't use lithium batteries (alkalines). Comparatively speaking, my IBM PC300GL (circa 1996) is still on its original clock battery, a CR2032 lithium coin. I'll try replacing the Tyan's CR2032 battery though.

    edit: Re-reading your posts, I haven't ever removed the battery from this system. Additionally, there is no BIOS setting for number of CPU's; from what I've gathered it auto-detects when power is applied. When I say "no video", I mean it didn't even warm up the monitor out of DPMS-Off.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    Hard drive (80GB Western Digital Caviar w/ 8MB cache) is downgraded to non-functional. It doesn't appear to be spinning up and clicks when it tries to, and the BIOS in my test machine doesn't detect it. I have no idea what my sister did, but the death toll in her machine is getting bigger every day.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    EMP maybe? Holy moly that's a lot of stuff broken in one shot!
  • ketoketo Occupied. Or is it preoccupied? Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    Ya, (almost) definite electric problem system wide. PSU?
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    PSU is still good though, but I have yet to test all the PCI cards. The FireGL 8800 is still working, which is a good sign. When khan's Dell got a power surge, the first thing to go was his PCI bus and all his cards. The thing had a new surge suppressor, and all the other stuff connected to the strip still works.

    -drasnor :fold:

    P.S. my production sucks because I have no working folding machines. I had to take the two P3's down because they're HSF's are the AMD stocks and I have to RMA the AMD MP processors. My P4 isn't dedicated to Folding, it just gets the leftover 80% from when it's on (it's my primary desktop).
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    Ok, I went ahead and re-checked the PSU and omg...

    The PSU is ok... except for the 5V line. The 5V line was giving me 4.6V, which was screwing EVERYTHING up. The hard drive is OK, I just backed it up with another machine not using the demon PSU. I finally caught on when the machine using the bad PSU told me my was-working-yesterday IBM DeskStar 120GXP was dead. I'm going to re-check all the parts and see if they work after all.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited November 2003
    Well the undervoltage could have damaged some of the parts.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    I'm thinking that too. I'm going to go ahead and try to return both CPU's, since I want to have a matched set and they might not send me back an MP2000 with the same core as the one I have. BTW, when RMA'ing boxed CPU's, do they want the HSF back with it usually?

    -drasnor :fold:
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited November 2003
    I would think so but an email or phone call would be best to make sure.
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited November 2003
    I haven't ever RMA'd a proc but I think I remember reading that AMD uses the retail hsf to validate your retail proc. I'd suggest that you do like Marc said and call or email AMD about this to make sure.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Processors and PSU are on their way out, system board will be soon pending me getting the NewEgg invoice from my buddy badnf0. I bought the board off of him when he discovered he had to choose between new rims for his Benz (cough Geeky cough) and a dual MP system to replace his dual Celeron BP6.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited December 2003
    well ... at least the HD is okay :)
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Ok, processors are mailed. Tyan RMA request form is submitted, and Antec hasn't e-mailed back.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Phew.

    Antec PSU is back (new revision = yay!), Tyan S2460 board is back (new revision = yay!), both CPU's back (same old Palomino cores, different stock sinks). I'll put it together again sometime this week, but meanwhile...

    Most of the parts for my dual Opteron rig came December 31. Dual Opteron 248's, MSI Master2 FAR, 1GB Corsair TwinX 3200RE LLPT, new optical drives, 250GB hard drive. Still waiting on my PSU and dvd burner from zipzoomfly and a couple of MCX603's. Silly MSI and their Xeon-holed Socket478 HSRM for dual Opterons.

    -drasnor :fold:
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