Re: AMD thunderbird oops

[Pierre Etchemaite <petchema@concept-micro.com>]

On 28-Jun-2001 Tim Moore wrote:
>> (I wrote)
>> Some ASUS boards (mostly P3B-F) would either freeze or self reboot
>> when using PhotoShop 5. Everything else would run perfectly.
>> 
>> Disabling MMX optimizations in this software would "solve" the
>> problem.  Another solution found on the web (sorry, I don't have
>> the URL at hand) is to add two or three additionnal capacitors on
>> the back of the board, to solve the electric instabilities that
>> cause the reboots.
> 
> This is incorrect information.  Abit BP6 early revs suffered under load
> from a 100uF cap (EC10, between the CPU sockets) that should have been
> 1500uF.  This was compounded by a weak or otherwise inadequate power
> supply.
> 
> Having run literally 7 P3F-Fs and 6 of their P2B-F predecessors, not a
> single one had any problems.  They were the premiere overclocking boards
> of their day.

Don't get me wrong, I like ASUS boards, and BX chipset boards were a
very safe choice at the time, that's why this problem was very
disturbing when I experienced it on 2 or 3 boards (out of more than 100,
but I guess many never ran Photoshop since then).

I digged my archives.

Adobe Knowledgebase article about the problem
(http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/2256a.htm) mentions spontaneous
reboots with Dell Optiplex GX1, ASUS P2B-F and ASUS P3B-F.

I could not find anything about the problem on ASUS websites at the
time.

(unofficial) P2B-(L)S fixing is documented here:
http://www.turbotech.ch/articles2000/000815-p2bls_rework-01.html

(unofficial) CUBX fixing (some of those are also affected):
http://members.ams.chello.nl/mgherard/html/photoshop.html

Best regards,
Pierre.