Goddamned old motherboard

[Darth Wong]

I have an old Celeron 1.4GHz machine that I was going to put in Matthew's room because he wanted a computer in his room (I can lock out his Internet access so I'm not too concerned about that). But it periodically locks up and after watching the hardware monitor, I discovered why. The CPU core voltage is supposed to be ~1.7V, and it's usually around there, but occasionally and for no apparently reason, it drops way down to about 1.5V. It stays there, enough voltage to run but not enough to be stable, for a random amount of time before it goes back up to 1.7V and the machine is stable again. No idea why it does this; has anyone else ever heard of such a thing? I guess I should assume that something on the motherboard is just wonky, but you really can't replace a motherboard of that vintage. You might as well just chuck the whole thing and get a new motherboard/CPU/RAM/vidcard.

[SCRawl]

I have an old Celeron 1.4GHz machine that I was going to put in Matthew's room because he wanted a computer in his room (I can lock out his Internet access so I'm not too concerned about that). But it periodically locks up and after watching the hardware monitor, I discovered why. The CPU core voltage is supposed to be ~1.7V, and it's usually around there, but occasionally and for no apparently reason, it drops way down to about 1.5V. It stays there, enough voltage to run but not enough to be stable, for a random amount of time before it goes back up to 1.7V and the machine is stable again. No idea why it does this; has anyone else ever heard of such a thing? I guess I should assume that something on the motherboard is just wonky, but you really can't replace a motherboard of that vintage. You might as well just chuck the whole thing and get a new motherboard/CPU/RAM/vidcard.

I don't want to sound stupid -- and, really, who does -- but couldn't that be the power supply?

[Uraniun235]

No idea why it does this; has anyone else ever heard of such a thing? I guess I should assume that something on the motherboard is just wonky, but you really can't replace a motherboard of that vintage. You might as well just chuck the whole thing and get a new motherboard/CPU/RAM/vidcard.

I have to concur with SCRawl. That sounds more like an issue with the power supply. Do you happen to have a spare power supply you could swap in and try out? (or, alternatively, do you have a computer you can go without for a little while?)

[Darth Wong]

The 5V and 12V lines show proper voltage. It's just VCore that occasionally drops way out of range. If the power supply were screwing up, I would expect the 5V and 12V lines to go out of whack at the same time.

[Glocksman]

There's no visible cap leakage on the board or in the PSU, is there?
In the past, I've seen vcore fluctuations because of bad caps on the board itself and because of bad caps in the PSU.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

There's no visible cap leakage on the board or in the PSU, is there?
In the past, I've seen vcore fluctuations because of bad caps on the board itself and because of bad caps in the PSU.

Try http://www.badcaps.net/

[Glocksman]

I forgot about the badcaps.net website.
Thanks.

[TrailerParkJawa]

I just replaced my Soyo Socket A mobo a week or so ago. I purposely chose to get another old mobo because I didnt want to buy a new computer. Luckily, I found a board at Fry's for 40 bucks and all is good again.

As to the failure of the motherboard, it turns out I had more than 1 blown capacitor. One of them even had leaked some material. In my case voltages to all the components were fine with the expection of the CPU being a little bit below the norm. However, I didn't experience any crashes or reboots while in BIOS. It wasnt until the OS loaded that everything happened.

Overtime it got worse until I got a BSOD even during a fresh install. As previously mentioned the root cause turned out to be failed capacitors on the motherboard itself.