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Re: [TCLUG:5904] New motherboard



On Fri, 7 May 1999, brady wrote:

> Last night I killed my redhat box trying to upgrade the BIOS.  It's kind of
> a crappy motherboard (P5VX-be with Cyrix 200) and though it's been
> dependable I've been unable to get it to recognize over 32MB of SDRAM
> anyway so I'm giving it the boot.  I'm thinking of replacing it with a Tyan
> S1590 with an AMD K62-400.  Does this sound like a good plan to you people
> who build your own stuff?  
> 
> tomshardware.com seems to like the Tyan boards and it looks like they have
> some over at General Nanosystems.
> 
> Thanks,
> Brady
> 

I like Tyan motherboards, too.  I've had a couple of them.  I set up a
S1590 with a K6-2 350 for my dad in December or January.  I had some
trouble at first, but it's running very well now. 

The trouble was memory related.  The board has a jumper that allows you to
use SIMMs at 66MHz, while still using a 100MHz front-side bus.  So, that's
what we did, at first.  We figured we'd save a few bucks, and we used his
old RAM.  The machine would just freeze every now and then.  Eventually,
we started seeing signal 11 on the screen after it froze.  Signal 11 is
usually an indication of bad memory, or bad path to memory socket on the
motherboard.

So, we got a 8ns PC100 SDRAM module, and set the jumper so both FSB, and
memory run at 100MHz.  And we haven't had a lock-up since then.  He's
running RedHat 5.2, KDE 1.0, and he mostly uses Netscape to check his
stocks on-line.  He's not a "heavy" user of his machine, but I play Quake
on it occasionally, and it works quite well.

I haven't determined whether the problem was with the RAM, or with the
66/100MHz feature of the motherboard.  But, if you're planning on going
with PC100 SDRAM, I'll recommend the board.  It boots quickly, and it's
reliable.

Chris