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CPU Vcore outragous reading


Tommy

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Okay, so I've been having a bit of a problem with my Windows 98 machine. Today while just poking around in the BIOS, I noticed the numbers we all good in the PC Health Section except for one, the CPU Vcore -5V was being reported around -61.69V. That's DEFINITELY not right. So, what could this be, a power supply issue or the CPU going bad? The computer itself seems to work okay most of the time except lately sometimes it seems to lock up for no reason. But I just put this board into a different case with a different power supply so I do not know the history of this power supply too much. So it could've been doing this with the other case and power supply as well but I do not know. Although the CPU seemed to be running a bit hot at almost 130F at idle. So what should I look into first? Suggestions?

 

Edit: It's a Pentium 4 Northwood 2.6GHz processor. It was overclocked slightly at one time but I have since loaded optimized values in the BIOS and that made no difference to this issue. I've heard Northwoods were a bit fussy.

Edited by Tommy
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A -5 V line reading -61.69 V means absence of a sensor or a toast component in the sensor system. Its meaningless.

If the machine is running at all, it cannot possibly be true. And, BTW, the -5 V line is not the Vcore line... (and Vcore is less than +5 V since shortly after the times of the 80486s...)!

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Thanks for the info, dencorso. I was actually a bit worried when I saw that reading so I shut the computer off and haven't used it since then. lol I just wondered if it had anything to do with the problem I started experiencing. I thought at first it had something to do with RLoew's RAM patch because when I shut down Windows 98, I always get the error saying error writing to device AUX and the only thing I can do is shut the machine off manually because if I try to do fail or ignore, then it just start beeping and won't stop. Memtest didn't find anything wrong with the RAM and RLoew said there wasn't any bugs in his patch that he knows of so I thought maybe something is wacky with the CPU.

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The only reason I at first suspected it was before the computer wasn't doing that before I added in the 2GBs of RAM and installed the patch. That's the only reason I suspected the patch at first but I have it going on a few test machines and it's not doing that so it's hard to say what's causing it. I could throw in an extra hard drive and reinstall 98 on that and see if anything causes the problems again or not. But sometimes during bootup it seems like 98 just stops loading and the computer freezes up so I think there are a few issues going on and it could very well be from a bad installation.

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Zip and attach (if you have no objection to it, of course!) autoexec.bat, config.sys and msdos.sys: let's see what's in them. BTW, are all HDDs present PATA? List models, sizes and partitioning for each one, please.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Don't worry at all, that -61V reading is most definitely erroneus (your comp would be in flames or something were it right).

You just can't trust BIOS or software voltage readings, particularly regarding negative voltages.

Use a multimeter for real readings on the PSU connectors.

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