Greetings,
I just picked up a 21164 LX Motherboard + 533MHz CPU for
$200 the other day, so I just had to try to get this thing up
and running. I've since bought the ATX case, floppy, Matrox
Millenium II PCI video card, cd-rom, 8GB IDE hard disk, and
two 72x8MB SDRAM modules for 128MB total memory.
This is my first experience with the DEC Alpha, so please
bear with me if I use any wrong nomenclature or whatever.
So, I put everything together, crossed my fingers, and
powered up my new box. Fans spun, and the hard disk and cdrom
spun up, but there was absolutely no video signal. My monitor
shows a general grayness if there's no VGA sync signal, and
at powerup there is a brief flicker to black, but then the gray
comes back like there's no video signal.
I've tested the video card on a different box after this, and
the card works fine. I'm also using the same monitor, so I don't
think it's a problem with the VGA card or monitor.
I went through the MB manual several times to see if there
were any jumper settings I've missed, but I can't find any. I've
also unhooked the floppy, hard disk and cdrom, to see if these could
be interfering with the system somehow. That didn't help.
I then tried setting the jumper to the fail-safe BIOS, and
to my relief, I heard the sequence of 1-2-3 beeps that is supposed
to happen during bootup. So, my first question is, does this indicate
that the CPU may be okay? Because there's no video, I can't tell what's
going on inside. Does this also indicate that the memory is okay?
My other question deals with video cards. Is there any reason
to believe this matrox card won't work? I assume just about any vga
card should at least work during bootup and bios initialization. Does
anyone have any input about this?
Thirdly, the manual mentions that error messages may be sent
out the serial port during bootup. Can I interface this with my
other linux boxes via a null modem to try to get the messages over
the port?
As a last resort of trying to get things right, I even
unscrewed my motherboard from the ATX case, and lifted it slightly,
in case ground loops were causing any problems. this didn't seem
to help.
I have two other questions, too. Firstly, I was told it was
a 533MHz CPU when I bought it, so I have the jumpers set for this
speed. I've tried the other speed settings (466 and 600) but they
didn't work either. Is there a way to verify the 533MHz speed?
Also, there are jumpers on the MB to change the cache size
from 2MB, but they are all 'reserved' for later options. Should I
just assume I have the 2MB cache?
And is there a way to tell if the memory is okay? Basically,
I'd like to know what the series of beeps implies is working. CPU
and/or memory? maybe my PCI bridge is broken so hence no video?
Thanks alot for any and all replies. Once again, this is
my first time using an alpha, and I've just joined this list yesterday,
(although I've scanned through the archives) so please bear with me
if I've breached any protocol or whatever :-)
Cheers,
- Jeff Wasserman
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