Dual Athlon MP 2000+

Rew

Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard
2 x athlon MP 2000+ CPU's
2 x 512mb of 2100 ECC/REG DDR
2 x graphics cards
1 x USB card (comes with motherboard)
450w PSU
2 x Coolermaster copper heat sinks

Tried a few differant Harddisks

Its compleatly unstable... while installing linux from various mediums (DVD, CD, NFS) it will giver errors about packages not being installed, hang, cant wirite LILO. We managed to get a booting system once but it hung after a while. 2 keyboard LED's flash after Linux hangs...?

Win 2k died the first time i tried installint it. Generally it will install but is incredibly unstable (more the the uasual w2k crap)

Iv tried anything i can think of to no avail anyone any ideas...?

PPC

Do you know if the psu is powerful enough for the cpu's cause i thought you needed a 500w or so for them.

I had problems like that on my board sometimes and there was no thermal grease on the northbridge so i put some on and getting great stability.

Also try using a fan too cool the board cause it might be over heating.

Also try search for some message boards for your board.

Gerry

You are going to have to try a different psu. Also try the machine with 1 cpu. Try and narrow down stuff. Also you will have to do a lot of hunting on messageboards, try
www.2cpu.com forums ,
www.anandtech.com forums ,
www.overclockers.com forums

longword

That kind of cross-platform instability is Bad News indeed. Obviously one of your components is defective. My setup is very close to yours, and rock solid under Linux. Lots of compiling and many hours of Wolfenstein under its belt.

Tyan Tiger 760MPX board, but the S2466N-4M variant of it which includes a bug-fixed southbridge so the onboard USB ports work.

2x MP 1900+ CPUs
2x 512MB ECC/Reg DIMMs
1x GeForce4 Ti4400
Enermax 450W PSU
Globalwin copper heatsinks with slowish quiet fans.
64-bit Adaptec 29160 card
5x 18GB 10kRPM disks
DVDROM drive
CDRW drive

Other cards include SB Live!, OHCI firewire, bttv card, and a Hollywood+ DVD decoder (which hasn't actually been used in this machine yet). A dual port gigabit ethernet card is due any day now. I don't use IDE for anything other than the DVDROM and a floppy drive (hda and hdc)

The CPUs stay at 60C under load. It's in a nice tower case mind, with lots of fans. Power shouldn't be a problem for you with a 450W supply, though it could be faulty. 500W is probably not necessary - so long as it can do 30A on the combined 5V and 3.3V rails that's fine. Note that this is NOT the same thing as the max 5V rating plus the max 3.3V rating. If the PSU label doesn't explicitly specify the combined rating, take the 5V rating instead.

Go with Gerry's suggestion and try to eliminate parts from suspicion. Run with only one DIMM, one graphics card, one CPU, and as few PCI cards as you can manage.

Once you get the stability sorted, I'd strongly recommend at least 2.4.19 kernel on 760MPX. Earlier kernels don't know so much about the chipset. Shouldn't cause problems as such, but performance should be better with the later kernel. Right now I'm running RedHat's first Limbo beta and a 2.4.20-pre2-ac3 kernel. It'll be upgraded to RedHat null beta soon.

You might also consider flashing the lastest BIOS available from tyan.com - on my board (which uses a slightly different BIOS) the latest update resolved an MP Table issue that was preventing the kernel from using the IO APIC properly for those nifty high IRQ numbers 16-19. I wouldn't dare attempt a flash on a system as unstable as yours though.

Rew

Yeah did a lot of chopping and changing around, got win 2k (and SuSE) to install but both were horribly unstable. The tyan hardware monitor was reporting that VRM1 (voltage regulator module) was running at 70-80 degrees C. I reckon thats not right ;-)

So got an RMA out of scan and its going back tomorrow morning.

Kernel will be latest when ever i get a replacement!!

longword

Originally posted by Rew
...horribly unstable. The tyan hardware monitor was reporting that VRM1 (voltage regulator module) was running at 70-80 degrees C. I reckon thats not right ;-)

Definitely not. I don't recall what temp my VRMs were at (never put much time into getting lm_sensors to see the monitors under Linux) but I know my CPUs were the hottest thing on the board, fixed at 60C each.

Did you see any variation in Vcore? Was it a solid 1.75V or very close to it? I had a problem with my last board, an MSI K7TPro2 board that degraded over time. Started out 100% fine, then nearly a year later it started to fail with three DIMMs installed, then a few months later it started failing outright. No monitoring of the VRM temp directly, but the Vcore was always well below what it was supposed to be. The BIOS allowed selection Vcore - up to about 1.9V I think - but even when requesting a voltage that high, the actual output measured by the onboard monitor never got above about 1.6V. Not enough to keep a Thunderbird happy.

Rew

The vcore was somthing else i noticed one was at 1.5 and the other was 1.7 seemed a bit strange as well....