[digidad]

I have a Precix 9100 built in 06 and it won't boot up . Determined that the motherboard was bad. It looks like a soyo sy-7vba1330u board. I found one on ebay for 1250.00 and I cant afford that . Anybody have any solutions?
Thanks!

[Jim Dawson]

That board is a pretty standard AT board. If the system is not using the ISA bus slots, a much more modern board should work fine.

[digidad]

Thanks Jim, Not sure how to determine if I have ISA bus slots.

[Jim Dawson]

The ISA slots are the long black slots on the bottom of the board. The PCI slots are the white ones.

If you have a card in the one or both of the ISA slots, then you need them. If that's the case, then you will have to find a replacement board that has ISA slots.

[digidad]

Jim,
I have both slots and there is cards in each one. So any motherboard with isa slots will work or is there specific boards?

[Jim Dawson]

Any board should work. I would keep the same socket family, Socket 370. That way your existing CPU chip will fit because I notice on Ebay that most of the boards have no CPU installed.

socket 370 motherboard | eBay

This assumes that the existing CPU is good. When you say the motherboard failed, the question I would ask is: What failed? Did you lose the CPU, the power supply, memory, video card, or something else. Normally the first thing I do on a failed computer is to stuff in a new power supply. About 80% of the time that's the problem. If you don't have experience troubleshooting computers, your local mom & pop computer shop could probably help you out. The big computer stores are pretty much useless for stuff like this.

The other problem could be that one of the controller cards could have failed, thus taking out the motherboard. You might try removing the cards, then booting up to see what happens.

It would be helpful to know exactly what happens when you try to boot up. Does it even try to come up? Completely dead?

[digidad]

Thanks, Jim !!

[digidad]

So if i get a another motherboard how do I set up the PMDI card?

[Jim Dawson]

Well, that is a good question. You may not have to because it's program may be burned to an Eprom onboard the card. The other possibility is that when the computer boots up, all necessary programs may just load from the hard drive. My best guess it that it will just work once the computer is up. One problem that you may run into is that the interrupts (IRQs) may need to be set in BIOS, that one I can't help you with. I am assuming that the computer runs on some form of DOS. If it's a Windows computer then you you may be able to do that from the desktop using device manager.