I've got this seemingly obscure motherboard and I am desperatley trying to upgrade the CPU power. It currently has a Duron 750 MHz, and have had no luck with the CPU upgrades. The first time I bought an ATHLON 1.3 GHz. When I put it in and attempted to boot the first time, in the POST it did read that it was detected as an ATHLON rather than DURON but it only read 850MHz, wouldn't load WinXP Pro, but I later learned that I had the 266bus CPU and this board obviously needs takes only a 200. I put my old Duron750 back in and all was okay again. So I bought another ATHLON, this one is definetly ther right bus(200) with the speed of 1100 MHz (1.1 GHz). On installation of this one, it didn't run all hot like the 266bus did, I also used new thermal glue between it and the heatsink/fan; this time on POST, it registered (read) perfect 'ATHLON 1100 MHz. But as soon as the words appeared, it never finished detecting the HDs the 'next stetp' the whole PC just POWERED COMPLETELY OFF!! IT THEN WOULD NEVER BOOT AGAIN AT ALL no video, nothing!!!

First I tried updating the BIOS MANY, MANY times and with different utilities and .bin files. Luckily, I never destroyed the BIOS with a faulty flash attempt but the BIOS v is Original and ANCIENT, can remember the version # off hand; not at that PC, but I can post it later if necessary; the numbers are incredibly lower than any of the 4 or 5 .bin flashes I've located online.

When I put the old D750 back in; no problems at all...

...WHAT THE HELL? Am I just not going to succeed here? Anyone else seen anything similar or had a problem like this on this BIOSTAR? Will I maybe only have luck with maxing out at a DURON chip; maxing at 950?? I'm not convinced even that would take.

I've successfully upgraded the RAM to 768mb of PC-133, I'm even running a PCI ATA-133 RAID configuration with 3 160 GB HDs and 1 250GB system drive, AGP 4x GeForce5500 MX Video; basically doing everything to get faster performance.

I would really appreciate any feedback or suggestions on this forum or email: clintkissing@gmail.com

Thanks in advance.

I'd say at this point it's time to upgrade the motherboard.