Posted by George on 10/27/2003, 8:55 am Specifically my symptoms were: Other people also experienced: Everything went merrily along until 6 months ago (6 months after its warrantee expired!). Since the VP6 was introduced around this time 3 years ago yours is about to be out of warrantee. Therefore contact Abit for an RMA at:
172.199.96.44
Like many people around the time that the RT came out I went to the then state of the art PC and in my case was the Abit VP6 Motherboard with twin P3-1 Ghz.
Most recently it failed to POST until it "warmed-up".
After replacing every component including ALL PCI cards, PS, Memory, etc.. I ran across threads of similar events happening to other people.
Failure to boot .
Must attempt booting several times before machine will start.
Instability , especially when graphics are complex.
Machine boots with a pre-Coppermine Celeron but will not boot with a PIII Coppermine.
Bad odor about the room.
Fans spin up, power indicator lights up and nothing else happens
Bios health alarm (hi-low siren) at boot but PC health screen shows no reason for the alarm.
The problem turned out to be the Cheap VRM Capacitors on the board. Apparently Abit used cheap parts.
The quality of these caps is less than to be desired, as they are failing at an extremely young age!!
It turned out the capacitors have
problems, not enough juice to power up the mobo, so it need multiple boots
and finally be able to boot up.
This problem is widespread and you can read more about it in:
http://www.vp6-board.com/caps1.htm
to replace the caps yourself (very risky unless you are good at precision soldering).
or read more to learn and have it repaired, if out of warrantee, at:
www.motherboardrepair.com
http://www.abit-usa.com/services/rma/
as soon as possible.
By all means don't give up on the VP6 and trash your computer because of other than this problem it is a great board and it fetches still a premium price ($150+ on E-Bay).
If you don't have a VP6 and have similar symptoms it is probably the same case.
MANY other manufactures have been affected by this condition besides Abit. Read the previously quoted websites for further info. This has already happened to me in two of my PC (the other was a P-200 vintage).
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