Asus M3A big problem! please help!

[Mausimo]

(i hope im posting in correct section)
Hello, im new to the forums and i come seeking anyone that could possibly help me.

I bought a system off a friend on the weekend, and he gave me a steal of a deal. He was abandoning AMD and going intel.

The system i got has, M3A mobo with the Phenom 9600 black edition, 4 gigs of ddr2 -1066.
It also has, dvd/cd writer, 250 gig sata2 harddrive and a linksys(cant remember exact name at school) wireless card.

He had been running the system in a different box on XP and it worked fine, he moved it over to a spare box for me and installed vista. However it does not recognize the quad core processor. Windows sees 4 processors but only uses one. CPUID, pc Wizard, HW Monitor and task manager(performance tab) all only see one processor. The other three do not seem to be running and in pcWizard give me exponential and negative clock rates. My friend and me have been trying to find fix's but to no success. So anyone that has delt with this or has any ideas would be much appreciated. Thanks - Mike

1 other problem is that the ram is only being detected as ddr2-pc6400 -(800).

p.s i updated mobo bios from 0301(initial release) to 0601 (current beta) with no success.

 

[arie01]

Hello and I hope it's not too late to try and help you. I'm no expert in anyway, but I do have some experience.

- First of all, stay away from any beta versions of the BIOS. Try moving up to the last non beta version and see what happens.
- If no sucess, see with your friend if you can try to install it again in his box just to make sure it works well.
- If not, get rid of Vista and try it with XP.
- If all is well, try moving the MB back to your box. If it doesn't work, there could be some kind of a short between the box and the MB that causes this problem.
- About the memory, the board supports it only with AM2+ CPU and since it is detected as 1 CPU, the memory speed is scaled down too.

Let me know if my suggestions helpped you in any way.

Good luck,
Arie

 

[cyberscribe]

I know I'm posting this long after the initial poster abandoned this thread, but the following info is for anybody that pulls this thread up later (as I have) looking for general information.

Certain AMD X4 chips suffer from what is known as the "TLB Bug". They are the AMD Phenom X4 9500, 9600 and 9600 BE models that the "B2" stepping.

The 9700 and the 9900 models both have "B3" stepping and are apparently immune to the TLB bug. Also, all the X4 xx50 models have the B3 revision as well, and don't suffer from th e TLB bug problem.

AMD has issued a BIOS update that supposedly work around the bug, but it doesn't actually "fix" the problem and it also imposes a performance penalty of 15-30% (AMD claims it's about 15% - but many users have reported it's higher than that).

The TLB bug seems to occur more frequently when using 64-bit OS's (particularly Vista) and also when the processor is overclocked.

As to the poster's memory issue (his 4 GB of DDR2-1066 being reported as DDR2-800) this is normal. The AMD website says that due to processor constraints the CPU can only handle having 2 DIMM slots filled with DDR2-1066. If you put 4 DDR2-1066 memory modules in (if you fill all 4 memory slots with DDR2-1066) then the memory will automatically default to DDR2-800 speed. Two sticks of DDR2-1066 are the max -- if you want to use all the memory slots them you may as well just use DDR2-800 to begin with.

Hope this helps clarify some of the issues mentioned here.