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Assembling a vintage AMD system

The 3200+ should boot with a 200 MHz setting and be recognized properly, unless it's fake.

If the system is so unstable that it's causing garbage on the screen when trying to boot something, I'd suspect bad RAM, bad power supply or potentially bad capacitors. While MSI was better than other brands in the capacitor plague era, they still had some boards with marginal caps. That and they're ~20 years old, and who knows how long that board was in service for, the CPU VRM caps could be degraded.

If you don't have any other PC2700/3200 memory available, try taking the memory out and cleaning the contacts with something like CRC 2-26 or Deoxit Gold. You may also want to hose down the RAM slots too, they get oxidized over time and can make bad connections. Can't tell you how many old boards I've had with ever so slightly oxidized RAM slots causing havoc.
 
That's an entirely different board from an entirely different manufacturer with an entirely different chipset. They have nothing in common other than having the same socket.

The KT4AV has a VIA KT400A chipset, which supports 400 MHz bus Socket 462 CPUs and DDR333/400 memory.

The A7N266-VM has an nForce1 chipset that only supports 266 MHz FSB CPUs and DDR.
 
Okay, thanks for clearing that up. As I said, it's been years since I had the thing in a system. I moved to Socket 754 CPUs pretty quickly.
 
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The caps all look good. I can only guess at the service-life of this board. Its entirely possible I am the original owner. Its also possible I dragged it out of an ewaste bin. I literally have no idea how this board came to me. I also know it spent at least some of it's life lose in a cardboard box before I found an anti-static bag for it.

The board was dusty as hell so corroded contacts are a real possibly. I do have tons of DDR1 on hand, these just happen to be the only 3 matching 1gb sticks in my collection.

CRC 2-26 looks like something I should be able to find at the local hardware store, no? How about Deoxit Gold? Sadly with the death of electronics and hobby stores, if its not sold at a hardware store I have to order it - and now is not a great time for fast shipping :p
 
For regular cleaning I use CRC QD here. You can find it at any auto parts store. It may be able to get you far enough. 2-26 is a lubricant, which is not a bad idea, but the primary goal is to get things clean.
 
As luck would have it, my neighborhood hardware store actually had CRC QD! I'm constantly amazed at that place's ability to have a little of everything.

Taking the system apart for roughly the 800th time, let's see what happens.
 
Well I hosed the DIMMs and slots down with CRC, and the AGP socket for good measure. I rubbed down the DIMMs with a swab and gave the whole thing a good long while to dry. I initially got the same behavior, right down to the weird loading crash.

So then I did what I probably should have done earlier and took all but 1 stick of RAM out. It still will not post with anything higher than a 166mhz FSB, but now I can get through windows setup.

Inside windows, CPUZ swears up and down that this is a 2500+ CPU. Is there anything I can do to dig deeper about what sort of chip I actually have?
 
The plot thickens.

After loading windows and some drivers, connecting a floppy drive, and adding a second stick of RAM, the system generally appearing quite stable. Then I tried to hook up a second optical drive.

Now the system won't POST again.
 
It turns out it might well have been. Not the optical drive per se but the IDE cable.

At least the ever-fail combination of random inkering and blind dumb luck seems to have won again!
 
Now I am trying to work out the RAM issue. I started with 1 stick, boot fine, added a second stick, boot fine. 3rd stick? No boot(posts fine but cannot reach windows).

So I took that third suspect stick and stuck it in the first slot by itself. It booted fine. Took one of the working sticks and put it in the third slot, booted fine. Put the sus stick in the 3rd slot by itself, booted fine!

Next I shuffled the sticks around... no boot. Any individual stick in any individual slot works fine, but populating all 3 slots results in windows failing to load. I already know I can't get memtest to load with all 3 sticks, I suppose I could try one at a time.
 
So I sifted through my memory box and found 3 other 2gb sticks of DDR1. Same results. The system simply will not boot with 3 gigs of DDR400.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Inside windows, CPUZ swears up and down that this is a 2500+ CPU. Is there anything I can do to dig deeper about what sort of chip I actually have?
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If the 3200+ CPU only works reliably with a 166 MHz FSB at 2500+ speeds, I would believe it's really a 2500+ that was remarked, or the core is so degraded that it will no longer work at its originally rated speed.

You could try bumping the core voltage up a few fractions of a volt and see if it will boot, just don't go too high. The normal core voltage is 1.65v, I would not go higher than 1.7v, and make sure that the heatsink is making good contact to the core, Athlons have zero overheating protection and will quite literally burn in seconds. I've come across many degraded Durons/Athlons/Semprons because of improper cooling, the most common was installing the heatsink backwards. If the heatsink is large enough, there will be a relief on one side for the step in the socket. Installing it backwards would put the heatsink on an angle and only cool half of the die at best and lead to thermal death or damage.

It's really hard to detect fake Athlons of that era because the cores had no definitive hardware strings that could be read to tell what they were. BIOSes at the time would use an internal table of multipliers and core speeds to determine what the CPU is.

hunterjwizzard said:
So I sifted through my memory box and found 3 other 2gb sticks of DDR1. Same results. The system simply will not boot with 3 gigs of DDR400.
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While the board is supposed to support 3 GB, I never had luck with getting more than 1.5-2 GB to work reliably. I usually ran mine with 2 GB (2 x 1 GB or 1 x 1 GB and 2 x 512 MB) or 1.5 GB (3 x 512 MB).

It definitely doesn't support 2 GB DDR sticks if you're trying to use those. 2 GB DDR sticks are usually ECC, Registered or both.
 
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GiGaBiTe said:
Athlons have zero overheating protection and will quite literally burn in seconds.
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I had this happen first hand once. My very first ghz-capable system was an Athlon XP 1800+. It had the old style HSF that only used a single tab on either side of the socket. When evening, whilst lying in bed watching the television, I heard a loud "snap" from my computer followed by a burning smell. And I couldn't play Morrowind for months after that.

GiGaBiTe said:
While the board is supposed to support 3 GB, I never had luck with getting more than 1.5-2 GB to work reliably. I usually ran mine with 2 GB (2 x 1 GB or 1 x 1 GB and 2 x 512 MB) or 1.5 GB (3 x 512 MB).

It definitely doesn't support 2 GB DDR sticks if you're trying to use those. 2 GB DDR sticks are usually ECC, Registered or both.
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Thanks for the tip. Yup I am using strictly 1gb sticks. I'll simply make due with only 2gb of RAM on this system. I'm keen to upgrade the motherboard at some future date, but for now this machine has served its primary function admirably: its kept me busy for 2 straight days! Granted, I would have liked to be busy doing other things with it, but this is nice.
 
It's always fun getting cranky old Athlon systems working reliably. Even my own boards that I've had since new are cranky.

One of my original Athlon XP 3200+ chips shorted out a few months back and blew up the mosfets on my A7N8X-E. Luckily I was in front of it when it happened and was able to shut it down before the board started burning. It was a real pain replacing those mosfets since the body is soldered to the PCB on top of a huge ground plane.
 
That is half the fun, though.

So I took 1 stick of RAM out, finished windows setup, put it back in, machine seems fine. I mean, its still only a 2500+, but eh. Its highly likely I will set this machine down, use it twice, then cannibalize the parts 6 months from now. I'll post pictures once I have it all buttoned up and pretty.
 
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