AMD Athlon 2500+ and ABIT VA-10 question

[bigeller]

A friend recently gve me an Abit VA-10 motherboard.. I bought an AMD 2500+ barton from a company on pricewatch to put in it..

I swapped everything into the case.. It has a ATX 350w power supply, 512Mb of 333 DDR and the board is supposed to be capable of 333 fsb and supports this cpu.. I have both of the power suply connectors plugged in as well..

When I push the power button, the cpu fan spins for a couple of seconds and the powers off..

I put an older Athlon 1000 in it and it works fine.. I thought it might be the bios, so I flashed to the latest version.. That didn't help..

What gives? I hope this is only a minor problem that is holding me up.. I would like to get this 2500+ up and running..

Any ideas?

Thanks in Advance..

 

[Fardringle]

If it works fine with the old Althon and all other hardware the same, I'd say there's a pretty good chance that either the motherboard does not support that CPU, or you have a bad CPU.

Do you have another system you could try the Barton in? Even if it posts at a low FSB, at least you'll be able to determine whether the thing can boot at all.

Also, you could try booting with the Athlon 1000 and in the BIOS manually set the FSB to 133 and then shut down and put the Barton in. If it boots at that point (it will be running at 1.5 Ghz instead of the CPU's default of 1826 Mhz) then the system may have a problem running at the 166/333 bus speed and will require some additional troubleshooting, like removing all non-essential peripherals and swapping the RAM, etc... If not, then you most likely have a bad CPU.

Depending on the brand of the PSU (what kind is it?), it's also possible that the Barton is drawing just enough more power than the Althlon that the PSU isn't able to handle it and can't boot. To test this, disconnect everything from the motherboard except the RAM, CPU (and heat sink/fan) and video card, and try booting again. If it works at that point, then you either need a better PSU, or you need to use fewer peripherals.

 

[Fardringle]

I did some poking around, and according to this page on ABIT's web site, that motherboard does support the Barton 2500+, so I'd start with some of the other troubleshooting steps I mentioned and let us know what happens.

 

[bigeller]

Thanks for the input.. I've tried going down to the bare essentials.. The power supply is supposed to be decent.. It's a JGE brand..

 

[Fardringle]

I've never heard of JGE before but the few references I can find for them don't look good.

First off, their 'official' web site, www.gpb-jge.com, doesn't even work. (Never a good sign.)

Second, the only thing remotely close to a review (really just a forum discussion) that I can find for a JPE PSU, here, has nothing but bad to say about them.

Do you have a spare power supply you can try in the system to see if that is the cause of the problem?