Hi,
I purchased this MOBO right when it became available on NewEgg in July 2005 and built the rig that is in my sig. I have had a ton of IRQ and memory issues on this board and my system has been pretty much unusable for the past 9 months or more. Here is what I have experienced with this rig.
First I had random reboots on the machine I suspected it was due to an IRQ conflict between the Sound Blaster and the video Card. I moved the SB card to another slot and was stable for quite some time, during this time I also changed the BIOS DRAM voltage to 2.75 when I purchased these parts Corsair and Asus said they were compatible even though this board does not automatically provide the right voltage to these sticks. MemTest also showed no errors for this RAM.
So everything was good for a while then I upgraded the BIOS and everything went bad pretty quickly. I upgraded the BIOS to 1009 from 1006 for a few reasons: I purchased a new SATA 3 drive and thought it required a bios update, I heard there were some corruption issues with HDDs with the early BIOS and ASUS said to install the newer NF4 Drivers said you needed to update the BIOS. Also I thought the 1009 bios was stable.
So after the upgrade I experienced a lot of lock ups and weird video problems. The display one day froze and displayed small squares with a comma and an ankh symbol on a blue back ground and then a pink square. This pattern of 1/2" X 1" was repeated on the entire screen. Needless to say I found this to be very strange. After this point I lost the video output most of the time. On 9 out of 10 boots ups, the PC did not give any video output. Usually the first boot of the day was ok but the PC would freeze up shortly after the login screen then after resetting I would get no video at all. So as a result I thought the Video card was hosed so I RMAed it. After getting back I still had the same problem so I contacted Enermax after someone here suggested the PSU maybe to blame and they said to RMA it. After I got the new one I still had the same problem. At this point I was pretty frustrated and stopped using the rig all together.
So this past weekend I try to figure out what the problem is. Now I start to remember about the voltage issue with the ram so manage to get into the bios on the first boot up and set the DRAM voltage to 2.75v and reboot and the video problem seems stable. I then go for the 2.5 CAS settings with 1T timings - this I don't think is too aggressive as this Corsair memory is supposed to support CAS 2. I think now I am out of the woods but no I would soon discover I am not. I loaded an IDE drive onto the spare IDE connector to transfer some files from an old disk over to this one is where my problems start up again. After I transfer some music and some video files over I get a BSOD I think the error was IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL. So I reboot and then try to find the dump file to analyze. After looking at the file recently created I try to open one in text pad and immediately get another BSOD. So then I reboot and go into windows explorer and click the plus (+) sign next to My Computer and viola another BSOD. So then I check my IRQs and try different things all the while getting BSODs at a rate of 1 every 5 to 7 minutes. The errors are mostly in the three variations IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL, IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL and finally DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL. Other BSODs occured without a specific message. One of the IRQ messages pointed to a McAfee file but disabling the scanner did not help. This whole time I only had a video card plugged into this FxxxER.
On all the reboots I was noticed IRQs 5 and 11 were shared multiple times when listed on the POST screen. The IDE port and the Display Adapter were sharing IRQ 5 however, in WinXP device manager my 7800 GTX was all alone on IRQ 23. IRQ 5 was not even listed in Device manager for some reason (reserved I guess) even after showing the hidden entries. I can?t remember what was on IRQ 11 but it was listed multiple times as well. So I tried alternating the PnP OS setting in the BIOS and also tried reserving IRQs 5 and 11 in the manual IRQ configuration but none of these things worked. When I reserve IRQs 5 and 11 I ended up with other conflicts in device manager.
I decided to reformat and reinstall XP Pro. I booted in Safe Mode (only had one BSOD in Safe mode LOL) then backed up my files to the IDE drive and preceded to reload windows XP with only the single WD Raptor connected. I got most of the way through and then boom another BSOD while installing the XP. I then turned the PC off and went to bed. I am not sure what my next move should be but I think I should RMA this mother of a motherboard to ASUS. It seems I have to go through some case submission form and they then test the equipment???!!! in order to make sure it really is a problem. So before I rip this system apart and go through another RMA does anyone have some advice for me? Does ASUS really test your equipment before they send you a replacement?
Any advice is appreciated I?m ready to chuck this board into the street just for the pleasure of watching it break into tiny pieces.
Thanks in Advance,
Brian
I purchased this MOBO right when it became available on NewEgg in July 2005 and built the rig that is in my sig. I have had a ton of IRQ and memory issues on this board and my system has been pretty much unusable for the past 9 months or more. Here is what I have experienced with this rig.
First I had random reboots on the machine I suspected it was due to an IRQ conflict between the Sound Blaster and the video Card. I moved the SB card to another slot and was stable for quite some time, during this time I also changed the BIOS DRAM voltage to 2.75 when I purchased these parts Corsair and Asus said they were compatible even though this board does not automatically provide the right voltage to these sticks. MemTest also showed no errors for this RAM.
So everything was good for a while then I upgraded the BIOS and everything went bad pretty quickly. I upgraded the BIOS to 1009 from 1006 for a few reasons: I purchased a new SATA 3 drive and thought it required a bios update, I heard there were some corruption issues with HDDs with the early BIOS and ASUS said to install the newer NF4 Drivers said you needed to update the BIOS. Also I thought the 1009 bios was stable.
So after the upgrade I experienced a lot of lock ups and weird video problems. The display one day froze and displayed small squares with a comma and an ankh symbol on a blue back ground and then a pink square. This pattern of 1/2" X 1" was repeated on the entire screen. Needless to say I found this to be very strange. After this point I lost the video output most of the time. On 9 out of 10 boots ups, the PC did not give any video output. Usually the first boot of the day was ok but the PC would freeze up shortly after the login screen then after resetting I would get no video at all. So as a result I thought the Video card was hosed so I RMAed it. After getting back I still had the same problem so I contacted Enermax after someone here suggested the PSU maybe to blame and they said to RMA it. After I got the new one I still had the same problem. At this point I was pretty frustrated and stopped using the rig all together.
So this past weekend I try to figure out what the problem is. Now I start to remember about the voltage issue with the ram so manage to get into the bios on the first boot up and set the DRAM voltage to 2.75v and reboot and the video problem seems stable. I then go for the 2.5 CAS settings with 1T timings - this I don't think is too aggressive as this Corsair memory is supposed to support CAS 2. I think now I am out of the woods but no I would soon discover I am not. I loaded an IDE drive onto the spare IDE connector to transfer some files from an old disk over to this one is where my problems start up again. After I transfer some music and some video files over I get a BSOD I think the error was IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL. So I reboot and then try to find the dump file to analyze. After looking at the file recently created I try to open one in text pad and immediately get another BSOD. So then I reboot and go into windows explorer and click the plus (+) sign next to My Computer and viola another BSOD. So then I check my IRQs and try different things all the while getting BSODs at a rate of 1 every 5 to 7 minutes. The errors are mostly in the three variations IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL, IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL and finally DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL. Other BSODs occured without a specific message. One of the IRQ messages pointed to a McAfee file but disabling the scanner did not help. This whole time I only had a video card plugged into this FxxxER.
On all the reboots I was noticed IRQs 5 and 11 were shared multiple times when listed on the POST screen. The IDE port and the Display Adapter were sharing IRQ 5 however, in WinXP device manager my 7800 GTX was all alone on IRQ 23. IRQ 5 was not even listed in Device manager for some reason (reserved I guess) even after showing the hidden entries. I can?t remember what was on IRQ 11 but it was listed multiple times as well. So I tried alternating the PnP OS setting in the BIOS and also tried reserving IRQs 5 and 11 in the manual IRQ configuration but none of these things worked. When I reserve IRQs 5 and 11 I ended up with other conflicts in device manager.
I decided to reformat and reinstall XP Pro. I booted in Safe Mode (only had one BSOD in Safe mode LOL) then backed up my files to the IDE drive and preceded to reload windows XP with only the single WD Raptor connected. I got most of the way through and then boom another BSOD while installing the XP. I then turned the PC off and went to bed. I am not sure what my next move should be but I think I should RMA this mother of a motherboard to ASUS. It seems I have to go through some case submission form and they then test the equipment???!!! in order to make sure it really is a problem. So before I rip this system apart and go through another RMA does anyone have some advice for me? Does ASUS really test your equipment before they send you a replacement?
Any advice is appreciated I?m ready to chuck this board into the street just for the pleasure of watching it break into tiny pieces.
Thanks in Advance,
Brian
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