Hello everyone,
I'm having a problem with a rather old board, a Chaintech Apogee 7VJL.
The pc setup is:
- Athlon XP 3000+ (175x13)
- 3x 512MB Corsair XMS PRO @350MHz
- ATI Radeon X1950PRO AGP
- Chaintech Apogee 7VJL
- Levicom VP550 (with an acrylic top, is actually fairly decent and recapped
on the secondary side with Panasonic caps)
- Club3D Theatron sound card
- USB 2.0 card with ALi chipset
- 2x 40GB Seagate HDD's
- 2x CD/DVD Combo drive
- 1x Floppy drive
Now, the problem is that the board randomly does not boot (about a third of the times). Sometimes runs rock solid and a day later it is an unstable piece of crap.
It is overclocked from a 166MHz FSB to a 175Mhz FSB, but it's got the same problems at the 166MHz FSB.
The instability comes mostly in the form of memory errors, CRC errors while extracting zip files, random rebooting, windows that can't find one of it's many "important" files at startup, hanging while posting and i think that the experienced users can fill this list with all the other problems that come with that.
But, sometimes it runs flawlessly, gaming, extracting and copying is not a problem at all then.
Raising the DRAM voltage, Chipset voltage, CPU Voltage and even the AGP voltage doesn't help. Sometimes it looks like it runs stable, and other times it runs only stable when the voltages are set to default.
Changing ram dividers, timings, different ram, nothing helps. Also swapping the GPU for 9600XT didn't help.
And now i hear you thinking, "It's obviously that nasty Levicom unit that can't even power a led strip while staying in-spec". But, i also tried it on a Supermicro ATX PSU with 550W that i use for extreme overclocking and even that didn't help a bit. Voltages on the Levicom unit are 12.6V, 4.99V and 3.33V on the major rails. Ripple shouldn't be a problem since it's recapped with pannies. The PSU also doesn't produce any coil whine or other noises that indicate oscillation.
You still here? Now comes the important part. The board is filled with C-grade caps. For the CPU vcore output purple G-Luxon (LW) caps, and for the rest green TEAPO with gold lettering. Ranging from 1500uF for the vcore input caps to 470uF caps for other smaller power delivery and filtering circuits.
None of the caps are bulged or lifted, they all look brand new actually. Could they still be faulty?
I'm having a problem with a rather old board, a Chaintech Apogee 7VJL.
The pc setup is:
- Athlon XP 3000+ (175x13)
- 3x 512MB Corsair XMS PRO @350MHz
- ATI Radeon X1950PRO AGP
- Chaintech Apogee 7VJL
- Levicom VP550 (with an acrylic top, is actually fairly decent and recapped
on the secondary side with Panasonic caps)
- Club3D Theatron sound card
- USB 2.0 card with ALi chipset
- 2x 40GB Seagate HDD's
- 2x CD/DVD Combo drive
- 1x Floppy drive
Now, the problem is that the board randomly does not boot (about a third of the times). Sometimes runs rock solid and a day later it is an unstable piece of crap.
It is overclocked from a 166MHz FSB to a 175Mhz FSB, but it's got the same problems at the 166MHz FSB.
The instability comes mostly in the form of memory errors, CRC errors while extracting zip files, random rebooting, windows that can't find one of it's many "important" files at startup, hanging while posting and i think that the experienced users can fill this list with all the other problems that come with that.
But, sometimes it runs flawlessly, gaming, extracting and copying is not a problem at all then.
Raising the DRAM voltage, Chipset voltage, CPU Voltage and even the AGP voltage doesn't help. Sometimes it looks like it runs stable, and other times it runs only stable when the voltages are set to default.
Changing ram dividers, timings, different ram, nothing helps. Also swapping the GPU for 9600XT didn't help.
And now i hear you thinking, "It's obviously that nasty Levicom unit that can't even power a led strip while staying in-spec". But, i also tried it on a Supermicro ATX PSU with 550W that i use for extreme overclocking and even that didn't help a bit. Voltages on the Levicom unit are 12.6V, 4.99V and 3.33V on the major rails. Ripple shouldn't be a problem since it's recapped with pannies. The PSU also doesn't produce any coil whine or other noises that indicate oscillation.
You still here? Now comes the important part. The board is filled with C-grade caps. For the CPU vcore output purple G-Luxon (LW) caps, and for the rest green TEAPO with gold lettering. Ranging from 1500uF for the vcore input caps to 470uF caps for other smaller power delivery and filtering circuits.
None of the caps are bulged or lifted, they all look brand new actually. Could they still be faulty?
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