How about another quick back to the past post? I got an ASUS P4C800 motherboard in ‘unknown’ condition. Before You ask, yes, it was indeed broken. Without further ado, let’s jump right into the “repair”.
Who would have thought – 00 POST code, accompanied by the sight of nothingness on the screen.
Probably why this board ended up in my hands.
Okay, but how do we diagnose a 00 error? Usually it’s either CPU or BIOS related, unless the motherboard has some serious problems with, for example, power regulation or NB/SB.
Upon taking the CPU out of the socket I’m greeted by this picture:
Thankfully nothing got into the socket.
A tiny bit of the old paste got near the LPT port. This might not have prevented the board from working, but certainly USB ports might have had some issues.
After cleaning the CPU and motherboard (+ new thermal paste on the 82875P IC).
Did that tiny speck of AG Silver prevent me from seeing its beautiful retro glory on the monitor?
At first I had another problem, which was fixed easily enough – this board didn’t like the RAM I used and displayed A4 POST code.
Using a different RAM stick solved this issue. Man, sometimes these boards can be REALLY picky. I think we take compatibility for granted in newer PC components. It really is a humbling experience to deal with retro stuff – You close to always have to be one step ahead of the hardware, otherwise it’s going to play tricks on You 🙂
Solving the Vdroop problem
It was common knowledge that the “P4” family of ASUS boards had problems with quite high Vdroop. Thankfully there is a mod for that – almost the same as in the Gigabyte GA-7N400L.
Link for the tutorial I used: https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r7997434-Droop-mod~root=ocusa~mode=flat
Does it work?
Kind of.
Less than 0.05V difference between 0Ohm and 50KOhm? Meh. Let’s use a multimeter.
~0.12V of difference on the meter, that’s more like it, especially that this is a Vdroop mod, not a Vmod, it’s supposed to reduce the voltage sag when the CPU is loaded.
And with that success I’m off to bench the Preshott, ekhm, ekhm, Prescott CPU I got and generally enjoy some Windows XP.
Thanks for reading!