Weirdest dad gum experiance and frustrating as h*ll
I have built a few thousand PC's and one thing that never fails is ... sure as you start thinking you had seen it all someone throws a monkey wrench into the works again.
Heres the scenario. I build boxs for buddies and do all the software and build the PC etc... for a very small fee. They pick and buy all the parts and I just build it.
I have one friend that dumped off parts again and I had sorta not enjoyed doing his as he loves those top of the line Soyo dragons and I thought they were sort of a pain and not much better then stuff half the price to boot. It has two wd 8mb 80gb drives to be raided off a hpt and the works. Big antec full tower case etc.. So I slap the hardware together and its got one of the older Palomino core 2100+'s and a stick of pc2700 generic stuff he wanted the dram at 166 of course. So I put it together and boot and it see's the cpu as like a 1500+ or something. The cpu bus is at 100 not 133. So I set the memory and the cpu seed and reboot. Won't boot. So I clear cmos and go back in and try leaving the memory at 133 and again it won't reboot. Hmmmmm. Pull everything out of the case and have it on the bench now with just cpu, memory and motherboard. Repeat process over and over. If I bump it up slowly OC'ing it FROM 100 not 133 I can sorta get it running up to 120 on the cpu bus. If I slow everythhing in the whole thing down way way down... I mean no 0 wait sates on the pci bus not DMA on the ide etc... I can get it to sorta try and boot and tryt to install XP. Won't ever make it though formating the raid.. I try one of his disks and then just the other. Disable the raid and all the other sound, lan, usb etc... One cdrom and just one ide drive... I mean I am pulling out my hair. Give up for a couple days and go to try again. Seems to get weirder and weirder the longer its turned on? I keep suspecting the ram but it does the same thing with a stick of my pc2700 Samsung thats been close to 200 I think.. His passes docmemory even in that motherboard for hours also.... Replaced the PSU with one of my big ones. Same thing. Its getting errors reading off the XP cd now. I mean it will hardly boot one out of three times. I burn more cdroms. I install from that same cdrom disk and cdrom drive to another computer and it works perfect. I have replaced the cheap round cables with new ata100 flat ones. I mean it had all the flaky signs of memory. IRQ_NOT_ LESS_Than errors... Page fault in non paged area crap.. And remeber I still can't make it run teh cpu at 133fsb either. Its either at 100 or OC'd up to 120 or so. tried adjusting the voltage on the cpu and memory up and down a little. Nope its just laughing at me. I finally quit letting the MB set the cpu ration and I set it manualy and it finally comes up as a 2100+ but its still acting bizare.
I finally decided it had to be the sh*tty MB doing this. I pulled his cpu and memory out and I dumped into a little ECS motherboard I have in a case as a test rig. Boot right up and acts fine. See's the cpu right off as a 2100+ and its running at 133fsb now and memory at 166. Looking good baby. Boots right up off the same cd and cdrom just happy as can be. gets to where I pick the disk and partiton and when I hit return I get a IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN again. Ok so well its got all the crap in the bios enabled. Sound, lan, usb and I have a gigabit nic in also. I pull the gigabit and disable the sound. Same thing.. This is getting old. I disable EVERYTHING ELSE and set plug and play OS to NO and reset the escd. Same thing. Ok so I swap in his other WD drive. You know maybe just maybe ??? Nope it does it again....
Now I have never ever had a new XP cpu act this way to me but ???? I had everything disabled in a known good MB and using my good memory and????
I stick his memory back in and go grab a 2000+ tbred from another box. SOB boots and installs XP perfect. So I pop that cpu in his and his memory and all back into the Soyo and the motherboard boots and sees my cpu perfectly. Boots off the same cd and cdrom drive it was giving read erros with and runs straight thru a windows xp install onto the raid controller and everything. I just kept assuming..... and assuming.... based on 20 years of doing this stuff and based on all the signs...
Stinking flaky cpu. I had not had a new cpu that booted and ran and even showed such a widely varying degree of symptoms from hour to hour and in one board and then acted totaly differnt in another MB. Still unstable but at least it seemed to be running right. If I hadn't seen it be so flaky for a couple days in the Soyo I would not of suspected the cpu when it was in my ecs. Just acted totaly differant.
lesson here in this rambling mess today is DON'T ASSUME because you have seen it a few times before and you think you know everything like I did.
Tex
Heres the scenario. I build boxs for buddies and do all the software and build the PC etc... for a very small fee. They pick and buy all the parts and I just build it.
I have one friend that dumped off parts again and I had sorta not enjoyed doing his as he loves those top of the line Soyo dragons and I thought they were sort of a pain and not much better then stuff half the price to boot. It has two wd 8mb 80gb drives to be raided off a hpt and the works. Big antec full tower case etc.. So I slap the hardware together and its got one of the older Palomino core 2100+'s and a stick of pc2700 generic stuff he wanted the dram at 166 of course. So I put it together and boot and it see's the cpu as like a 1500+ or something. The cpu bus is at 100 not 133. So I set the memory and the cpu seed and reboot. Won't boot. So I clear cmos and go back in and try leaving the memory at 133 and again it won't reboot. Hmmmmm. Pull everything out of the case and have it on the bench now with just cpu, memory and motherboard. Repeat process over and over. If I bump it up slowly OC'ing it FROM 100 not 133 I can sorta get it running up to 120 on the cpu bus. If I slow everythhing in the whole thing down way way down... I mean no 0 wait sates on the pci bus not DMA on the ide etc... I can get it to sorta try and boot and tryt to install XP. Won't ever make it though formating the raid.. I try one of his disks and then just the other. Disable the raid and all the other sound, lan, usb etc... One cdrom and just one ide drive... I mean I am pulling out my hair. Give up for a couple days and go to try again. Seems to get weirder and weirder the longer its turned on? I keep suspecting the ram but it does the same thing with a stick of my pc2700 Samsung thats been close to 200 I think.. His passes docmemory even in that motherboard for hours also.... Replaced the PSU with one of my big ones. Same thing. Its getting errors reading off the XP cd now. I mean it will hardly boot one out of three times. I burn more cdroms. I install from that same cdrom disk and cdrom drive to another computer and it works perfect. I have replaced the cheap round cables with new ata100 flat ones. I mean it had all the flaky signs of memory. IRQ_NOT_ LESS_Than errors... Page fault in non paged area crap.. And remeber I still can't make it run teh cpu at 133fsb either. Its either at 100 or OC'd up to 120 or so. tried adjusting the voltage on the cpu and memory up and down a little. Nope its just laughing at me. I finally quit letting the MB set the cpu ration and I set it manualy and it finally comes up as a 2100+ but its still acting bizare.
I finally decided it had to be the sh*tty MB doing this. I pulled his cpu and memory out and I dumped into a little ECS motherboard I have in a case as a test rig. Boot right up and acts fine. See's the cpu right off as a 2100+ and its running at 133fsb now and memory at 166. Looking good baby. Boots right up off the same cd and cdrom just happy as can be. gets to where I pick the disk and partiton and when I hit return I get a IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN again. Ok so well its got all the crap in the bios enabled. Sound, lan, usb and I have a gigabit nic in also. I pull the gigabit and disable the sound. Same thing.. This is getting old. I disable EVERYTHING ELSE and set plug and play OS to NO and reset the escd. Same thing. Ok so I swap in his other WD drive. You know maybe just maybe ??? Nope it does it again....
Now I have never ever had a new XP cpu act this way to me but ???? I had everything disabled in a known good MB and using my good memory and????
I stick his memory back in and go grab a 2000+ tbred from another box. SOB boots and installs XP perfect. So I pop that cpu in his and his memory and all back into the Soyo and the motherboard boots and sees my cpu perfectly. Boots off the same cd and cdrom drive it was giving read erros with and runs straight thru a windows xp install onto the raid controller and everything. I just kept assuming..... and assuming.... based on 20 years of doing this stuff and based on all the signs...
Stinking flaky cpu. I had not had a new cpu that booted and ran and even showed such a widely varying degree of symptoms from hour to hour and in one board and then acted totaly differnt in another MB. Still unstable but at least it seemed to be running right. If I hadn't seen it be so flaky for a couple days in the Soyo I would not of suspected the cpu when it was in my ecs. Just acted totaly differant.
lesson here in this rambling mess today is DON'T ASSUME because you have seen it a few times before and you think you know everything like I did.
Tex
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Comments
"Please Mr. Wizard??? Just one more time and I promise I won't jack you around again"
(grin)
Tex
KingFish