A8V is giving me some fun...

[labortius]

I'm having a few problems with my (brand new) Asus A8V. I'm pretty sure the board is a dud, but I'd appreciate any opinions, especially if I've forgotten to do something obvious.

My system is Corsair TwinX 512 3200 Dual channel at 1GB
Athlon 64 3500 Venice
Asus A8V.
El Cheapo 4000W PSU Colorsit
1x DVD, 2/3 IDE drives I've had for years

Put it together fine, seems to work fine for a day or two. Compared to my Athlon XP 2000, it moved like lightening.

Except, when it booted, sometimes (20%) it didn't recognise all the IDE drives.

Sometimes (30%) it had an exception error 006 before Windows.

Doom 3 (which was finally looking sweet) kept crashing in different places after about 5-10 mins.

Ghosting my WinXP drive managed to screw up some NTFS info, so I had to quick reformat it.

Ram, I thought? Ran a few windows tests on it (Passmark burn in), Sandra, no problems, with RAM or CPU.

I was about to test ram with memtest98 is DOS, when the motherboard refused to turn on at all.

I'd wait a bit, try again, and it would work. Now I don't get the green power light at all, except for when it finally starts up.

I've tried a different power supply (from my four year old XP2000 computer) (before it went completely bad, and since), same result. El Cheapo PSU was rock solid on the rails, believe it or not, ran Sandra on it, although I was semi convinced that was the problem, because it was cheap.

When it does turn on, usually after I've moved to a different socket (?!) it runs fine, except for, I except, the Doom3 crashes and occasional 006 errors etc.

Anybody have any ideas?

Anything I should try? (apart from getting a good PSU, probably Antec)?

Thanks,
lab.

 

[roncpem]

is this revision 1 or 2? also, what bios is the board using.

 

[roncpem]

also, what is the rest of your system specs, ie; video card, sound card, hard drives, dvd drive, ect. & are you doing any over clocking?

 

[roncpem]

you also mentioned moving to a different socket, are you talking about an electrical outlet?

 

[roncpem]

do you have any other ram to try out? value ram would be best. this board is a bit fussy about ram. my xms ram would not work, but the value ram does. both by corsair.

 

[labortius]

Thanks for the replies.

I don't know what the revision is, and can't check the BIOS now, either.

I could try other RAM, but I can't see how RAM could be stopping the computer to start up. I'll try it, though...

Yes, I did mean a different electrical outlet. I'm sure that's coincidence.

Video card, x800pro, works fine in my XP2000 system.

Sound card, SBLive, works fine in my XP2000 system.

Hard drives, Seagates, x 3, two less than a year old. All work fine in my other computer. Philips DVD Lightscribe drive, brand new (had to get it after my old DVD-RW got blown up by this new system, sorry should have mentioned that).

I'm not overclocking anything.

 

[roncpem]

i had the same thing happen to my daughters a8v, it was a revision 1 with the original bios, & one day it would not post, it had been running fine for about 6 months. it had a 3500+ new castle, x800pro, wd 80 ata hard drive, sound blaster live, tdk cd burner & 2 512 corsair xms 3200. i took out each part one at a time & put them into a known good board/system & everything worked untill i tried the ram. i never did find out what happened to it, but it works fine since i replaced the ram. both sticks, very unusual that both would go bad. but they did some how. don't know if this will help or not but if you have an extra system you could try it too.

 

[labortius]

Well, you had almost the same equipment as me! I will move the RAM, but my A8V isn't even turning on most of the time, let alone getting to the stage where it can fail a POST.

 

[Mike995]

Goto http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php, download the cpu-z utility, then when you open cpu-z click on the mainboard tab, and it will tell you what bios you have. Heres the bios page for your A8V http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us

Now asus has a good free utility that can load bioses onto the board from the desktop, called ASUS Update it should be under utilitys on the cd that came with your motherboard. How ever, I have that motherboard and its been an absolute b1tch. Also check to see what your pin assignment on your harddrives is. If you have your hdd on a single IDE port and you dont have anything else plugged into that cable such as a cd rom drive, and or another harddrive, then I suggest you remove the pins, how ever since you have so many drives I dont think you can do with out putting 2 devices on one IDE port.WDs usually call for you to take out the pins in that situation (1 HDD on the IDE port with no slave), I had a problem booting up where it would halt for around 20-30 seconds after POST, because I had the pin in my HDD.

 

[labortius]

CPU-Z is great, unfortunately, it needs windows, which I can't get to.

I have nothing else plugged in except motherboard, + CPU lead.

Tried with two PUS's both same result.

Noticed occasionally I get a green flash on the power light, and CPU fan turns on, but after a second or so, goes dead again.

I could understand if the motherboard was protecting itself against a bad PSU, but the first PSU (the new one) I'm now using to run my old XP 2000 system without any probs (so far). Old one I'm using in 64 3500 (new system) ran my XP 2000 for three years or so. As I said, rails are steady in Sandra, and both are 400W (well probably less, stickers are easy to put on).

In what ways was your A8V a bitch, Mike?

I'm probably going to RMA the motherboard, and get a good PSU. Unfortunately, people are rubbishing Antec and Thermaltake as well as Asus around here, though the A8V got some good reviews (ha!)

 

[Mike995]

Now this is a hunch but the bios you have is most likely the 2.08, um.. I had problems all around, sata problems(not detecting drives), overclocking isnt great at all, random performance and or stability, an annoying hault after post...thats about all I can remember atm. If thats the case, did you check your cmos ?, try resetting that. I have a really cheap 40 $ psu in my pc and it hasnt hurt my motherboard or anything atm, so I dont think its your psu, It could be if things arent powering on or anything then I suppose it could be your psu, but if it worked in your other system then it should work fine in your other system as there isnt any thing changed but processor, and 400 watts is fine with your computer, Ive got a cheaper 450 Watt psu and it works fine. Check your front panel connectors just to make sure there werent any pulled out when you were working in your case. Asus does make good intel boards, but they dont make that great amd boards they put cheap capacitors on them.

 

[evilshuriken]

CPU-Z is great, unfortunately, it needs windows, which I can't get to.

Noticed occasionally I get a green flash on the power light, and CPU fan turns on, but after a second or so, goes dead again.

You know I had this exact problem with my asus p5p800, though that was the first time i tried it, I blamed everythign else, then unplgedded everything and learned it was the board that was bad, I say you just rma it, save you the the headaches of blaming somethign else. Asus boards are good... when they work, when they don't it sucks cuz their support is crap and just getting an rma number from them is a pain... have fun!

 

[labortius]

I'll RMA it, that new PSU is fine in my xp2000, been running it for about seven hours. If it takes six weeks etc, I'll probably get an MSI, I had one for my XP2000, neve gave me any problems for three years.

The pause that bugs me is when it waits for the RAID configuration you're not using. It would be good if you could disable that in the BIOS... OK, it's only two seconds, and right now I wish that was the only issue I have with this.

Thanks all for your help.
lab.

 

[Mike995]

You can disable that, I think its in pnppci, or something to that affect. Its boot sata I think. If you cant find it, Ill reboot and find out exactly what its called.

 

[labortius]

I think I found that.

Meanwhile I've got an MSIK8T Neo2 and it's working fine with a new Enermax 480W and the same RAM and processor.

Back to the depths of Doom3 - see you people later.

Thanks for the help.

Now I just need to figure how to install winxp on c: and not e:

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/software/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=231377&highlight=