Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (
More info?)
Hi,
My comments were based on experience. I purchased the 8knxp referred to at
about the same time as Bob. The conversations of the day (nearly a year ago)
were around getting stability with the F5 and later F6 bios. There was very
considerable discussion on this to the point where one site I made reference
to had 27 pages of conversation thread on the issues around getting systems
stable from the memory perspective only. There were even representatives
from the memory manufacturers monitoring the newsgroups to see what positive
advice they could give and also to keep things straight.
GB was not alone on this front - all manufacturers seemed to have troubles
with the 865 and 875 chipset.
My comments reflected the fact that it took quite some time for GB to
produce bios F6 - several months. There were multiple versions of the beta
bios's that floated around that many people tried and slowly but surely
reported progress with. When bios F6 finally arrived, his largely sorted the
issue out. However there were still considerable issues with disc drive
detection in particular SATA drives not appearing in the bios at all,
corrupt bios display strings and corruption in general requiring clearing
cmos. This was when they decided that it was a good idea to initialise the
on board controller bios's prior to entering setup that caused some people
to fret - without this the bios could not display the drives on these
controllers and so get the boot order specification right. This did not work
well in bios F6 at all. After some further months, bios F7 came and went
very quickly as did F8 while F9 hung around a bit longer than either of
those two. Finally bios F10 did arrive and in that version things were / are
largely correct.
To compare this history with the asus - and to put Bob's experience into
perspective a little, by comparison asus had most of these issues sorted in
considerably less time that GB. IE the interval between each bios version
was considerably less along with the stickability of each version.
Basically, from day 1 with Asus, by comparison I had no issues. Certainly
Bob did have the issue with swapping IDE discs in drive bays. All the asus
P4P and P4C systems I have installed have been running 24 x 7 without issues
apart from one system that had a RAID 1 disc fault - nothing to do with the
mobo.
So yes, at the end of the day I have no qualms about the reliability of the
electronics on the 8KNXP. My systems run 24 x 7 as do my customers, so as
people that see me post will know I always run RAID 1 and seek reliability
before all else (IE placing System on RAID 0).
Basically, I think a more beneficial statement may be to list the mobo's
that people would be foolish to touch. The 8knxp is a good mobo. Rev 2 is
according to others different only in the sound chip, and Prescott CPU's are
dead in the water... If you want a future get an AMD64 bit
I stated it a long time ago: a dual bios is useless if there is no stable
bios available. I had never needed to clear cmos prior to the 8knxp, and
prior to this fiasco would never have seen a benefit in a dual bios. Now I
know why they are needed. Give me 1 reliable bios from day 1 and i will be
happy.
- Tim
"Courseyauto" <courseyauto@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20040606215036.16160.00000715@mb-m15.aol.com...
>
>> That is the unbiased report. The biased report would be: get the asus.
>> The
>> choice then becomes if you get the P4C800 or the P4P800 for exactly the
> same
>> reasons. The biased report is based from experience: the asus boards are
>> better. The big let down for the GB boards is the quality of the bios and
>> the length of time it takes them to resolve issues.
>
> I must disagree with some of your points with respect given to your
> experiences. First, I selected the 8KNXP Rev. 1 one year ago almost to
> the
> day, and it is not only still running but has only crashed in XP Pro once,
> this considering the fact that it is used in a home-based business that
> requires it to be powered-up 18 hours per day, seven days per week, and in
> actual use much of that time. This inauspicious occasion occurred while I
> was attempting to position the bios settings for XP to accept the ICH5R
> SATA
> controller, previously disabled, but that situation was quickly corrected.
>
> As for Asus vs. GB and bios issues, if I had to pick one board at this
> time
> it would be the GB. I installed a P4C800 in a friend's computer, mostly
> because of price, and quickly ran into problem with its AMI bios that
> would
> arbitrarily rearrange the boot-drive sequence without human input when
> detaching IDE drives connected intermittently through a Mobil Rack. It
> caused so much trouble that I had to install a PCI IDE controller to
> circumvent the main bios, wresting control of the IDE drives away from the
> bios. This was not an isolated issue, as when I inquired on an Asus
> newsgroup I received lots of commiseration from others who had gone
> through
> the same problems. I'll take the Award bios any day, and I've never had
> trouble with f5, f6, or f9 on this Rev 1 board--the only versions I've
> used
> to date.
>
> This person plus another friend who also owns a P4C800 are both happy with
> their boards, even though one experienced a fatal failure requiring a
> replacement, but if I had to build another system for myself today it'd be
> a
> Rev 2 8KNXP. I have reason to believe it is better than the Rev 1, but if
> it is only as good, that would be good enough.
>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>
> Not only is the Gigabyte bios better than the Asus,it has 2 of them.
> The Asus bios is what kept me from buying one. I built a revision 1
> KNXP
> for my nephew that he uses for video editing a year ago and it has been
> solid a
> a rock,i have the revision 2 that has been running 24 hours a day for over
> a
> year. DOUG
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