Help with Dual Coppermine on BP6

swampwater
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Help with Dual Coppermine on BP6

Post by swampwater »

Hi everyone,

I've gotten two Coppermine 1000E processors and two Powerleap Neo-S370 adapters and I've done the modifications to get it to boot (Broken trace on Neos, wire bridge the sockets, replace EC10 capacitor to 1500uF/6.3v). Everything boots fine, however Windows 2000 does not boot, and if it does boot, it runs for a few minutes and then starts showing anomolies and then gives a bluescreen.

When it does boot, motherboard monitor reports that the VTT (Core 1) seems to not drop more than 1.48v, but I'm not sure if that's what is causing the problem.

A single CuMine 1000E works flawlessly on the BP6, of course.

Would it be worthwhile to do the other mods, such as the VRM mod on Yoichiro's website? Or is there anyone else out there that has had a similar problem?
BCN
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Location: Barcelona, Spain
Contact:

Post by BCN »

try lower fsb and see if it helps
Dual C366@550MHz 1.90V :) (History)
yet single PIII-S 512Kb L2 cache at 1400MHz@700MHz
BP6 (not modded yet)
256MB PC133 C2
GF4Ti4200-8x
Maxtor 2x60Gb - all on promise ATA133
Lite-On LTR 40125S@48125W!!!
Plus P4 system
InactiveX
BeOS Forever
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Post by InactiveX »

What sort of cooling do you have on the northbridge chip?
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swampwater
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Post by swampwater »

I've got it running a single 1.0GHz right now, and it is super stable, running for 2 days straight.

I'll try reducing the FSB and see if that makes any difference.

So far I've got nothing else other than the stock heatsink on the 440BX chip. I will find a fan to addon to the stock heatsink in a few days.
davd_bob
Confused
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Post by davd_bob »

swampwater wrote:I've got it running a single 1.0GHz right now, and it is super stable, running for 2 days straight.

I'll try reducing the FSB and see if that makes any difference.

So far I've got nothing else other than the stock heatsink on the 440BX chip. I will find a fan to addon to the stock heatsink in a few days.

AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!
Not good.
The "Greene" doesn't even have grease to help carry the heat to the HS.

You didn't mention what FSB you are running. If 66FSB you might be ok but if you are going to 100FSB you NEED to use grease and put a fan on it. Looking at the investment in parts and effort I would suggest just getting a HSF designed for video cards or chipsets and doing the job right. After that you will probably get to run dual-CPUs on 100-110FSB depending on the cards and devices connected to your IDE ports.
There are *almost* no bad BP6s. There are mostly bad caps.

No BP6s remaining
Athlon 2800
Sempron 2000
ViaCPU laptop with Vista.(Works great after bumping ram to 2Gig)
P-III 850@100
jaybird
Posts: 301
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2002 9:21 pm

Post by jaybird »

Do yourself a BIG favor, goto ebay, search for "mini-peltier", spend $4 to $5 USD, after you put Arctic Silver under "greenie", tie device to "greenie" with a plastic cable tie and watch your BX cool way down!

I have actually seen on start-up, a drop of 20 Deg. F!

My BX runs at between 85 Deg. F and 99 Deg. F with dual PIII 1100E's @ 110 FSB.

With out it I couldn't even get into Windows before it would lock up on me!

I use the same setup on my dual PIII Gigabyte server mobo and the Via chipset NEVER goes over 100 Deg. F even with both CPU's running at above 80% load!

Regards,

jaybird

BP6, ver 1 mobo
EC10 mod
regulator mod
moded NEO 370's
ZIF sockets rewired & cut trace
2, 1100E's 1100/256/100/1.75v CPU's @ 110 fsb
GlobalWIN FEP-32 heatsinks w/72W Peltiers, air cooled only!
3 sticks 256meg PC133 RAM
Matrox G400 32meg dual hd vid card
SBLive Platinum 5.1 (original, not Audigy) sound card
Adaptec SCSII card for Microtek X6EL scanner
WinTV GO! analog capture card
SIIG multipurpose card(firewire/USB/ATA100/RAID)
10/100 NIC
4 optical drives:
Lite-On 24X 52X 24X 'burner
Panasonic DVD-R/RAM burner
ZEN Multi-scan 52X TrueX CD-ROM dirve
Pioneer S104 DVD-ROM drive
dual ViewSonic 21" CRT's
Cambridge 2500 5.1 home theater surround sound system
Super Micro 750A server case with LOTS of fans! (sounds like a 747 taking off)

I use it as a backup to my dual Gigabyte system (I do video editing, DVD authoring and burning)

Regards,

jaybird
swampwater
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Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Post by swampwater »

Sorry about the lateness in reply, but I had to put my project aside for a while but I've got some spare time again, so I'm back at it :D

I put some arctic silver on the greenie and a 486 cooling fan on it. It seems to be a little more stable, I can get farther into the Windows 2000 boot process, but still bluescreens or just hangs. Running the system at 66MHz bus is rock solid, but not at 100MHz, Windows refuses to boot.

I am now seriously looking into getting one of those mini-peltiers from eBay now, since they seem relatively cheap.

Is there anything I should know about installing it on to the BP6? Could there possibly be any moisture problems while running the peltier? Any comments/suggestions are welcome :)
jaybird
Posts: 301
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2002 9:21 pm

Post by jaybird »

Have you done the regulator mod? What Rev (1.0 or 1.1?) and what Version (.40 or .41?) board are you using?

My first BP6 was the same way until I did the regulator mod.

Regards,

jaybird
swampwater
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Post by swampwater »

I've got a Rev 1.0 Version .40

I haven't done any regulator mods so far. Which regulator mod are you refering to? The Q6 VTT mod in the articles section of BP6.com or the regulator mod from Yoichiro's site?
jaybird
Posts: 301
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2002 9:21 pm

Post by jaybird »

Based on your information you need to goto "Yoichiro's" site, that's where I got my information. You need a LM317T regulator (in stock at most Radio Shack's, about $2.99 USD) and don't forget the required capacitor per Yoichiro's site that goes with the regulator mod, worked for me :D !

Regards,

jaybird

OBTW, I'm about to mod my 3rd BP6, one died (of old age? :wink: ) and I killed 1 buy leaving the TEC's on after I shut down the system (fried my CPU's :oops: ).

Why keep doing it? It's relativley cheap and once done and working it will run rings around any Via Apollo chipset and I keep learning things even though this board is "obsolete" and besides, I can't afford anything else at this time :wink: !
swampwater
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Post by swampwater »

Yoichiro's site says that the best combination is the LM338T and a 1500uF EC10 capacitor. I've already replaced the EC10 with a 1500uF cap, but should I use the LM338T or the LM317T?

I just hope I don't kill the board in the process of doing this mod.
jaybird
Posts: 301
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2002 9:21 pm

Post by jaybird »

I believe if you look at the chart (I may be wrong) it says for a rev. .40 board use a LM317T and for a rev. .41 use the LM338T.

Regards,

jaybird
swampwater
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Post by swampwater »

Looks like you're right. He never used the LM338T with the .40 revision. So for the sake of doing things that we know will work, I'll use the LM317T as well :)
swampwater
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Post by swampwater »

I've done the VTT mod on Yoichiro's site and Windows 2000 still starts up with a bluescreen with 100MHz FSB. I've tried giving more voltage to the CPUs (went up to 1.85v) but still gives me the same result, although sometimes it makes it further into the boot process with more voltage.

Any suggestions now? I've got a 486 fan on the greenie with arctic silver between it and the 440BX. The machine runs at 66MHz FSB with both processors with no problem, but I would love to run at 100MHz.
jaybird
Posts: 301
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2002 9:21 pm

questions on PIII conversion

Post by jaybird »

Well, you may have hit "the luck of the draw", or as I choose to call it "the wall" ,I know, I have on a number of BP6's.

It just simply won't work!

Other things to do and/or look at:

Power suplies; I added a second PS (parallel, see this web site) and I went from 100FSB stable to 104, small but it was a gain.

RAM tests; (docmemory.com) found one bad chipset, changed out and system is more stable.

Software problems; Internet Explorer caused crashes, switched to WildFire and it helped, now told "opera" is even better, testing at this point.

USB modem on a 4 port hub caused a problem, went directly to 1 USB port and others such as printer to a hub and things got better.

Hardware and driver issues; I'm just starting on this but we all must remember, this board was designed for "single cpu operation" only, what ever we get out of it is only a "bonus".

At this point in time with this board and these 366's, 550 into FireFox, goto bp6fsb to 104, 106 then surf. 550 boot then to bp6fsb and 106 then to what ever, burn-in tests to 594 stable but unstable in windows apps.

(have tried matched and lapped 366's, 400's, 433's 466's and 500's), best stable combo to date: 366's at 571 (104 fsb)

OS options; I've found far less problems with WIN2K Pro & SP4 than any other version of windows, PERIOD!

To answer your question, its' up to you for VRM, it may work, it may not, but if it were me and I had already gone this far I would go fo it!

It all comes down to how much time/money and/or satisfaction do you get from doing this?

I'm semi-retired so I REALLY enjoy the challange (my "second" system is a P4 D, 2.8 gig cpu, 2 gig of ram, 200 gig hard drive, 256 meg vid card, 7.1 suround system, and a Avermedia PVR 250 card as well as MicroSoft Multimedia XP.) all paid for my my "boss" :)

Just as a "note", I did luck-out one time only; dual 1100E's @ 110 fsb for 4 years, am trying to duplicate but at this time its' like looking for the "needle in a hay-stack".

Regards and good luck,

jaybird
swampwater
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Post by swampwater »

Thanks for your feedback, jaybird, you have been most helpful :)

I will try another power supply, I think the one I am currently using may not have enough power. If that does not work, I will find another BP6 and try again. Since I have all the expensive parts already, I might as well keep trying :P
g0fvt
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Joined: Mon Jul 29, 2002 3:32 pm
Location: Hertfordshire UK

Post by g0fvt »

Any progress on this? Would be good to see another dual P3 one up and running!
swampwater
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Post by swampwater »

Looking for another BP6 to mod for dual PIII. The boards are getting very rare now. Currently, I'm using my existing BP6 with the dual PIII 1GHz chips running at 66MHz FSB.
Abit BX133-RAID - 1 x Celeron (Tualatin) 1.4GHz
Abit BP6 - 2 x Pentium III (CuMine) 1.0GHz@666MHz (66FSB until I get another BP6)
Acer TravelMate 290 - 1 x Pentium M (Dothan) 2.0GHz (Upgraded from Banias 1.3GHz)
g0fvt
Posts: 110
Joined: Mon Jul 29, 2002 3:32 pm
Location: Hertfordshire UK

Post by g0fvt »

I guess it means watching Ebay for a while, a few friends have BP6s but are still using them. All of them except one have needed capacitor changes, fwiw it seems to massively help stability even replacing them before they have failed.

My VP6 has been my main pc for quite a few years now, it used to overclock well but not so good with all the memory slots filled.. 933s used to stretch to about 1200Mhz but now running at stock speed :(
swampwater
Posts: 15
Joined: Sun Apr 03, 2005 5:51 pm

Post by swampwater »

Should I consider re-capping the motherboard? I remember there was a company that would send free caps for BP6 owners? Is that offer still around?
Abit BX133-RAID - 1 x Celeron (Tualatin) 1.4GHz
Abit BP6 - 2 x Pentium III (CuMine) 1.0GHz@666MHz (66FSB until I get another BP6)
Acer TravelMate 290 - 1 x Pentium M (Dothan) 2.0GHz (Upgraded from Banias 1.3GHz)
g0fvt
Posts: 110
Joined: Mon Jul 29, 2002 3:32 pm
Location: Hertfordshire UK

BP6 capacitors

Post by g0fvt »

Hi, good to see someone is still playing BP6s!

I got the capacitors from Maplin Electronics here in the UK, I have not heard of the free capacitors offer.

Some pictures of my motherboard are on my crap website www.lisney.org.uk

A few people were a bit scathing, suggesting that the board would not run with the capacitors I used, well it does and has done so for many years.
I have another BP6 which I am using as a webserver which has had similar treatment and I can assure you that it also works fine! Incidentally I am typing this on an overclocked VP6 which had it's capacitors fail maybe 4 years ago and has also been treated to oversize capacitors.

A few words of advice, do not use higher voltage capacitors than necessary, they tend to be physically even bigger and have a higher ESR which is a bad thing (I will explain this).

The board is multilayer and the capacitors need removing with a little care, get the solder joints good and hot before attempting to "rock" the capacitors out....

The holes can be cleared of solder with a good desoldering pump or desoldering braid, sometimes pushing a stainless steel needle into the hot solder can also help to open the hole for the new capacitor. (The solder will not wet to stainless steel)

Make absolutely sure the replacements go in the correct way round!

ESR is effective series resistance... basically any practical capacitor will to an extent behave like a "perfect" capacitor in series with a resistor, the pulse currents that appear on PC motherboards can be very high so it is desirable to keep these resistances low in order that the pulses don't get superimposed on bits of circuitry they are not intended for.

The capacitors I have used (including the infamous EC10) are all 4,700uF,
physically they are a bit on the large side so you may prefer to use 2,200uF which would result in a slightly tidier job.

A few of the tiny capacitors on the board are fine at their original values, I did not note exactly which was which but you can see the pictures on my webspace.

Something I discovered with my experience of my own BP6s is that the Highpoint controller which is universally hated behaves better at a sensible overclock, my 466s are aircooled these days and they are no longer "racing computers" so I run them with a 75Mhz FSB and the Highpoint seems to find the resultant PCI bus speed agreeable.

My server at home runs OpenBsd and has NEVER crashed, this is despite having a pair of 250Gb drives on the Highpoint controller (boot drive is a 30Gb on UDMA 33).

Good Luck with yours if you decide to do the capacitors yourself, it is a fiddly task but should take in the region of an hour if you decide to go for it, I have done a number of boards with no problems but I prefer to not get involved with doing them for other people. (Some poor guy sent me a VP6 to do and although I did do it for free I kept the poor guy waiting for ages, I moved house in fact while it was with me, I mailed it to him recorded delivery and never heard from him again)

P.S Brian Hopkinson if you ever visit and read this please PM me to let me know how you got on with it, I lost your email address shortly after I despatched your board. (The infamous IBM 60Gb hard drive death)

Regards David
s4brains
Posts: 46
Joined: Sun Aug 28, 2005 10:36 am

Re: BP6 capacitors

Post by s4brains »

g0fvt wrote: My server at home runs OpenBsd and has NEVER crashed, this is despite having a pair of 250Gb drives on the Highpoint controller (boot drive is a 30Gb on UDMA 33).
David,

How is it that you are able to (or dare to) connect 250 GB drives to the Highpoint controller?

I was not aware that any version of the Highpoint BIOS extensions supported 48-bit LBA. I would like to be proven wrong because I fear connecting a drive larger than 137 GB to the Highpoint controller.

I experienced substantial data loss with a different motherboard which had a UDMA controller without 48-bit BIOS when I connected a 160 GB drive to it and now I'm terrified. If I remember correctly, all appeared normal and everything worked well until the data on the drive exceeded some threshold size. Then the drive became horribly scrambled and I experienced significant data loss. This happened even though I was using WinXP with SP2 which supports 48-bit LBA drives because the controller BIOS was not capable of the same support.

Regards,

s4
g0fvt
Posts: 110
Joined: Mon Jul 29, 2002 3:32 pm
Location: Hertfordshire UK

Large Drives

Post by g0fvt »

Hi, I will see how full the drives are, to be honest I thought there was a BIOS limitation too!

These drives are far from empty so I need to check, just looked at the shares via the Windows PC and it seems one of the 250s has only 40Gb left at the moment, however I did move a lot of stuff across a few days ago. Perhaps Openbsd treats the drive filing system in a different way?

http://www.lisney.org.uk/samba.bmp is the view of the drive I get from my Windows pc at the moment (of the drive that has the most data).

I don't know much about Openbsd or it's filing sytem (a friend administers it remotely), I have been out on the razzle all day today so am not thinking clearly, I seem to remember Windows/Dos used to run out of "descriptors" if the cluster size was too small on a large drive...

Perhaps someone else can describe/explain how I get away with running such a large drive on the Highpoint?

Anyway, I hope the bmp is useful, it has not been through Photoshop and it is most definitely my BP6 with a Highpoint controller...

I was originally going to use an aftermarket IDE controller but to keep things simple this particular BP6 runs without any peripherals except a cheap Realtek Network card and a fibre optic network card. It has no video card or sound card (removed after software installation).
The motherboard is running a late BIOS (I think the last official release).

I did not expect such large drives to work, I expected a problem from them but it never happened, regards David
s4brains
Posts: 46
Joined: Sun Aug 28, 2005 10:36 am

Post by s4brains »

I believe that both the o/s and the controller that the drive is attached to must support 48-bit LBA for proper operation.

I think you are headed for trouble unless you add a controller card which is known to be "48-bit LBA capable".

Search the topics here. I seem to remember some mention of add-in cards that have been used successfully with the BP 6.

Good luck with the drives!

Best Regards,

s4
g0fvt
Posts: 110
Joined: Mon Jul 29, 2002 3:32 pm
Location: Hertfordshire UK

Large drives

Post by g0fvt »

Hi S4....

I have a third party disc controller around which I could use, certainly it would be a bit faster if nothing else, going from a 100Mbit network interface to a 1000Mbit makes barely any difference, the poor old Highpoint seems to be the bottleneck.

The following is a cut and paste of the log from the machine>>>

Checking subsystem status:

disks:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/wd0a 513678 33328 454668 7% /
/dev/wd0h 15437206 5696476 8968870 39% /home
/dev/wd0d 1030550 2 979022 0% /tmp
/dev/wd0g 10318790 534706 9268146 5% /usr
/dev/wd0e 1030550 117198 861826 12% /var
/dev/wd1a 241244002 182872118 46309684 80% /samba1
/dev/wd2a 241244002 114441554 114740248 50% /samba2


As you can see the drives called Samba1 and 2 are the big ones....
the smaller drive is basically used for Boot and mailserver etc.

I will investigate a little to see if there are any issues with this arrangement, certainly so far it has been fine with no signs of wierd behaviour, regards David
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