Optiplex gx150 no boot

[370forlife]

Had this for years, ran great until today. Me and my friend were going to make a FTP server with it, so we were upgrading stuff on it. I took out the processor (1ghz p3 w/o heatspreader,) and put in a different p3 (1ghz w/ heatspreader,) we put in 256mb of ram (for now,) put in a xfx 440mx 64mb agp, had xp already installed on a 20gb wd hard drive, and it booted and ran just fine.

The board has all Rubycon caps. The power supply we are using is a Delta 200w (opened it up, very heavy and well built. NCC primaries and Taicon/Rubycon secondaries, none bulging)

Then I put a 512mb stick of pc133 I had in it and see if it would recognize it. It did, all 512mb showed up in the bios. Then it would not boot, it would get just before the xp loading screen and just go blank and the keyboard would freeze. Tried everything, going back to the old processor, the old ram, running on integraded video. Nothing, all the same.

Whats strange is this is the EXACT same thing my supermicro board was (and still is,) doing. No amounts of bios resets helps, either.

[Wizard]

Re: Optiplex gx150 no boot

Stop messing around trying and use knowledge on a chipset that it can do and no more. These board won't take 512MB sticks (815, had to be 256MB sticks).

The metal lid P3 are you SURE is correctly identified as tualatin core? Which is hard to determine with a mainboard that support it or not (takes research).

Get another board or junk it.

Cheers, Wizard

[370forlife]

Re: Optiplex gx150 no boot

no, its not a tualatin. Its one of the processors from my Abit VP6. Looked up the s spec, its a coppermine.

Stop messing around trying and use knowledge on a chipset that it can do and no more. These board won't take 512MB sticks (815, had to be 256MB sticks).

Thats the weird thing, it booted just fine into the bios with that 512mb stick and showed all 512mb.

Do you think using the 512mb screwed the board, as it worked fine with the 2 128's and now it won't boot with those either.

[Wizard]

Re: Optiplex gx150 no boot

Don't know. But just replace the board and use 256MB sticks (16 chips). 815 chipset aren't made for one stick 512MB for SURE as it won't use all the lines even it reports as such by luck.

Should had kept the bare die cpu in there. There are decent copper-bottom heatsinks for socket 370/ socket 462.

The dell's fan transfer from old heatsink to new heatsink. Or use generic fan short outer 2 pins together and use it as ground, center is 12V, leave one wire off the fan if it has rpm tach output. This done to fool the fan monitoring (it only checks for presence of fan is working or not, not as active rpm monitoring due to Dell fans only pulls down low when spinning, high when not spinning).

Cheers, Wizard