I have just bought a 1GHz Pentium 3 processor (socket 370) for my ECS P6BAT. Unfortunately, with this CPU attached to the motherboard, my computer ceases to work correctly. Sometimes it won’t POST at all, and sometimes it will! When it doesn’t POST, the lights show up to indicate hard drive and CD-ROM activity, the keyboard lights flash once, but there is no beep and nothing comes on screen. When it does POST however, it won’t load the operating system. Windows will give me a cryptic message such as “XXXX file is missing or corrupt” when I know it isn’t. Linux (also installed on the same system) just won’t load past the BOOT loader. My motherboard supports Socket 370 & Slot 1. The manual states the maximum speed of the CPU should be no more then 850MHz in the Slot. However, it states that the socket 370 can only handle Celerons up to 433MHz. I have proved this wrong by installing a Pentium 3 650MHz in the socket 370, and it worked fine. Therefore, I am very critical of the manual specifications. I assumed that 850MHz was the fastest speed available at the time of writing the manual, and the guys at ECS hadn’t bothered updating the manual My CMOS setup only had multipliers that went up to 8.0, so I couldn’t understand ECS’s claim that it could support 850MHz. I have updated the BIOS to the latest version, and I noticed that the multipliers now go up to 11.5. Therefore, I cannot understand the motherboard’s incompatibility with 1GHz processors. My motherboard detects the CPU, but won’t load the operating system. So I guess what I am trying to ask is this: 1. is there such a thing as a half dead CPU – i.e. it can be detected but doesn’t actually work? 2. Is it possible for a motherboard to stop functioning correctly after a certain CPU speed, regardless that the CPU is using the same core (Coppermine) and the BIOS has the multipliers to handle it (1GHz)? I know there’s a lot of information here, but there’s no easy way of asking this
