Building 2nd rig

[OLtimrNewbie]

I moved this message to the *** Official ASUS A7N8X/Deluxe Thread. ( I hope ) My first attempt at posting here and I messed up.

 

[mechBgon]

Hi OLtimrNewbie and welcome to the Forums

Answers:

#1. You can put the updated drivers on floppy, and use them during Windows Setup. Good plan, too. Press F6 at the very first blue screen of Setup as it begins, and later it will ask for the floppy as a result.

#2. Yes, and a good idea too. The C1005 BIOS fixes issues with SATA RAID. Download the zip file containing the new BIOS, put the BIOS on floppy, and press ALT + F2 during POST, and it will automagically update the BIOS from the floppy.

#3. I would start with the memory at conservative timings, but if you want to tweak them, look at the manual, section 4.4.2, and see where it says Memory Timings? Set that to "User Defined" (I believe that's the correct choice) and now you can enter the timings manually.

#4. During Windows Setup, you will be able to partition and format your RAID array as if it were a single drive.

Don't worry about your post not landing in the "official" thread, nothing wrong with it being separate. Have fun with your new system, and if you run into crashing problems, back off on the memory timings or raise the memory voltage a touch (2.7V is good).

I know how it is when your post vanishes The longer my reply, the smarter I am if I copy the contents into Notepad before I hit "Reply to Topic."

 

[OLtimrNewbie]

Thank you MechBgon for your prompt reply. I was just in the process of editing my message and getting it over to the Official ASUS A7N etc. thread. It's gonna show up there as well I guess. Thanks for the tip about notepad.

 

[mechBgon]

Sure thing You're getting the hang of it now, just use the Reply buttons within the thread that you want to reply to. But it's fine to have your own thread too; the main faux pas that the new folks commit is that they go and post the same identical thread in two, three or four different categories of the Forums at the same time :Q

 

[OLtimrNewbie]

I'm guilty of repeating myself for sure. Once you start a thread how do you delete it or cancel it. I 'm just putting an edit on it to say where I've tried to put it.
I really appreciated the answers you gave in May (05/09/2003) to Mitheral Arc; re: the procedures for installing O/S and SP1 and MoBo drivers etc. I will follow that procedure. I may get started tomorrow. Thanks again.

 

[mechBgon]

They don't seem to have a way for us to delete our threads, but if you just change the thread's title to something like "double post, ignore," that should take care of whichever thread you don't want... it'll just drop off the scope for lack of replies.

Anyway, best wishes with the new rig, and if this happens to be your first Socket-A motherboard/CPU, then it's worth noting how the bottom of the heatsink has a notch in one end to provide clearance over the raised, solid-plastic end of the CPU socket, as illustrated in Figures 7, 13 and 14 of this guide to heatsink installation (in PDF format). If the heatsink gets reversed, or gets too close to the raised end of the socket, then it can't land squarely on the CPU core and the CPU overheats and shuts down almost instantly.

 

[OLtimrNewbie]

Hello again mechBgon;

The A7N8X is the 2nd rig with AMD for me. My first is 2 years old and the one I'm presently typing on.
MSI K7T Turbo R with AMD T'Bird 1.333 not oc'd and 2x256 PC133 SDRAM; 2x 40Gb Maxtors in Raid0. It went together and came up sweet. No problems with Raid or any other hardware. I 'm running Win-ME and it gets buggy every 6 months! I've reloaded the O/S 5 times in 2 years! I hope the new rig with Win XP is less of a trouble for bugs. I faithfully do the scan drives and defrags; but eventually Win -ME starts getting corruption problems. I do suspect I'm going to have a HDD failure. Recently I've been hearing a bit of a vibration on startup; then get an error message during the post that it can't find the HD to boot from. At that point I C-A-D and it reboots and loads up fine. But something will fail eventually. I tried Raid 1 when I first put it together; but after a month of painfully slow response times I switched to Raid 0. Really fast; but no protection against HD failures. Here's hoping the Raid 1 with SATA drives is as fast as Raid 0 with ata133 drives.

 

[OLtimrNewbie]

Back again; I'm running Memtest 3.0 on the new rig. It's been going for about 6 hours on the extended test. No errors so far. I'll let it run all night and see what's there in the am. My CPU temp is 33*C and MB temp is at 27*C. (Bios readings) I doubt the Memtest puts much stress on the CPU. I expect ASUS Probe will give me more accurate readings than the BIOS does.