Weirdest problem....

[iKronS]

So My AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE was hanging now and then. I decided to update the bios for stability with OC. Bios were a fairly old version on the ASUS M5A97 MOBO. All went well - no more hanging while OC'D.

Now for the fun stuff. My computer starts normally but My D-Link Extreme N Wireless Adapter Is not installed. It is now called "Ethernet controller". The only way for me to install the driver is by me physically unplugging the PCI adapter (The D-Link) and plugging it back in while the computer is on. It also instructs me to do this in the D-Link driver installation.

This works and the internet works enough to browse and torrent BUT if I restart my computer the same thing happens again. Found device "Ethernet controller"... Gotta unplug/plug it back into the PCI seat and install the driver. So I learned to live with this by never turning the computer off. I just put it into sleep overnight.

My problem is though it seems the stability of the connection is complete $#^&. Playing games my ping goes up and down all the time and hangs and just isn't playable.

I know enough to check my wifi channels and settings and sniff around. I live in a rural area - there are no other wifi signals around. Just mine. No one else uses the internet. I even called the provider up and everything is just great 15mb connection. I do a speed test to somewhere local and get 16mb/s down 2.5 up 30 ping. What in the hell is going on? There are no PCI settings in the bios I checked everything in there.

 

[DarkSable]

What happens when you use an ethernet cable?

 

[iKronS]

No idea I can't actually try it. Landlord won't allow a cable. Her laptop works fine though with the wifi. She only uses email and stuff RARELY. Also I have admin access through my browser to the router and have fiddled and learned the settings in there. I can get the wireless connection pretty stable with inSSIDer (let's me check signal strength channels etc)

 

[smorizio]

never plug a pci card in with the power on you damage the card and the pci slot/mb. when you updated the bios you should have updated the mb chipset drivers and then the newest drivers for the devices in your pc. also you should have powered the pc down..depower the mb and clear the cmos. then go in and make sure the mb is at the factory defaults. also make sure the pci irq are set to auto. some times the unreadable card is that way because it sharing an irq or dma range. if it still acts up try turning off the com/printer ports to free up and irq.

 

[iKronS]

That is what I thought.. Never plug in a pci card with power on but the D-Link installation guide literally showed a picture of my tower and mother board with an arrow showing to plug the card in and it said now please plug in the card and hit continue. I figured it was okay with this one or something. It worked too. Before the bios updated all my mb chipset drivers and other drivers were already up to date. All I changed was updating bios. No new drivers were needed. I don't know what PCI IRQ are. If that is a bios setting there is no PCI bios settings. I checked and quadruple checked the bios. "sharing an irq or dma range" ? How do I turn off com/printer ports? Bios has none of those settings.. really crappy bios honestly. I will try cmos clear

 

[smorizio]

your mb has a built in ethernet port. did you happen to turn it off when you switched to wifi?? realteck network adaptor it may have turned back on. you can try and see if it is on and turn it off in the bios or install the driver for it. to turn the serial port off is right above the ethernet port info. also under advance mode make sure usb 3.0 supprt is set to auto and enabled.
http://www.asus.com/Motherboard/M5A97/#support_Download_29

 

[iKronS]

I have already tried switching my onboard realtek ethernet on and off in bios- neither changed anything. Serial port is turned on. Usb 3.0 is set to auto. Still having the issue. Tried clearing CMOS and it cleared the bios to factory but the bios are still the updated bios that I flashed in myself (never had to clear CMOS before so not sure if it is supposed to revert to old bios or not).

THE ONLY way for me to be able to get the driver to successfully install is by unplug/replug the pci wifi adapter WHILE the pc is turned on. WTF? So weird. Should I try turning the serial port off? I haven't tried that but isn't the serial port the mouse/keyboard port?

Also to be clear. I never have used wired internet. Always used this wifi card. It worked fine until I flash updated bios. There are no PCI settings in the bios it does that all automatically. I set all my bios as far as I know to the correct settings and have studied/learned my bios over time.

 

[smorizio]

I would try and put the card in another slot..see if the error changes. if the error does not..then try this look online to see what chipset the dlink card uses and see if the vendor default chipset driver works better then the dlink one.

 

[iKronS]

Tried both slots and I tried a dlink driver and an atheros one. Both same problem.

 

[smorizio]

if you can i would rma the card...and or try another brand/usb wifi dongle. may be a bios issue that you cant fix now.

 

[Scott_D_Bowen]

I decided to update the bios for stability with OC.

- Does it pass 3x passes of MemTest86+?
- Does it pass 1 hour of Prime95?
- What clock speed is your PCI bus running at? (If you cannot figure it out then don't overclock until you can).

I'd suggest setting your PCI Latency Timer to 64, from 32, as this affects how PCI bus-mastering devices to share the PCI bus. The PCI on your chipset may be 'hanging' off the rest of the south-bridge bridged to the rest of the system via a PCIe channel.
- It's less granular but it has two major advantages: (1) it's more efficient (2) if your PCI bus is overclocked to, say, 40 MHz due to a +20% overclock on the FSB or equiv. BASECLK then the logic on the card is more likely to work as it's not being pushed quite as hard.
- On servers with 66MHz+ PCI slots the PCI Latency Timer is usually set to 64


Other things to try:

1) MSCONFIG, Boot (tab), Advanced Options (btn)
- Tick PCI Lock
- Quote: "PCI Lock. Prevents Windows from reallocating I/O and IRQ resources on the PCI bus. The I/O and memory resources set by the BIOS are preserved." --- Microsoft, Using System Configuration, Applies to Windows 7.

2) After doing the above reflash your BIOS (same version) while not overclocked, it may have inverted a bit or two while flashing overclocked.
- When you do this, see if you can reset the DMI data during the flash (ties in with 1, above).

3) Uninstall the driver in Safe Mode, then re-install it normally.

Once you cold-boot after all that there's a higher chance it will be stable.


The AMD '3rd party' (or not) chipset's can require some serious general chipset/bus knowledge to get stable. Even when not overclocking.


The AMD SB950 chipset (your motherboards south bridge) has two well known bugs
- http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=73472a46b5b28116b145fb5fc05242c1aa8e1461
- HPET MSI = High Precision Event Timer: Message Signaled Interrupts.

So you may want to DISABLE your HPET in BIOS, as this appears to have a flow on effect with the AMD SB950 south-bridge.


I'm not an electronics engineer, but I do know almost everything about every x86/x64 chipset up until the AMD Opteron™ 200 series era. Most of this 'old school know how' is still relevant today but I hardly get a chance to use it, so I hang around here.
- Thanks for the opportunity of trying to help with your chip-set config.

Monthly rank (January): 61 out of 1067565 (2388 points) [Top 0.006% on forum]

 

[memadmax]

Do you have any BIOS settings for overclocking the PCI bus?
If you do, make sure PCI clock is set to 33mhz(I think, or default), and do a "Reset configuration data" flush in the Bios. You go into the Bios and set it to enabled and then restart the computer. Or do a clear cmos by pulling the battery or switching the clear cmos jumper.

 

[Nedal0]

I will suggest you reset your BIOS to the default and then update again to Version 1503 as that actually Enhances compatibility with some USB devices and also improves system stability.

 

[Scott_D_Bowen]

FYI: Resetting the BIOS to defaults doesn't usually reset the configuration data / DMI data, even if you use CLR CMOS jumper on the mobo.

That said I agree with both memadmax's and Nedal0 comments as they raise valid points.

Sometimes performing a cold while holding down the [Insert] key for 30 seconds will, but even then I'm not sure that this old trick works on modern BIOS's with USB keyboards attached, even if PS/2 emulation is enabled.
^ This one is so old you might not find it using Google.

 

[iKronS]

I decided to update the bios for stability with OC.

- Does it pass 3x passes of MemTest86+?
- Does it pass 1 hour of Prime95?
- What clock speed is your PCI bus running at? (If you cannot figure it out then don't overclock until you can).

I'd suggest setting your PCI Latency Timer to 64, from 32, as this affects how PCI bus-mastering devices to share the PCI bus. The PCI on your chipset may be 'hanging' off the rest of the south-bridge bridged to the rest of the system via a PCIe channel.
- It's less granular but it has two major advantages: (1) it's more efficient (2) if your PCI bus is overclocked to, say, 40 MHz due to a +20% overclock on the FSB or equiv. BASECLK then the logic on the card is more likely to work as it's not being pushed quite as hard.
- On servers with 66MHz+ PCI slots the PCI Latency Timer is usually set to 64


Other things to try:

1) MSCONFIG, Boot (tab), Advanced Options (btn)
- Tick PCI Lock
- Quote: "PCI Lock. Prevents Windows from reallocating I/O and IRQ resources on the PCI bus. The I/O and memory resources set by the BIOS are preserved." --- Microsoft, Using System Configuration, Applies to Windows 7.

2) After doing the above reflash your BIOS (same version) while not overclocked, it may have inverted a bit or two while flashing overclocked.
- When you do this, see if you can reset the DMI data during the flash (ties in with 1, above).

3) Uninstall the driver in Safe Mode, then re-install it normally.

Once you cold-boot after all that there's a higher chance it will be stable.


The AMD '3rd party' (or not) chipset's can require some serious general chipset/bus knowledge to get stable. Even when not overclocking.


The AMD SB950 chipset (your motherboards south bridge) has two well known bugs
- http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=73472a46b5b28116b145fb5fc05242c1aa8e1461
- HPET MSI = High Precision Event Timer: Message Signaled Interrupts.

So you may want to DISABLE your HPET in BIOS, as this appears to have a flow on effect with the AMD SB950 south-bridge.


I'm not an electronics engineer, but I do know almost everything about every x86/x64 chipset up until the AMD Opteron™ 200 series era. Most of this 'old school know how' is still relevant today but I hardly get a chance to use it, so I hang around here.
- Thanks for the opportunity of trying to help with your chip-set config.

Monthly rank (January): 61 out of 1067565 (2388 points) [Top 0.006% on forum]

I have it set to default clock ever since this started happening just in case it was that. So everything is stock right now. Memtest checks out fine. It runs fine under prime95 and MSI Kombuster. There is no bios setting for PCI bus freq. Only PCIe.

PCI Latency Timer to 64, from 32 - Don't know what or how to do this , if it is a bios setting my mobo doesn't have the setting in bios.

Ticked PCI Lock in msconfig, will try the restart along with a bunch of ideas.

Funny I found that setting to be the only south bridge setting HTEP and I thought hmm.. why not try and disable it. And yeah. It has been disabled since LOL. Just tried it earlier thought it could help.

 

[davidgermain]

You need to rule out a faulty card, replace the card with a Known good card. different manufacture if possible.

 

[hedwar2011]

When you replace the card, if it's internal (PCI or PCI-E), DO NOT plug it in while the computer is running. That's just asking for you to fry your whole rig and potentially yourself with a crazy shock.

 

[iKronS]

When you replace the card, if it's internal (PCI or PCI-E), DO NOT plug it in while the computer is running. That's just asking for you to fry your whole rig and potentially yourself with a crazy shock.

I have tried everything. I don't see how updating my bios could have done this but it seems it did. I'm scared to buy a new wifi card because it might just be the mobo's pci slot/config. I have it working and will just have to deal with never turning it off. I had to un-lock the pci msconfig to let me get it working this much again. Cheers everyone.

 

[Nedal0]

There is no need to buy any cards now. You will have to deal with the BIOS if you need your system back. Its very obvious the BIOS update caused your USB driver to be unstable.

Sooner or later, you will have more serious issue than you have now if you don't take the time to sort it out now.

 

[iKronS]

There is no need to buy any cards now. You will have to deal with the BIOS if you need your system back. Its very obvious the BIOS update caused your USB driver to be unstable.

Sooner or later, you will have more serious issue than you have now if you don't take the time to sort it out now.

Everything is set right though... No OC. There are no pci settings. No

 

[Nedal0]

Let me get something straight. So you are using a PCI WiFi card and not a USB Wifi Card ?

 

[iKronS]

Yes it is a PCI Wifi card. I might upgrade to usb hopefully solving all this BS

 

[Nedal0]

Your motherboard seems to have multiple PCI slots on it. Is it possible you are using the wrong slot ?

Also, Have you tried a different PCI slot ?

 

[iKronS]

Yeah I tried both slots many times. Also just checked bios for the 50th time and am 100% sure nothing is set wrong.

 

[Nedal0]

If there is anything wrong with the BIOS, you won't see in the settings.

I'm guessing the PCI slot and Card was working before you updated the BIOS right ?