[bronchitis]

Hello

I know very little about these systems, so please bear with me. I recently got a Visual Workstation 320 which will not POST. The fans spin up and everything seems to be getting power but other than that, it shows no signs of life, not even a beep. I hooked up a USB keyboard to it (no mouse) and a normal CRT monitor (VGA) in case it matters. It has a single 600MHz Pentium III and all the RAM slots are filled. It has no hard disk at the moment because it has had its hard disk removed before it was given to me (shame, it must have been one of those nice SCSI ones). I have been told that the onboard graphics chip tends to fail on these systems. Is this true? Could it be the cause here? I am hoping it isn't the RAM, because there's no way I'm going to be able to find replacements. It is also worth mentioning that the capacitors on the motherboard all seem ok.

[Raion]

Have you tried moving memory around? Pulling the onboard battery? Reseating the CPU? etc. It's very much an x86 box with just a bit of custom hardware.

[micrex22]

If you have the spare cash you could try purchasing one of the PCI POST test cards:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/PCI-Motherboard...1988545873

[bronchitis]

Hello again. How exactly do you remove the CPU in this thing??? I haven't tried much because I don't want to break anything. If this is hard I'll buy one of those PCI cards.

It doesn't look like an ordinary Slot 1 socket. There are two latches at the sides where the CPU goes in which seem like they must be pulled.

[micrex22]

Hello again. How exactly do you remove the CPU in this thing??? I haven't tried much because I don't want to break anything. If this is hard I'll buy one of those PCI cards.

It doesn't look like an ordinary Slot 1 socket. There are two latches at the sides where the CPU goes in which seem like they must be pulled.

I'd highly advise taking a quick look through the manual, there's a few specifics in regards to the memory modules needing to be installed in a specific way as well (not as common for x86 hardware): http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems...-vw320.pdf

Page 67 and 69 specifically has an explanation for processor removal and insertion:

5. If you are installing a secondary processor, remove the processor terminator card from the secondary processor slot, as shown in Figure 6-1. Push the latches on the outside edges of the terminator inward and pull the terminator out of the slot. Save the terminator. In the future, if you remove the processor, you will need to reinstall the terminator.
8. Install the processor, as shown in Figure 6-4. With the connector on the processor facing the connector on the system board, push the processor into the slot. Push the latches on the sides of the processor outward until they snap into place.

Apparently there are also jumpers and stuff for CPU configuration. It's possible your system has misconfigured CPU jumpers, RAM, etc. I'd just minimize the configuration and start from scratch ensuring everything is configured correctly. Also if someone removed the second CPU terminator that may also be why it's not posting. You'd need to get another terminator or a second CPU to populate it with.

[bronchitis]

Hello again. How exactly do you remove the CPU in this thing??? I haven't tried much because I don't want to break anything. If this is hard I'll buy one of those PCI cards.

It doesn't look like an ordinary Slot 1 socket. There are two latches at the sides where the CPU goes in which seem like they must be pulled.

I'd highly advise taking a quick look through the manual, there's a few specifics in regards to the memory modules needing to be installed in a specific way as well (not as common for x86 hardware): http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems...-vw320.pdf

Page 67 and 69 specifically has an explanation for processor removal and insertion:

5. If you are installing a secondary processor, remove the processor terminator card from the secondary processor slot, as shown in Figure 6-1. Push the latches on the outside edges of the terminator inward and pull the terminator out of the slot. Save the terminator. In the future, if you remove the processor, you will need to reinstall the terminator.
8. Install the processor, as shown in Figure 6-4. With the connector on the processor facing the connector on the system board, push the processor into the slot. Push the latches on the sides of the processor outward until they snap into place.

Apparently there are also jumpers and stuff for CPU configuration. It's possible your system has misconfigured CPU jumpers, RAM, etc. I'd just minimize the configuration and start from scratch ensuring everything is configured correctly. Also if someone removed the second CPU terminator that may also be why it's not posting. You'd need to get another terminator or a second CPU to populate it with.

I don't think the current CPU is the one it came with, it's different (600MHz). It doesn't have the two latches at the top and the manual does not specify the jumper configuration for 600MHz. They used to do professional work on this machine so I assume it worked fine for a while.
There is a terminator installed in the second slot.

Here are some pictures:

[micrex22]

I see what you mean -- taking a closer look at the CPU it's missing the latch-out tabs because it's not a validated SGI part. In order to get it out you'll probably have to jam the lower tab mechanism to force it out whereby the tabs on a 'genuine' module would have done.

I don't know enough about the system to speculate what a non-genuine processor in there does, but it's possible the board doesn't like it at that frequency--or worst case scenario slowly killed the VRM due to high power requirements and it finally gave up. I wonder if you could swap the CPU and terminator to see if that changes anything.

I'd try:
Reducing the configuration to the minimum (and even reducing the RAM configuration to its minimum), remove any unnecessary PCI cards, and see if that changes its behaviour. I'd also be curious to know what it does without that 'un-official' CPU installed -- but considering it needs a terminator to work I don't know what would happen with an empty slot. It's possible it may do a power-up boot like it's doing now, or something completely unpredictable.


If I had to take a guess based on my experience with hardware, it's kind of looking like a CPU issue.

[weblacky]

Yo,
Just out of left-field, I've seen this EXACT symptom on PCs that actually have bad PSUs (circa 2008). In my case they were NEW cases with 350w PSUs (Antec), of a large lot, two cases with new third-party motherboards (also installed by me) showed this exact described symptom when I was assembling them. Using a basic ATX PSU tester I found if the POWER GOOD (PG) time for the PSU is over 300ms (like 500ms-800ms), the computer will act this way. Fans spin but nothing else will happen. All line voltages were correct, but if PG time was long, boards would "zombie" on start and never work. Changing PSUs solved it for all two cases I ran across.

I can't see all the power connectors to tell if they are ATX standard or SGI-only BS.

If they are standard ATX, can you please get a nice 700W PSU or something and hook the board and any processor power connector to a new PSU (hanging outside the case) and see if it just starts right up. I'd assume if someone was using this before, then it worked in its current config. Just because fans spin doesn't mean the PSU is OK.

Also, please replace the coin-cell battery as well to ensure ALL powers are good on next attempt.

Let us know,

[bronchitis]

Hello.

In addition to the ATX connector, the PSU seems like it has a special connector. It looks like nothing I've ever seen (kinda looks like a CD-ROM AUX connector).
I'd be scared to chuck in another PSU even if the motherboard didn't have that special connector.
I wouldn't be surprised if the PSU has a different kind of ATX connector, like some Dells do, for example. It would be great if someone could confirm that the ATX connector is indeed a standard 24-pin one.
Here is a picture of the special connector (it's the one in the middle):




I'll try changing the jumpers and let you know. They're kinda hard to get to because the CPU blocks the way.
Its current jumper configuration is not in the manual, so I don't know what it's doing.