Another Opinion Among Many

In my quest for a more powerful but cheap computer, and ebay acquaintance happened to send me a motherboard that he had replaced because of a random freezing problem when spooling a print job. The board was, of course, the Asus P3B-F. This board was, at its introduction, hailed as a strong contender for the Abit BX6 and its siblings (or a logical progression from the P2B). This board comes with a Intel 440BX chipset and an ATA33 drive controller. I happened on the model with only 1 ISA slot and 5 PCI. The nice thing about this board was the 4 RAM slots, which was a good thing, as the BX chipset had a limitation on the size of RAM it could handle (and this extends to the chips size as well).I installed this board in a new case I had purchased for the reason (my first ATX computer) of accommodating my new slot 1 board. Unfortunately, I had the same luck with it. It was no problem to boot the machine and I successfully installed Debian GNU/Linux (Woody - 3.0 original) as the OS. It ran in console mode fine, but when I fired up an X-Server, that’s where the problems arose. I experienced the same freezing when I was doing anything CPU intensive like screen paints - as in scrolling down a web page!!!!!! I had to do something, for sure. Since I didn’t have anything to lose, I resorted to a bit of surgery. After many hours of diligent searching on the web about my problem, I hit upon the right search terms and came across the Asus Motherboard Reworking Guide, which is an excellent resource for those who also have a problematic Asus board. I should note that when I found the page, the author had a different URL and was “off the net” for a while as well. He’s back, which is excellent.

This is where I found the suggestion to solder a capacitor on my motherboard’s CPU socket, bridged between pins A1 and A3. I followed Chris Gardener’s example and used the back of the motherboard. This way, I didn’t have to rip the shroud off the CPU, which looked like it would break when I pried at it ( ). I got a bit luckier than he did, I think, as I happened across some flat surface-mount tantalum capacitors on a broken modem I got for free in a pile of junk. They were the perfect size to bridge between the two pins and they were flat, so I wouldn’t have to worry about contact with the case and I didn’t require any extra wires. Above and below are a few images. Please excuse my old webcam. Its all I had when I started this adventure.

If you have one of these old boards I hope that this helps you. Its still in service, by the way. The machine has also been running the same install of Windows XP since it was recommissioned as my Wife’s computer (I replaced it with an AMD board and I didn’t want her to be stuck with the new one of there was any weirdness.

This is just an update on Feb 3, 2008.  The board is still running in the same computer like a champ (depite the wonky power supply).