T e c h S t u f f Tech Stuff Cheek.Org ASUS SP97-V Post Mortem

This article dates from around January of 2001. I still occasionally get email commenting on my sp97, so I decided to keep this article online. I appreciate all the offers to help repair or replace the damaged motherboard. I no longer have that motherboard or a system to put it in, or I'd happily take you up on them.

Here we see my first computer. Well, my first Windows computer. Okay, it's the case from my first Windows computer. It originally contained a 133 MHz Intel Pentium system with 16 MB of RAM. This was close to top-of-the-line when I got it, but it quickly lagged behind the technology curve. Going back to the store for some upgrade advice, I found that the store was out of business. Something about the owner closing up and moving to Florida to take advantage of computer illiterate retirees. I hope that was a joke.

Luckily, I discovered a local computer store.. Ever luckier, they had an "upgrade special" for some ridiculously low price. It featured an ASUS SP97-V motherboard, 266 MHz AMD K6, and 32 MB of RAM. I eventually upped her to 64 MB of RAM, added a Voodoo1 3D card, and I forget what all else. Again, I was close to top-of-the-line, but of course that didn't last. I found it a little lacking, with only the two external 5-1/4" drive bays.

I soon upgraded to a totally new computer with an AMD K6-2 at 400 MHz, and eventually to an AMD Athlon Thunderbird at 800 MHz. However, I kept the original system, added a new harddrive and some other stuff, and gave it to a friend of mine, and it met all her needs for many years.

To the right, you should see a very nice picture of the SP97-V motherboard. I swiped it from the official ASUS site back when they still had a page available telling the specifications and whatnot of this mainboard.

Anyway, there wouldn't be much point to this page if all I was going to talk about was the SP97-V running smoothly. My friend called me up one day to tell me that I'd sold her a defective computer, as it didn't work anymore. I told her that, first of all, I'd given her the computer and not sold it to her, and second of all, it had been years since I'd given it to her, so if it stopped recently, it was nothing I had done. I asked her what kind of problem it had, and she said that black smoke was boiling out of the back of the case.

The next time I was in town, I checked out the system. Sure enough, it did smell vaguely of smoke. I cracked open the case, checking the power supply and CPU, figuring that one or the other had melted down. Nothing wrong with them, but I'll show the pictures of what I did find:

As you can see, I had four 16MB SIMMs in the memory slots. For some reason or another, the bottom SIMM, the one in slot 0, decided to catch fire and burn the socket. Or maybe the socket caught fire and burnt the SIMM. I'm at a loss as to why, as are the good people at the local store. The inside of the case was fairly clean, without a lot of dust buildup, so this isn't an attack of Rogue Dust Bunnies from Hell. Moisture was suggested, but there was no evidence of condensation, no use of water blocks or peltier (thermoelectric) cooling, etc. As the motherboard and case were oriented, it was the very bottom memory slot which fried, which means it's unlikely that some piece of metal or wire could have fallen in from above. If you have any ideas, drop me a line.

Anyway, even with the burnt SIMMs removed from slots 0 and 1, and fresh SIMMs put in slots 2 and 3, the system will not boot. The series of long beeps seems to indicate a memory error, which indicates that the sockets or supporting circuitry is damaged. A local shop had a used SP97-V board handy, and the K6 from my board works in it. The plan was to just use this board as a replacement, put the system back together, and have it be business as usual. However, my friend thinks that the computer is getting a little slow for here tastes, so we're looking at upgrade options, but that's another story (and another article).

Update April 27, 2004: presspcman wrote in and explained one mystery. "Due to the limitation of SiS 5598B chipset, if you want to install memory on memory socket 3&4, there must be memory modules in memory socket 1&2 first. this is probably why your getting the memory error beeps." The first two slots were the ones that were damaged, so even if the motherboard was otherwise functional, I still would have never gotten it to work. Incidentally, this board ended up displayed the wall at a local computer shop for a while.