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Black screen after installing pci usb card in socket 7 M538 motherboard

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Nicolas 2000

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 23, 2022
Messages
172
Location
Belgium
My pc works perfectly fine, but when I put a brand new Logilink pc0028 pci 5x usb 2.0 card in it (VIA chip), all I get is a black screen. I do not hear a Windows chime, so I guess it's not booting.

Something in the Bios set incorrectly? It's the original Award Bios from 1997.

As I don't get any screen from the very beginning of booting (the monitor doesn't even go out of sleep) I doubt this is a W98/driver issue.
 
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My graphics card is a PCI S3 Virge. No other PCI cards installed. I have no integrated graphics card.
 
Apparently the VIA chip needs pci 2.2 and I don't have that. Well thanks for advertising it as "32 bit pci 33mhz" which I do have, just not the right flavour.

Oh well, extra usb ports for anither computer then.

Apparently a NEC chip based card would work?
 
There were no major changes in PCI 2.2, it was mostly ECNs and cleanup of the documentation, it's backwards compatible. The 82437VX supports PCI 2.1, so it should be fine.

I think the problem is you're trying to use a peripheral card of dubious origin and quality on a motherboard of even more dubious origin and quality so bad that it has fake cache chips and exploding CPU power circuitry.

If I were to guess, I'd say that the strapping for the VT6212L on that USB card is probably incorrect, or it wasn't routed correctly. It might be stepping on some other device on the bus or corrupting the PCI address space. The link you provided to AliExpress doesn't work, so I can't see what that is.

I've rarely had any luck with super generic peripheral cards. The only two brands I've had any success with were SIIG and Startech.
 
Thanks for the reply! I think I'll go for the safest USB route: the motherboard has a 9 pin connector for usb 1.1. I'll just plug a rear bracket with 2 USB ports in it. It's mainly just to connect a mouse and the odd usb flash drive, speed is irrelevant. Problem: I can't find these brackets with the richt connectors. What to google?

Question 2: these cpu power supply concerns of the motherboard, are they potentially dangerous to other hardware in the pc, cpu or otherwise? There will be some expensive cards plugged in... Any preventative actions I can take?
 
By the way, I have done some research into PC Chips. They indeed did put fake cache chips (as in, a piece of plastic with no chip inside) on some of their 486/early pentium motherboards and cut other corners (soldering processors onto the motherboard, hurah!). My M538 (or something very similar) motherboard and the others in this series have real cache though as far as I know. M538 is a version of M535 with onboard cache instead of COAST cache by the way. I have found multiple experiences that say their socket 7 motherboards were a lot better than their earlier work (couldn't be worse than their earlier work, short of a piece of cardboard with "motherboard" written on it with a sharpie), working reliably and benchmarking better than most other brands.

I see the same remark about inadequate power delivery for the entire M520/M535/M538/...series on The Retro Web info pages, but I can't find any other information or source for it. Do you have more information?

I'm not trying to defend this PC Chips motherboard, I'm trying to understand what if any risk the other hardware in this computer is running due to this motherboard.
 
Nicolas 2000 said:
Problem: I can't find these brackets with the richt connectors. What to google?
Click to expand...

USB Riser:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/184612753157 (4 port)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/384942653684 (2 port)

The board has either USB 1.0 or 1.1, it's going to be VERY slow, 1.5 mbit/s or 12 mbit/s. Flash drives are a pipe dream. The board may only be able to use really old flash drives with USB 2.0 spec or older. I find that many USB 3.0 flash drives don't work properly or at all on old motherboards. They won't work at all if they have any sort of encryption processor on them. I keep a pile of ancient 256 and 512M flash drives around to use on my old machines.

Nicolas 2000 said:
Question 2: these cpu power supply concerns of the motherboard, are they potentially dangerous to other hardware in the pc, cpu or otherwise? There will be some expensive cards plugged in... Any preventative actions I can take?
Click to expand...

Yes, they are dangerous, which is why the footnote talks about exploding parts. Why do you think that a company that goes out of their way to make fake injection molded plastic cache chips, make special routing on the logic board to make it look like they're connected, and make hacked BIOS images to display fake cache amounts, wouldn't cut corners elsewhere in the design? You may want to run CACHECHK.EXE to ensure you actually have cache, and not just fake reported cache by the BIOS.

PC-Chips purposefully cut corners in the motherboard design to use as few layers and as little copper as possible. This causes power delivery and signal integrity issues. They used the cheapest everything they could find, including power regulators. The whole thing is on the knife edge of barely working by design. If you compare your board to a reputable board, you'll probably find yours is thinner and a bit more flexible.

I would not recommend running any Cyrix chip, or any of the fastest Pentium chips in the board, as they're in the 15-22W territory. That doesn't sound like much, but it is when the power regulation circuitry is running on hopes and dreams. If the power regulation goes wrong, CPU death is entirely possible. What happens is one of the regulators usually fails and just sends 5v directly to the CPU and kills it.

It is unlikely that any of the PCI/ISA cards would die, but anything is theoretically possible. I wouldn't put anything you cared about a great deal in this motherboard.

The AT power supply is another matter entirely. Hopefully you aren't using a period AT power supply, or one of those crappy modern replacements made using an IED power supply that will explode under any appreciable load.
 
Thanks! Using the title of your Ebay links, I have found similar items on Amazon that ship to Belgium. I might still have very old flash drives floating around somewhere. If not, diskette drive it is... At least I'll be able to say goodbye to using the ball mouse.

Regarding the PC Chips motherboard: I'm now thinking about taking this in a whole different direction. I can keep the current setup (PC Chips mobo, 64MB EDO, 166MMX running at 200, S3 Virge 4MB and SB16 ISA) just as a "fast DOS" PC. It is running W98 from where I fire up whichever DOS game that likes that (or whatever low-demand Windows game that doesn't like my newer PC's), just for convenience. And if not, reboot to DOS it is. So this would be a PC with low power demands, very suitable for its task, and nothing major is at risk if the motherboard would decide to go further south than it was when it left the factory. It's mounted in a period baby AT case. I have no idea about the age of the PSU in there, I might have to check up on that to see if I can find a date or brand.

I also have a Voodoo2 SLI setup awaiting. I would have put it in this PC, even though it would be majorly CPU limited, just for the sake of Glide'ing along in 1024 resolution. However, with what I know now, the PC chips mobo is not the place to put -and risk- such setup. So I'm now thinking of adding a PC that would CPU balance out Voodoo2 SLI setup. Still a W98 thing (I have a more recent XP system as well), but no requirements to be able to run old DOS stuff. I have yet to buy a PC suitable of housing the Voodoo's so all options open there, however mainly limited by what the local market will supply. I'm thinking in the direction of a midrange Pentium 3 system paired with a good-but-not-overshadowing-the-Voodoos-good graphics card. Compatibility before performance. The games I'm aiming at are those that I used to play on a P2 233 at best, so it will be a smoother experience in all cases.

Anyway, if I have news on the USB front I'll post it here. Further thoughts and questions about a potential second gaming rig will go into my gaming rig thread.

Thanks again!
 
As I was trying to finish the first phase of my adventures with this PC, I tried to put it back in the config it came with: S3 Virge, SB16, old PCI network card. Only now the computer also fails to boot (no screen, no beep) when putting in the network card with which it used to work! I've tried all sorts of combinations of which PCI port to put the S3 in and where the network card, but always the same result.

Either I'm doing something wrong here, wrong setting somewhere. Or this is the famous PC Chips mobo misbehaviour...

So for the time being, the config is just the S3 with the Soundblaster. It works glorious like that, and yes my L2 cache is real. But still I'd like to know if I'm doing something wrong, to prevent making this error in the future. The next PC will have decent brand stuff inside, don't worry.

As for the PSU in this PC: it's a made in China (Target brand? I forgot) from 1997. Given the simplicity of the setup in this PC, if I decide to keep this PC (eg if the other PC turns out to be too fast for quite some of the DOS stuff I want to do), I will recap it unless it really looks terrible inside. Good quality replacement AT supplies aren't easy to find and as expensive as the PC (this also goes for things like the ATX4VC with a good new ATX supply), so I might as well redo this one with quality components.
 
The capacitors aren't the problem with those old AT power supplies, the build quality and circuitry is the problem, they're often horrendous.

Whenever I need a permanent AT power supply, I just convert a decent quality old ATX unit to AT standard by replacing the 20/24 pin with P8/P9 connectors. For temporary, a simple ATX 20 pin so P8/P9 pigtail works.
 
Just remember that you need an ATX power supply with a -5v rail, or you'll have to bodge one on. There are motherboards even in the Pentium era that would check for the presence of the -5v rail and will not power on if its missing.

You can hang a LM7905 off of the -12v rail to get the -5v rail.
 
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