GA-MA790GP-DS4H and Phenom II

I just built a new system (the first one in my signature) and just wanted to start a little discussion about the board (and if possible the board and this CPU if anyone else got one).

After reading the web, I must say I feel lucky, as I am having much less issues with this board (and CPU) than most. The issues I have though have me confused.

First, I have the F3h BIOS (none of the others seem compelling enough to upgrade) and the newest drivers (except for the 2 that came out today) and ATI 8.11 drivers.

What works:
-> Starts up quickly, and shuts down fast (normally)
-> very nice performance, where it should be
-> Solid when under load and in games with 4850
-> Runs OCZ ram @ correct speed (autodetects)
-> Recognizes that this is a Phenom II 940

What doesn't:
-> Although it is extremely solid (hours of Prime95, Memtest) under load, I have had several restarts when at idle. At first I blamed CnQ, but even after I turned it off, it happened. This is rare however and no more than an annoyance, but how often have you seen a computer unstable at idle but not at load?
-> Temp calibrations are horrible. Whatever they have hooked up to the CPU temp is way off (10C at idle). This was really annoying since I now have to turn off fan speed control since it would turn off my AC Freezer 64. The core temps (0,1,2,3) seem to be reasonable and probably correct. One suggested reason for the restarts was that some part of the board was overheating. However, all of the TMPINs stay below 35C, so I don't know if I just cool the board well or if another probe is off. Gigabyte really needs to improve their monitoring hardware as my past two boards have had issues.
-> When running LAN at about 100Mb/s the CPU usage ramps up to 34% (weird on a quad core, I'd expect 25% max for a program) and then drops to zero when done. The computer it was talking to (FX60, Asus nForce 4 SLI) never goes above 10%. The did release a new LAN driver today though, so maybe that will fix it (or maybe it is no issue at all and something else is causing it.

Thanks for any insight. Just wondering if anyone else had any experience with these parts.

The reboots are extremely rare (I'd guess 4 or 5 in the 2 weeks I've owned it). This makes it difficult to diagnose since as soon as I think I've fixed it, it will restart. I turned off auto fan control from the start since I was unsettled by the CPU fan not turning during my initial boot.

That is good to hear about the LAN. It is weird that my old Asus board (with integrated LAN) does so well though.

The other really weird issue that I forgot was when I would plug in a USB hard drive (not flash drive, though) it would reboot instantly. That problem left as mysteriously as it came though, so it may have just been a weird driver hiccup.

Update:

I may have fixed the issue. After doing a little searching, I found someone with the same problem (USB causes reboot) and he also had put the little insulating washers in between the MB screws and the MB (which I did as well). When he tried removing one, his problem seemed to go away. So, I decided to give it a try and removed four of the washers and then gave it a try. It passed all of the things that would usually cause a reboot (plugging in thumb drive, USB cable, standing near/over it, feeling near the fans). Now, it is worth noting that it is a little more humid today and I tried to be very cautious about static (though I always try to be) but it still was very encouraging. I'll update again if anything else happens.

Yes, that makes sense. I'd never used the insulators before so I never put much thought into it. Still though, if you google it you will find many debates about this grounding, though for my computer, it definitely seems necessary. Doesn't appear to be any permanent damage fortunately.

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you (turns out, I'm an engineer too). As soon as someone mentioned grounding through the standoffs I realized what I'd done. My hypothesis is that since I insulated the standoffs (the correct ground) it began grounding through the USBs (which then caused my rebooting problem) and also caused my random instability even when not using the USBs. Makes perfect sense now, hopefully this was the only problem.

Well, I know my thread is a bit old, but I thought I'd update it for completeness. Gigabyte put out a new BIOS (F4) a day or two ago and now the CPU temp is correct! Or closer at any rate. It is a little higher than the core temps (which I trust, since they seemed to work before). This is nice actually as it makes the board speed up my fan sooner (since I now can turn auto fan back on!). The only thing that it seems to have broken is HWMonitor (it now gets several bogus readings, maybe I need a new version. Weird that PC Wizard (same people) can still read the stuff, though). All in all, it seems solid (about time!).