Ok, I have taken the adventuresome step of building a computer.

Upon getting the components I put the system to gether then to have
one problem with the video card and GPF's after the computer was
running after awhile.

Here's what's in the system:
Topgun Pentium MMX motherboard with Cyrix MX PR-233 set at 75Mhz bus
and 2.5x multiplier 2.9v and 16 Meg of SDRAM. This motherboard uses the
AMIBIOS with the WINBIOS cmos setup.

Seagate 4.3 Gig UDMA EIDE HD, Partitioned into 2 Drives with 50% of total
capacity on each drive. LBA enabled.

36X Max CDROM Secondary IDE Channel set as master.

3 1/2 1.44 Floppy Drive.

S3 Virge 4 Meg Video

Problem 1:

I am using my parents monitor so this isn't a monitor problem.  When I boot
up I am getting strange characters in video.  I can see POST in progress,
but barely.  I am able to enter the CMOS setup but cannot see anything well
enough
to set up the system. So I hit the reset button.  Sometimes it clears up the
problem sometimes it doesn't.  I usually have  to reboot a couple of time
before
it clears.

Problem 2:

After running in Windows 98 (Upgrade) for awhile, or when I use processor
intensive programs I start getting GPFS one after another, and the infamous
"blue screen of death" . either the processor is overheating, or the
processor is going bad.

Problem 3:

After figuring out a problem of over heating, I figured that the fan may be
on wrong,
so I reversed its position.  The fan works, that's not the problem.  The
problem is
after I seated it on the processor. and turned the computer back on the
thing refused to boot, and has refused to boot. The HD, FLPPY, and CD are
getting power, buy no video, and considering I don't hear it going through
the boot process lends me to believe that the processor has gone bye bye.



Question:

Could the Video have gone out, or has the processor gone bad? I can't return
the processor, but the Video I can return. I inspected the motherboard to
see if I had caused any damage, but could see none.

If it is the processor its no big loss I had planned in getting an AMD or
Intel MMX since the reputation of Cyrix in the department of overheating is
well known.

--Patrick Black

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