Utsource App Download

[Edilma Howard]

SoI did my order through utsource.net, the first time I bought some MDRAM for my tseng labs card, a bunch of SOJ40 memory chips and everyone but one were working fine.

A month ago I did another order.

I bought some more MDRAM chips and some cache chips.

This is what I got:

Obviously noone of the chips has ever worked, they are just a piece of plastic, I suppose they just packed with some paper just a minute after they come out from the factory, as they claim.

Just to be on the safe side during the order I also paid the "Returns & Shipping Guarantee Policy" for 1 eur but despite of that i'm fighting with customer client support they claim they can't see the pictures of non working chips even if I attached them to my email and in a website too.

I paid with paypal lucky enough but i'm unsure they will side with me, what do you think?

Yes, the guy I paid for tested all 4 of them and when installed the board didn't boot, while once those were took off the board worked like a charme.

I needed just 1, I bought 4 because I knew there could be defective parts, but those are all fakes.

Also as stated I doubt they get out from the factory wrapped with tape and paper, that's not how the original stuff is sent out.

Alright! ?

All you did was solder on the chip, right?

My reasoning is if they just sent you plastic with legs the board would probably post normally just with the same amount of cache as before; electrically nothing changed.

So either you got chips that are defective or just too slow for the board,

or you got completely different chips,

or they are the real deal but something else is wrong.

I looked up some pictures of the board. I assume you populated the pads directly next to the chip with the correct capacitors? Without them the chip will most likely not work right.

Also I think you need to move the resistor from R24 (one cache chip) to R23 (two cache chips).

Also, in my experience even broken cache chips won't prevent the board from booting unless there's a short between Vcc and GND, which you can easily check. All the blown cache chips I've encountered either weren't detected at all (as if they were not there) or produced instability after POST when the L2 is enabled.

I didn't solder them my self, I wouldn't have the knowledge. But since we are gone to guessing.

There isn't any empty spot for others capacitors, the board is fully popoluted, the only thing that are missing are 2 tiny resistors around the second cache chips.

The pin layout is the same (just checked to be sure) but there are standards. Also the chips I bought are 5ns while the installed one is 6ns, for sure that is not a reason for incompatibility.

When Tiido tried to use fake cache chips on my motherboard (not that one) it just stopped booting, so things are different between 486 mb (where when you select the wrong cache amount it boots and then hangs before loading the OS) and those socket7, it came back to life when those fake chips were desoldered.

If those fake chips were just plastic packages with legs, then them being soldered on the board or not would not have made any difference whatsoever unless the legs are all connected... aka, a metal plate with legs sandwiched in between two layers of plastic.

I didn't solder them my self, I wouldn't have the knowledge. But since we are gone to guessing.

There isn't any empty spot for others capacitors, the board is fully popoluted, the only thing that are missing are 2 tiny resistors around the second cache chips.

When Tiido tried to use fake cache chips on my motherboard (not that one) it just stopped booting, so things are different between 486 mb (where when you select the wrong cache amount it boots and then hangs before loading the OS) and those socket7, it came back to life when those fake chips were desoldered.

So what exactly did the board do? Did it turn on (fans spinning, drives powering up) but no beeps and no picture? Did it POST (count RAM, list drives etc.) but not boot the OS? Or was there no sign of life at all?

You did not adress the possible issue with not moving the resistor (marked green). From pictures online it appears the resistor is installed at R24 when only one cache chip is installed and in R23 with two cache chips.

This motherboard specifically started to turns on as soon the atx power connector was plugged, that was already worrying.

Then it showed a black screen with fan spinning and so on.

Unlucky I can't remember what the debug card said.

I was referring exactly to those things, thank you for the clarification. I suppose it's worth a try but i'm not confident.

I should move the resistor from r23 to r24 and then add two caps on the pads near the cache chips.

Do you know how can I find the value for the caps?

Those are caps that provide a local "energy pool" for the chips in case they need a sudden spike of energy, and delivering it from somewhere else in the board wouldn't be fast enough. So the exact value of the caps doesn't matter that much. It's important that these caps have a low resistance, so they can deliver the energy with minimal "friction". Multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC for short) do a great job at this, so industry convention is to use 100nF MLCC capacitors. The typical size of SMD components on PC mainboards is called "0603".

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