Machine froze almost the moment after I plugged in my Adaptec IDE->USB enclosure. Today I got a new enclosure with the Cypress chipset and haven't frozen after about 30 minutes of steady activity on the disk.
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Hey all,
EPOX has finally FIXED the freezing issue (hopefully I am not speaking too soon!) with a BIOS change!! As I said all along, in order to find a TRUE solution, the obvious method would be to look to see whether this problem has occurred before and to find out if a solution was available. Low and behold, after a quick Googling, one finds that Shuttle SN25P users had this same exact problem and a few weeks later there was a BIOS fix.
Well, for me it has been a few MONTHS later, but EPOX TW finally asked their buddies over there at Shuttle TW for the solution, and with their latest BETA BIOS, it appears that EPOX may have finally FIXED it! I have been stable for over 20 hours and this includes the overnight period where I normally wake up and find my computer froze at 5am or so. If you go to the Epox 9npa forums, you'll see that other people would agree with my sentiment, and they use other devices as well like USB HD's.
Being the nice guy that I am, I am trying to find out what was fixed so the word can be spread and my curiosity satiated. The only thing I have been told as far as what was fixed was that it was a problem with the Chipset BIOS rather than the CPU BIOS. I also know from using CBROM (a good BIOS utility) that the ACPI table and awardext.rom were also changed, although I don't know how. If Abit/ECS still is in business, I would have them try to get in touch with friends over at Epox or at Shuttle as that will be the fasted route to a solution for you all.
If I find anything else out, I'll let you know, but I just wanted you all to know that a BIOS fix is THE answer, and hopefully you'll get yours SOON!
IlluminiX
P.S. I don't believe it had anything to do with the ERRATA 123 or 124 which apparently Epox already patched awhile back.
EPOX has finally FIXED the freezing issue (hopefully I am not speaking too soon!) with a BIOS change!! As I said all along, in order to find a TRUE solution, the obvious method would be to look to see whether this problem has occurred before and to find out if a solution was available. Low and behold, after a quick Googling, one finds that Shuttle SN25P users had this same exact problem and a few weeks later there was a BIOS fix.
Well, for me it has been a few MONTHS later, but EPOX TW finally asked their buddies over there at Shuttle TW for the solution, and with their latest BETA BIOS, it appears that EPOX may have finally FIXED it! I have been stable for over 20 hours and this includes the overnight period where I normally wake up and find my computer froze at 5am or so. If you go to the Epox 9npa forums, you'll see that other people would agree with my sentiment, and they use other devices as well like USB HD's.
Being the nice guy that I am, I am trying to find out what was fixed so the word can be spread and my curiosity satiated. The only thing I have been told as far as what was fixed was that it was a problem with the Chipset BIOS rather than the CPU BIOS. I also know from using CBROM (a good BIOS utility) that the ACPI table and awardext.rom were also changed, although I don't know how. If Abit/ECS still is in business, I would have them try to get in touch with friends over at Epox or at Shuttle as that will be the fasted route to a solution for you all.
If I find anything else out, I'll let you know, but I just wanted you all to know that a BIOS fix is THE answer, and hopefully you'll get yours SOON!
IlluminiX
P.S. I don't believe it had anything to do with the ERRATA 123 or 124 which apparently Epox already patched awhile back.
The AOpen PCB is identical to the Abit, except obviously for some manufacturer options (SATA ports, color scheme). Yes, ECS also makes value segment boards for AOpen.
Here is the answer to your question:
ECS 661FX-M7 v. ABIT SG-80
Just a suggestion: I would not use winflash to flash the bios on the ECS A939 under windoes. It will not write the bios code properly particularly if you use the latest ecs bios file. Do it under DOS with a boot floppy with the normal awdflash exe.
Same combo deal here. Just started using the motherboard after putting it aside to try an ECS KN1 SLI Extreme, which, by the way, has the exact same USB lock up issue as the A939 using BIOS version 1.1g.
3 questions:
a) has anyone ever rma'ed this motherboard (or, i guess, similar motherboards) to ecs? how was that experience?
b) has anyone ever tried using 3 sticks of ddr for dual channel? (examples: 1 x 1gb - ch1, 2 x 512mb - ch2 OR 1 x 512mb - ch1, 2 x 256mb - ch2)
c) the SB(?) Fan is quite noisy. Think it's acceptable to replace it with like a passive Thermaltake NB1?
TIA!
a) has anyone ever rma'ed this motherboard (or, i guess, similar motherboards) to ecs? how was that experience?
b) has anyone ever tried using 3 sticks of ddr for dual channel? (examples: 1 x 1gb - ch1, 2 x 512mb - ch2 OR 1 x 512mb - ch1, 2 x 256mb - ch2)
c) the SB(?) Fan is quite noisy. Think it's acceptable to replace it with like a passive Thermaltake NB1?
TIA!
I have the same problem with the board. It would freeze up when I load windows xp pro with sp2. But when I restalled windows xp with the first edition it ran fine. I had to go to microsoft for sp1 and sp2; slowly I downloaded and it works fine for me. So when I jump into from a fresh install of windows xp pro sp2 it freezes up......
There is a new BIOS v1.1K just out on their site (USA link didn't work, I got it off the Taiwan one) that claims to fix the USB hanging issue specifically, dated 8/10/06. Has anyone tried it yet? I have to head off to work now...
Had similar problems with an older ECS board a few years back and tried everything.
The only thing that worked for me then was to underclock the CPU
The only thing that worked for me then was to underclock the CPU
Unfortunately it doesn't look like bios 1.1K helps. My machine is now randomly rebooting. I'll try moving the USB drive back to my PCI USB card and see if the rebooting stops.
So I did 2 things and now the USB drive has been working fine:
- Plugged the drive directly into the USB port on the motherboard instead of going through a hub
- Rebooted the PC with the drive on. Initially I had booted into XP before turning the external drive on
Well, a year after buying my black friday fry's combo, it's finally really stable with the latest BIOS! Does anybody know if this ECS A939 board will handle ECC RAM? -- I'd like to use this box to replace my aging home server, which currently has ECC RAM, and I rather like that about it.
The RAM has to be unbuffered - registered DIMMs can't work with socket-939 processors. They may be ECC DIMMs though. I've personally put unbuffered ECC DIMMs into this particular board, and it worked and still does. I have not investigated into whether it's actually doing ECC, but it accepts the DIMMs and everything looks and works OK.
Well, I'm getting random reboots with 1.1K and my USB HDD plugged in. For now I've moved the HDD back to an add-in PCI USB card. I'll post back if it still reboots.
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