Friend of mine has a Pentium 4 2.66Ghz ( socket 478 ) in an ASUS P4PE motherboard. he is running Windows XP Home SP3 with 1GB RAM in which this motherboard has 3 RAM slots and there are a pair of matching generic unknown brand 512MB DDR 333Mhz sticks placed into slots 1 and 3 with slot 2 empty.
So here is how this motherboard is picky:
1.) I have a bunch of old DDR RAM laying around but only a few 266Mhz slicks and the rest are 400Mhz DDR sticks. I tried to add a 512MB DDR 400Mhz Kingston stick to this system after confirming online that this stick can run at 333Mhz underclocked. His system will not post with this 400Mhz stick placed in there. So I then tried other brand 400Mhz sticks that were 512MB and 256MB to see if I could give him a free memory upgrade to either 1.5GB or 1.25GB of RAM, but it still would not post with any of these in that 2nd slot. I then tested that 2nd slot by moving the stick from slot 3 to slot 2 and it booted with no issues so I know that memory slot is good. I then removed the 2 unknown brand 512MB sticks and placed a single 512MB 400Mhz stick into the board and tried to boot and still no post. I then dug out an old system I have that takes 266/333/400Mhz DDR to test the sticks and the sticks were fine with memtest86, so this motherboard is extremely picky and must require 266 or 333Mhz only. And I was hesitant in adding the 266Mhz stick into slot 2 with his other RAM because if it does work while it would give him more memory, it would decrease the system performance. So until I find him a 333Mhz stick such as on ebay I guess he is stuck with 1024MB RAM when max RAM supported is 2GB.
2.) Board CPU support suggests some 800Mhz FSB Prescott CPU support with FSB overclock, but the site is broken to give details on what info use to be there here at:
http://support.asus.com/Cpusupport/List.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=P4PE&p=1&s=15 So I had a P4-3 GHz (800 FSB, L2 cache:512KB, HT, D1/M0) which is same as listed in supported under the overclock support and upon swapping out the CPU and booting there is a black screen and then siren like noise from internal speaker and then the Female Voice from the BIOS complaining about CPU failure.
**** Now this motherboard has a very strange way of powering the CPU, it has an onboard male P-connector for 5V and 12V, and so I figured maybe the reason why its failing the CPU post diagnostic is because the no name power supply is not able to power the more watt demanding 3Ghz HT CPU vs the prior 2.66Ghz single core, and so I swapped out the no name 300watt power supply with a known good spare 350 watt modern PSU and made sure the CPU P-connector was plugged in and booted it up and got the same result. Looked all over for any info on "HOW" people got the 3Ghz CPU to work in this board and one detail I noticed was that the BIOS version was 1002 and the CPU support for the 3Ghz required 1005 or newer. And so I swapped the 2.66ghz back into the motherboard and it booted up correctly, I then had to dig for some floppy disks in storage that I havent used a floppy in almost 8 years because the BIOS Flash utility only would run from a floppy disk ( or I suppose I could have made a bootable CD with the utility but I didnt want to spend any extra time on this than necessary ), so with 1.44MB floppy disk in hand I formatted it to be bootable with Windows XP Home, and then copied the aflash utility to it and the 1007 version of the BIOS flash to make it the most up to date it could possibly be for CPU support. Flashed with no problems and booted it back up with the original 2.66Ghz P4. Then shutdown and swap of the CPU to the 3Ghz and then right back where I started with the Female Voice at post that there is a CPU failure. So removed the 3Ghz CPU and placed this CPU into a 3.2Ghz socket 478 motherboard system I have to test the 3Ghz HT CPU and the CPU is perfectly fine. Place the 3.2Ghz CPU back into my old spare system and place the 2.66Ghz back into his system because unless I find anything new such as a jumper setting etc, this system obviously is not going to boot off of that 3Ghz CPU even though its in the support list and now the BIOS is version 1007.
3.) He had a Geforce 4 MX 440 AGB 8x video card with 128MB VRAM. I have 2 x XFX Brand Geforce 6200 8x AGP video cards with 256MB VRAM, so I figured I might as well give him a free upgrade to the 6 series GPU from the older 4 series GPU, and everything seemed ok at first. I then downloaded the 307.xxx version from nvidia for this card as for thats the last version for the 6200 for Windows XP 32-bit. Went to install that driver and it went through the install process and then failed. Rebooted system and it was running off of Windows generic video driver with 800x600 max res. I then tried again and 307.xxx failed again. I then downloaded version 306.xxx from nvidia and tried that, and that installed successfully. It then requested a reboot and so I rebooted and everything seemed well. Now he had res support beyond 1024x768 even though he runs at 1024x768 and the nvida icon was in the tray with utility etc.
So then he decided to try out some facebook flash games with it and surprisingly the flash games are running much worse now with the Geforce 6200 video card than the Geforce 4 MX440. This makes absolutely no sense.
So I then downloaded and ran Passmark on his system with the 6200 card installed and wrote down the scores for the CPU and the GPU since the 30-day trial doesnt allow of saving or printing info. I then shutdown the system and placed the Geforce 4 mx 440 card back in and it surprisingly ran without complaints with the newer 306.xxx driver. Ran passmark again and wrote down the CPU and GPU results.
Results were that the CPU with the Geforce 6200 installed dropped 5 points from like 214 to 209 and the video card showed a score 30 points higher than the Geforce 4 mx440. Ran the test again between both cards to make sure the numbers wouldnt change and got same results.
Swapped 6200 back into system and also noticed that the graphics refresh seems to lag some with the 6200 with taring of windows when moving windows around on the desktop.
So for the fact that I have 2 of these video cards, i swapped that 6200 out with another and got no surprise ... the same results with screen taring of windows.
Tried both of these cards in another older system I have with AGP slot and the cards run perfectly fine on the other computer so I know the video cards are fine and its pointing to an issue with friends system
After 4 hours too many wasted on this system I offered my friend another system that I have that is a 2.8Ghz P4 for free, but he didnt want it. He wanted to stick with his 12 year old beast.
Lastly I used a XP Home SP3 slipstream to reinstall Windows clean with his system key so there is no potential of malware etc and then reinstalled video driver 306.xxx and still same issue remains with the 6200.
I swapped the Geforce 4 MX440 back into the system and it was back to behaving again although a lesser powerful GPU than the 6200.
Anyone have any suggestions on what I may have missed? I cant imagine a Geforce 6200 being a wrong pairing to a Pentium 4 2.66Ghz with 333RAM as for I ran this video card on a Athlon XP 2800+ 2.08Ghz years ago and no problems with that and that was also 333FSB RAM.
My thoughts are if I had some 333Mhz RAM to test this system with I'd try that next to see if the generic no name RAM has any relation to the video card issues just in case they are the cause, but the motherboard is one picky old board which is surprising of an ASUS board, although its an old oddball motherboard with P-connector CPU power and a Bios that talks to you at boot with POST successful and OS now booting in Female Voice. This computer he bought from a mail order gaming computer manufacturer in which he paid like $1300 back in 2003 or 2004 for this system, and hadnt upgraded anything until recent attempts with my free parts and time..
