Celeron 300a at 450 hangs on W98 splash screen.

[SysOpt]

ABIT BH6, OEM Costa Rica 300a, 2.0v. Boots fine every time through POST, but when Win98 splash screen appears, it hangs with no disk activity, but the progress bar still continues to move. At 2.05v, freezes totally at splash screen. Has a decent cooling fan/heatsink. Any ideas?

Scott

[dedric]

From what Ive read about the Abit BH6, sometimes one board can act strange, and another will be just fine re O/C. Do you have another motherboard nearby you can put the OC chip and HD in and see if it works? You could switch memory sticks with another board and see if it works then. Let us know what you find. BTW, I guessing it doesnt do that at 300.
Sysopt.com/Tweakit.com... 129 and counting

[Pat L]

Um, hate to state the obvious, but have you tried bumping up the voltage to 2.1 or 2.2 volts yet?(see softmenu II or the movie-> Real Genius)

I'm assuming that you are using thermal grease, instead of the standard thermal tape?

[dedric]

I just saw something over at Agn3d that might help. This guy had stability problems with a Cel300A at 504 (I wonder why in HalfLife. Someone suggested that he switch the stick of SDRAM to the second or third DIMM slot. He put it in the third slot and its rock solid. But he also said he got a Soyo board and never had another problem.....

[Isos]

Try to override Win98 to boot safe mode. If you can boot to safe mode, then a check system registry to see if DMA is enabled - disable it and try to boot normal.
If safe mode does not boot completely, try disabling cache. If it still not loading Win98 completely, try installling Win95. If all else fails, then maybe that particular 300a is only good for FSB lower than 100. Good luck.

[Joel Kleppinger]

Thanks to Scott for getting everyone's responses before I actually got the CPU from him. He was trying it on a BX6, and did it kinda rushed. When I received the CPU, I hooked it up in my BH6, and booted it at 300. After working at that speed, I booted to 450 , 2.0v. It hung just before loading the Win98 GUI. I bumped it up to 2.05v, and it's ROCK SOLID. Only one freeze in two days.

I then took it up to 464 where it was pretty stable at 2.2v. It crashed once after a few hours or so. I did get it to boot at 504 at 2.2v and 2.3v, but it hung upon accessing the HD. I decided that the extra 14 MHz for 464 wasn't worth the .15v and a little less stability. So I'm content with 450 MHz at 2.05v.

Looks like the problem was just with the BX6. I don't know how the BX6 II compares, but the BH6 really IS better than the BX6 for overclockers. Take a look at Tom's site for the same conclusion.

Joel