Recent content by GiGaBiTe

I wonder if it's a matter of buffered or unbuffered memory. Some systems are extremely picky about that.

Need a picture of the pigtails coming out of the power supply. There should be a P8/P9 and a separate small 3 pin connector.

The extended POST time with the huge amount of memory is because of RAM training. If the system is unstable with that RAM, I'd suspect some of it is bad. If you can get the machine far enough, you may try running Memtest.

I would start suspecting potential bad RAM. Unfortunate though that it has RAM soldered to the motherboard, all of the chips would have to be removed and replaced with known good chips.

The caps are for filtering. Since this is an old PSU, the 2200uF is probably on the +5v rail and the 1000uF is probably on the +12v rail. Almost all power supplies have silk screened polarity markings on the PCB. Even if they don't, it's usually pretty obvious which way they go. Just follow the...

The system is telling you the problem right on the POST screen. "Secondary IDE Channel no 80 conductor cable installed" An 80 wire IDE cable is required for speeds over ATA-33 spec. Forcing DMA modes faster than 33 MB/s on a 40 wire cable will cause massive data corruption. SiS chipsets and...

There is still a ton of junk on the pins of that IC, and the soldering is very poor. It doesn't look like much, if any flux was used, and far too much heat with what look to be lifted/damaged traces nearby. That chip needs to be resoldered properly with flux, and all of the pins need to be...

00 means that the board isn't doing anything, it's not even trying to read from the BIOS ROM. That SB82378ZB chip to the right of the PCI slots doesn't look right. Someone has definitely run a soldering iron over all four sides of that chip, and some of the legs look bent. I would inspect that...

Radeon cards up into the 7xxx series had problems with BGA failure in laptops. The hotter the chip, and the more power hungry it is, the more likely it is to fail. You can increase the lifespan of the chip by always keeping the part running and warm, power and thermal cycling is the worst for...

VGA monitors, and monitors in general had to put up with all sorts of signal abuse and non-standard nonsense, they did have to deal with it, all the time. 3rd party VGA clone manufacturers all treated VGA and its backward compatibility with EGA and CGA differently, there was no conformity...

.. And? There are dozens and dozens of other DOS resolutions besides that that modern monitors don't support. I don't know of any that support 320x200.

That's not going to fix his problem. No gender changer or different video port is going to solve the problem he has. His modern monitor simply does not support the old CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA resolutions that his legacy machine runs. This is why the monitor can sync when Windows is loaded, because it...

Is the transformer a regular mains transformer, or is it a SMPS design? You can probably get away with a normal diode if it's just a linear supply, but if it's a SMPS design, you'll need something like a Schottky barrier diode. But the question is why did the diodes fail? It's entirely possible...

It looks like a SOD-57 or SOD-64 package diode, which doesn't narrow it down much. It's probably not a TVS diode, since those are usually labeled as such on the PCB, so it could be a standard recovery diode or fast recovery diode/avalanche diode. The 4J and 4K markings most likely denote the...

Low noise does not mean low static pressure, it just means the geometry of the blades are changed to reduce noise. Scimitar shaped blades make less noise than straight blades. What makes low static pressure is not having a duct to contain the pressure and letting it blow out the sides. Any...