CMOS Checksum Error - Press F1 to Continue or DEL to enter set-up..........

Im doing a friend what I thought was a favor. You see he had an old
Pentium III-800/Intel 815 Chipset that he was growing tired of and
with "Fry's Electronix" offering a CPU/Mobo Bundle @ $59 how could he
pass that up?

So here's the scoop:

I installed his new ECS mobo~K7VTA3(v.8C) with an AMD Sempron 2500+
and when I boot up I get this prompt:

CMOS Checksum Error
Press F1 to Continue or DEL to enter set-up..............

I pressed DEL and my screen went black & nothing...........Re-boot and
now I don't even get the CMOS prompt & my LCD monitor green light is
lighting on & off with nothing on my screen.

I cleared the CMOS via the jumper on the mobo, but still nothing comes
up, just black........

Is this a battery issue, god I hope I didnt fry the Video
Card...........that would suck.............

any thoughts on this?

OS = WIN XP (professional)
ECS K7VTA3 (KT 333 chipset)
1 stick of PC2700 DDR (333)

Here's some more info.........

250 watt Power Supply
Asus GeForce 4 Video Card

Any help would be greatly appreciated...........

I had that when I updated the bios but unchecked reset everything to
default.

I pressed DEL and re-setup the bios the way I like it and now it's fine.
Please try it. If you have problems setting up the bios, read the mobo
manual + google "bios optimization guide".

"Brian Mahan" ???
om ???...
Here's some more info.........

250 watt Power Supply
Asus GeForce 4 Video Card

Any help would be greatly appreciated...........

Does the 250 watt power supply, that used to power the Intel III /
800mhz CPU, have the same 20-pin connector as today's power supplies
that power up an Intel P4 or AMD Athlon 2500+ ?

I've read somewhere that the main power connector from the power
supply to the mobo is different? Is this true?

And I took some multimeter readings on the a spare power
connector.......

They are as follows:

12v pin measured only 11.5 V DC
5v pin measured only 4.8 V DC

Didnt check the 3.3 pin however..............

Could his Vid Card not be getting enough juice? The AGP gets fed by
the 3.3 Rail right? Would 3.0 not be sufficient? I mean it ran b4
w/out a problem...Is it because the AMD Sempron is needing more
wattage & it's taking more juice so that there's less juice on the 3.3
rail to properly drive the AGP GeForce 4 Vid Card?

TY every1 for your advice..............

On 25 Oct 2004 14:45:21 -0700,
(Brian Mahan) wrote:

Im doing a friend what I thought was a favor. You see he had an old
Pentium III-800/Intel 815 Chipset that he was growing tired of and
with "Fry's Electronix" offering a CPU/Mobo Bundle @ $59 how could he
pass that up?

So here's the scoop:

I installed his new ECS mobo~K7VTA3(v.8C) with an AMD Sempron 2500+
and when I boot up I get this prompt:

CMOS Checksum Error
Press F1 to Continue or DEL to enter set-up..............

I pressed DEL and my screen went black & nothing...........Re-boot and
now I don't even get the CMOS prompt & my LCD monitor green light is
lighting on & off with nothing on my screen.

I cleared the CMOS via the jumper on the mobo, but still nothing comes
up, just black........

Is this a battery issue, god I hope I didnt fry the Video
Card...........that would suck.............

any thoughts on this?

OS = WIN XP (professional)
ECS K7VTA3 (KT 333 chipset)
1 stick of PC2700 DDR (333)

Appended:

Here's some more info.........

250 watt Power Supply
Asus GeForce 4 Video Card

A very good, semi-modern 250W PSU might handle that system,
but in general the power supply is too low a capacity for
the parts. At this point though, it's too early to tell if
this is the problem, when the system is in that
nothing-but-black-screen state you might check the voltage
levels at the ATX connector with a multimeter, if possible.

Try clearing the CMOS, with power supply unplugged from AC.
Although you mentioned clearing CMOS I've seen some people
do it without unplugging system. If there is no jumper,
pull the battery for 10 minutes (also with AC unplugged).

If you had an old, less power hungry video card it might be
helpful to temporarily pull the Geforce 3 out of the system
to reduce the load. Likewise, pull/disconnect any drives or
cards, and if there are jumpers on the motherboard to reduce
the FSB speed, you might try temporarily underclocking to
reduce load and it would also be easier, more likely to post
with lower bus if the memory is the problem. Naturally
another way to see if memory is the problem is to try a
different memory module, ECS motherboards are sometimes
pretty picky about memory.

The motherboard is also fairly old to be running a Sempron
CPU. It "should" work but if that is confusing the bios
(and since ECS makes some of the most tempermental bios
configurations possible), it might help to temporarily
install an older CPU, and if/after confirming some
stability, flash the board's bios to the latest version.

My first guess would be that if your 250W PSU is same age as
the old system, it's the problem. IIRC that board uses 5V
for CPU power so a replacement PSU should have at least 200W
combined 3V+5V rating, preferably 220W+, but again it may be
premature to assume it's the power supply, especially
without voltage readings.

"Brian Mahan" ???
m ???...
Does the 250 watt power supply, that used to power the Intel III /
800mhz CPU, have the same 20-pin connector as today's power supplies
that power up an Intel P4 or AMD Athlon 2500+ ?

I've read somewhere that the main power connector from the power
supply to the mobo is different? Is this true?

The ATX connector is the same for P3 and P4's. The only difference is a "P4
Capable PSU" has an extra 4 pin plug supplying addtional power to the CPU. A
"P3 PSU" won't have that, but it'd still have the same 20 pin ATX connector.

I've never used a 250W PSU since the P2 days and don't know how it'd perform
with the GF4.

On 25 Oct 2004 21:27:46 -0700,
(Brian Mahan) wrote:

Does the 250 watt power supply, that used to power the Intel III /
800mhz CPU, have the same 20-pin connector as today's power supplies
that power up an Intel P4 or AMD Athlon 2500+ ?

I've read somewhere that the main power connector from the power
supply to the mobo is different? Is this true?

And I took some multimeter readings on the a spare power
connector.......

They are as follows:

12v pin measured only 11.5 V DC
5v pin measured only 4.8 V DC

Didnt check the 3.3 pin however..............

Could his Vid Card not be getting enough juice? The AGP gets fed by
the 3.3 Rail right? Would 3.0 not be sufficient? I mean it ran b4
w/out a problem...Is it because the AMD Sempron is needing more
wattage & it's taking more juice so that there's less juice on the 3.3
rail to properly drive the AGP GeForce 4 Vid Card?

TY every1 for your advice..............

3.0V is not sufficient for 3.3V rail. Those readings
indicate the PSU is struggling, it shouldn't be below 4.9V
on the spare connector... although the official spec allows
for 5% deviation, in practice an ATX power supply is
regulated based on it's 5V rail and/or weighted with 12V...
either way it's capacity is less than needed.

It's not necessarily a problem with power to the GF4, it
could be but instead could be power to something else, the
3V & 5V rails are sharing same transformer winding and have
a combined total output on "almost" any older 250W PSU.
Odds are there is no damage to the video card, YET.

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 12:57:22 +0800, "Bronney Hui"
wrote:


"Brian Mahan" ???
om ???...
Does the 250 watt power supply, that used to power the Intel III /
800mhz CPU, have the same 20-pin connector as today's power supplies
that power up an Intel P4 or AMD Athlon 2500+ ?

I've read somewhere that the main power connector from the power
supply to the mobo is different? Is this true?

The ATX connector is the same for P3 and P4's. The only difference is a "P4
Capable PSU" has an extra 4 pin plug supplying addtional power to the CPU. A
"P3 PSU" won't have that, but it'd still have the same 20 pin ATX connector.


What happen if only 20 pin ATX connector is plug to the motherboard
but leaving 4 pin connector unplug?

--
WebWalker