Help with Epox 8K9A3+ issue

RustyNale

Platinum Member
Apr 14, 2001
2,220
0
0
Need opinions as to the issue with this board. Running onboard raid 0/1, 4
new WD JB's 40gb. ATI radeon 9600pro, Creative Audigy. Lan is on board.
Antec 430W Truepower. Corsair 3200 C2 512mb DDR. XP1600+ cpu.

The WD's replaced 2 Seagate 40gb hdd's that caused corruption to the os-- XP
Pro. Started getting what looked like dashes on the screen, thought the
video card (a radeon 9500 128mb) was going bad, replaced it with the 9600.
Dashes appeared on the screen again. Then my Seagates started dying,
replaced them with the WD's. Started getting crashes where my desktop would
blink and the display would be set to basic settings ( 16bit color and
800x600 res) and get the message that my system had recovered from a device
crash. Rebooting would return everything back to normal-- with the dashes
again.

Tried adjusting the bios settings from default settings on up through to oc
extreme, no change. Tried adjusting the hardware acceleration, no change.
Re-installed all motherboard and video drivers, tried installing only parts
of drivers ( ex. Via 4-in-1's only the agp and inf, not the bus.) Did fresh
wipe and reload of OS. No change. Using MBM5 and Sisoft to monitor temps and
voltages, all within spec.

Question to all here is: would you say motherboard or psu going bad? It
"feels" like psu, but voltages are within spec with bios readings. Mobo was
new in spring. Flashed to latest bios, flashed back to previous bios,
flashed back to new. No change. Advice and help welcome
 

o1die

Diamond Member
Jul 8, 2001
4,785
0
71
Are you running directx 9.0 and agp 8x? I would try directx 8.1 and 4x mode or an inexpensive nvidia video card (newegg refurbs start at about $39). Otherwise, I would change motherboards. My last epox wasn't all that stable (w/sis 645 chipset).
 

JustStarting

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2000
3,135
0
76
What FSB are you running? Are the PCI busses in spec? Running too high out of spec can cause hdd corruption after time. I would never run a raid 0 setup with the PCI busses too high out of spec.