New cold plate = strange problem...help?

[pvanosta]

My system:
P3-700/100 cB0 stepping
Alpha Cooler/Leufkens Peltier
MSI 6309 MoBo
Hercules Prophet 2 gts 64
256 MB CAS 2 pc 133 sdram
IBM 20 GB 7200 rpm
SB Live
My system was rock stable at 966/138 (Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, 3DMark2000, etc).
I wanted to remove the crappy aluminum cold plate and replace it with a nice, thick copper cold plate. When I installed it (with a LOT of effort, as the retaining clips were not exactly designed for the added height of this combo), first off, I got NO boot at all. No post, no nothing. Just power to the fans and I could hear the HD initiating.
I reset CMOS and booted immediately. I ran the system for a couple of hours at default (700/100) without problems.
Then, I decided to crank it up to 933/133. Immediately, I got nothing but registry errors and forced reboots.
When I turned it back down, I started getting all sorts of other funky errors, like I got kicked back to VGA. It said I was missing a file called bios.vxd and asked me for the win98 CD. I put the cd in, no go.
I've since been struggling to recover my hardware. It went through a re-install of my printer, I'm still stuck in VGA and I have no sound.
Any ideas/suggestions?
Remember: my system was totally stable before I started work on the Peltier.
Thanks.

 

[Fireball]

Sounds like something isn't seated correctly. Perhaps the cpu is not laying flat against the coldplate/peltier. Do you have CPU temp monitors? What do they tell you?

 

[DaddyG]

Ya got to make sure that the big copper cold plate isn't 'flexing' the little pcb. Also check to make sure that you didn't 'chip' the core. the darn flip chips are very fragile (both slot and socket).