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Asus A8n SLI-Deluxe Beta 1005-03 Released

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Mofrack,
I looked all over the top of the drive, but it doesn't say anything about firmware.
Should it say somewhere on the drive?
I just read a post today about somebody with a Maxtor Diamonmax10 and A8N-SLI Deluxe, and he's been running it successfully with NCQ enabled with all the different bioses. No problems at all, just like me.
 
I not overclocking or doing anything that is different from known stable settings. I had removed my jumper from both drives also. I do remeber I bought these 2 DiamondMax 9s as soon as they were released so I probably have the first revision firmware.

I'm just going to keep throwing $$$ at it till it works. I'm to frustrated to do anything else.

My new DiamondMax 10s show up on Wed. I'll let every1 know how it goes then.
 
Originally posted by: MeatHead88
I not overclocking or doing anything that is different from known stable settings. I had removed my jumper from both drives also. I do remeber I bought these 2 DiamondMax 9s as soon as they were released so I probably have the first revision firmware.

I'm just going to keep throwing $$$ at it till it works. I'm to frustrated to do anything else.

My new DiamondMax 10s show up on Wed. I'll let every1 know how it goes then.
Click to expand...

Hey Meathead let me know how that goes with the new drives, I'm waiting to pull the trigger on 4 of those myself. Just scared I'll get them and they wont work.

"I learned a long time ago that the potential problems/headaches caused by overclocking is not worth the small gain in performance"

To each his own I guess. I have a 2.4c on P4C-800 deluxe been running at 3.0 for almost 2 years now. And now I have had my new setup on 20% OC for 3 weeks with no issues but this drive 🙂

I think I am starting to get less upset about the issue and more upset at how fing difficult it is to find out firmware info for HD's.


 
Last week I emailed Maxtor about firmware upgrades for the drives. I got a reply saying I should call in to their support desk. I did but after 30 min of waiting I hung up.
 
Originally posted by: MeatHead88
Last week I emailed Maxtor about firmware upgrades for the drives. I got a reply saying I should call in to their support desk. I did but after 30 min of waiting I hung up.
Click to expand...

Damn you 🙂 I would have loved to hear what they had to say, Maybe I should call em 🙂

 
Well I finished building a similar system for my sis this morning.
Everything is mostly identical, A8N-SLI Deluxe, Leadtek 6600Gt, Maxtor DiamondMax 9 160GB SATA...
The only difference is that I put in a larger Enermax PSU (mine is 350W, hers is 450W).
What can I tell you. It's been 4+ hours and her system installed flawlessly, and is working perfectly. No HDD problems at all. My Maxtor was dated Dec 2003, and hers is dated Dec 2004, exactly one year newer, and no problems. So I dont think firmware is the problem.
Not sure what to say, but perhaps I'm lucky and just managed the right bios/hardware formula to make things work.
 
Originally posted by: sharpnsmart
Well I finished building a similar system for my sis this morning.
Everything is mostly identical, A8N-SLI Deluxe, Leadtek 6600Gt, Maxtor DiamondMax 9 160GB SATA...
The only difference is that I put in a larger Enermax PSU (mine is 350W, hers is 450W).
What can I tell you. It's been 4+ hours and her system installed flawlessly, and is working perfectly. No HDD problems at all. My Maxtor was dated Dec 2003, and hers is dated Dec 2004, exactly one year newer, and no problems. So I dont think firmware is the problem.
Not sure what to say, but perhaps I'm lucky and just managed the right bios/hardware formula to make things work.
Click to expand...

My 80 gig DiamondMax 9s are both from August 2003
 
Originally posted by: sharpnsmart
Well I finished building a similar system for my sis this morning.
Everything is mostly identical, A8N-SLI Deluxe, Leadtek 6600Gt, Maxtor DiamondMax 9 160GB SATA...
The only difference is that I put in a larger Enermax PSU (mine is 350W, hers is 450W).
What can I tell you. It's been 4+ hours and her system installed flawlessly, and is working perfectly. No HDD problems at all. My Maxtor was dated Dec 2003, and hers is dated Dec 2004, exactly one year newer, and no problems. So I dont think firmware is the problem.
Not sure what to say, but perhaps I'm lucky and just managed the right bios/hardware formula to make things work.
Click to expand...

I did some digging around today. and couldnt find a single person with an issue that had a 160 gig, all of them were 200, 250, 300.

Who knows, I am selling the drive and pickking up 4 news ones. Just need to find out if meathead does OK with his new 300's before I buy mine 🙂

 
AAha! Tha'ts very interesting!
I'm glad now that I have a 160GB instead of the larger ones. But back when I bought mine, the 160GB was the largest available.
I too will be interested in hearing about the larger drives.
We must keep in mind that most motherboards have various issues such as this.
I had the A7N8X Deluxe for 2 years, and I used every Nvidia SW IDE driver available.
Every HDD and CD and DVD burner I used always worked perfectly, not a glitch.
But, I read everywhere on the net that people were experiencing problems with the Nvidia IDE driver. I just couldnt understand it. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I also built several A7N8X systems for friends and installed the Nvidia SW IDE driver on all of them. They all worked perfectly too.
So bizarre eh?
 
Not bizarre, just an example of nVidia having no clue on how to write proper storage drivers. They work on a lot of people's systems and completely trash other people's. It's been this way since nForce hit.
 
Really, I believe it is a chipset issue, not a driver issue. If it was a driver issue, my hard drives would show up every time at the bios screen, not intermitently.

Probably something to do with wierd latencies or something. The DiamondMax 9 is a "Bridged" SATA drive. Meaning it was desinged as a PATA Drive but Maxtor used a bridge chip to make able to connect to SATA connectors.

I did another test yesterday. I hooked a DiamondMax 9 up to an Intel 865 chipset board and ran a speed test. Oddly enough, the DiamondMax 9 was 6 MB/sec slower than a seagate 7200.7 PATA drive. (SiSoft Sandra) This further makes me believe my drives are old and are first run and have some weird firmware/design flaw.

I saw some other posts with some ppl using SATA Seagate 7200.7, which is also a bridged drive. Some were having issues with these. The Seagate 7200.8 drive is a Native SATA drive and I have not seen anyone having issues with it.

The Raptors are Native and they seem to work.

I guess we'll all know Wednesday when my 2 250 GB DiamondMax 10s show up.
 
The Raptors aren't native SATA, they use a bridge chip (which also explains why they still have a molex power plug as an option.) There are some definite BIOS issues right now, I was referring to the post above mine when I was talking about the drivers.
 
I have a 2 160 gig SATA Maxtors that just refuse to stay detected on the Nvidia controller, no matter what BIOS. The latest beta (1005.003) kept it online for about 1 minute longer than usual... feh. I've just said to hell with it and mirrored them on the Sil controller until this gets cleared up somehow.

Thanks to sharpnsmart and others for their suggestions about this issue.

oh, and Meathead, the Raptors are also bridged drives, theres more SATA drives out now using bridges than not, native drives havent been around as long.

And I wouldnt jump to the conclusion that this is a chipset issue, since some Nforce3 users are having the same problems with their drives, and Nforce3 has been out for a while now.
 
No Meathead you are right. It is an NF4 issue. Similar problems with other NF4 boards, and also some NF3 boards (lots of people had trouble with SATA and the MSI Neo2). Search around the web and you'll see this problem mentioned.

But it is also a driver issue, which is why 6.39 fixed it for some people. For me it mucked things up until I realised it had turned on NCQ by default. Otherwise I have had no problems with my Diamondmax 10 (I d/l 6.39 to try to sort the firewall, but I've decided to just bin that).

For some people I also feel sure that they're having power issues. This seems to be a very demanding board, and even with fairly light loads you need good 12V delivery. If you're a bit light on power the Board has all sorts of quirks.

The latest release BIOS (1004) seems much more solid to me, but if you have problems you should try clearing the CMOS after installing it (take out battery and leave jumper in clear setting for around 30 secs) - this trick has worked for a number of people in sorting out issues.

One other thought - are people using SATA 0? Theoretically it shouldn't matter, but 0 will be checked first.

But it seems possible that you can get everything right and still have problems.
 
Originally posted by: S0Lstice
Originally posted by: MeatHead88
Well my drives showed up and i'm installing now......
Click to expand...

Make sure to post how it goes or PM me, if yours goes well I am getting 4 300's
Click to expand...

Its going great! No issues. I have my machine running perfect. The test is if it will last over night and all day tomorrow without freezing. looks very good, though. I have NCQ enabled and everything seems fine.

Everytime I booted it recognized both drives it has not froze since putting these drives in. I dare say I might be cured. (I'm calling Maxtor during work tomorrow and see if I can get my DiamondMax 9s switched out cause they seem to be the issue. Might as well get drives that work...I'll use them for back up then.)

My disk scores are not much better than my DiamondMax 9s, though. about 90 MB/sec in SiSoft Sandra. Tried NCQ enabled and disabled but get the same score. Using the NVidia drivers...
bios 1005.003...
 
Originally posted by: MeatHead88
Hmm, not sure if Asus figured anything out. I switched the model Hard Drive I was using, thats it.
Click to expand...

Wow meathead thats great news, You were my Guinea pig on this. I was waiting for your results before I paid $800 for some HD's. thats just seriously some great news.

Other than that if I can get my ISP to stop throttling P2P connections I will be set 🙂
 
I did post this in another treat!But this is killer!!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by ajmiles
Major Slaughter: You've managed to get past 250mhz at 1T? As far as I knew getting past 250mhz at 1T was an impossibility with the Asus A8N SLI Deluxe with a memory divider?

With most of the recent BIOSes unless you specify DDR400 (1:1) in the BIOS it will automatically revert to DDR333 I believe above 217mhz. What bandwidths are you getting on Sandra, and does A64 Tweakers definitely say 2T is disabled?



I'm using 1005.005 which works fine

Running at 1t 282mhz 2.5 3 3 7 1:1 4x ht @ 9x

Sandra had me at around 7,800

I've got the DFI Nf4 sli DR now so don't have the Asus running right now, will be up and running the DFI this Saturday
__________________
GLAD TO BE BACK AT XTREME !
(DFI NF4 SLI DR & G.Skill 1gb LE on the way)
Asus A8N SLI Delux
3500+ .09 @ 2540 1.55v XP120
G.Skill 2x256 LE @ 282 2.5-3-3-7-1T 2.8v
2 x 6800 GT SLI
2 x 74g Raptors Raid 0
Audigy 2 ZS

What do you say!!!!!!
 
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