K8V SE Deluxe is giving me fits

[jonny13]

Okay, I got a A64 3200+ and this board from retailaccess by being a retail employee. My previous 3 systems have all been intel and the last two boards used were Intel made. I have built AMD systems before and always hated VIA boards, but I thought I would give this one a try. I knew this board wouldn't overclock, so I just got the basic PC3200 ram from Kingston to go along with it. Here are my issues so far:

After running about a week without lock ups, now I am getting errors while encoding videos and it can't go more than an hour or two in Prime95 without locking up or blue screen. I am assuming this is a memory problem, so I bumped the ram down to PC2700 and it still locked up. I further bumped it down to PC2100 and it went all night with the memory test in sandra. So, again, it looks like the memory. I bumped it back up to PC3200 and upped the voltage to 2.7 and gave it a run and it died after about 1.5 hours.

Should I RMA the ram and try the same memory again and hope for a better batch or does this board have issues with this ram. It is listed on the ASUS site, so it shouldn't be a problem. Any one have experience with this combo.

Other than that, I am getting a few other issues. I can't load the drivers for the Promise ATA controller. I first booted with the RAID controller enabled and loaded those drivers and now I can't load the separate ATA drivers and the controller fails to load in Windows. And the onboard GbE seems to drop out sometimes when I am on the internet and IE asks if I would like to work offline or try again.

So, with all of these issues, does the first problem still sound like a memory problem or does the board have some issues? I hope I can get this figured out in the next few weeks or its back to the dark (non-via chipset) side for me. Thanks in advance for your help.

Jonny

 

[mechBgon]

A full system spec list might help us out here, including the brand/model of the power supply Here are my initial ideas:

SiSoft Sandra = the AOL of benchmarking programs, never admit that you use it! Besides Prime95, Memtest86 is a good memory-testing program, try that on each of the two modules.

The Promise controller can be switched between ATA and RAID modes in the BIOS (pages 4-23 and 4-24 show where to change it). After changing it in the BIOS, you can use the other driver.

I have the original K8V Deluxe with two 512MB Corsair XMS 3200C2 modules and that's been working for me (it had some issues initially that turned out to be a faulty video card). I use an Antec TruePower430 backed by a line-interactive APC uninterruptible power supply, so it does have very stable power.

 

[jonny13]

I have a Antec 400 watt PS with a 1500va APC, so the power should be stable. My other specs are as follows:

A64 3200+
k8v SE Deluxe
Kingston PC3200 512 MB
Hitachi 80 GB boot drive
Maxtor 250 GB HD
WD2000JD
WD1800JD
TI4200 Video card
Audigy 2

I had this exact setup running with a 3.0C P4 and didn't have an issue, so it shouldn't be a power issue as the A64 shouldn't take as much power as the P4.

And yes, I know that Sandra is a crap benchmark, but it seems to have a decent memory burn in part that I have used in the past, but I will give memtest86 a try tonight and let it run all night (or as long as it will run).

The promise controller loaded up fine in RAID mode (although it wouldn't run the individual drives unless in a raid setup) but I tried to install the drivers in ATA mode and it keeps asking for the RAID drivers as well and will never load with windows. The driver are found in the bios at bootup, but nothing when you get to windows.

Anyway, I will give memtest86 a try tonight. Thanks for your help so far and hopefully someone can shed some light on the promise issue.

Jonny

 

[mechBgon]

Good to hear you have quality power

Next suggestion: if the Audigy 2 is not already in PCI slot #4, park it there since that slot doesn't share its IRQ. Since it and the motherboard both have a Gameport and Firewire, I suggest disabling the Audigy2's gameport and firewire in Windows Device Manager if possible (the A2 is inflexible about resources for the gameport, according to Asus, and causes trouble as a result).

 

[jonny13]

Interesting, I will have to check which port I have it in. I had it in #2 but noticed the IRQ was shared with the GbE port, so that was a no-no, especially for my storage machine. I will also disable both the gameport and teh firewire as I don't need the gameport and the firewire is onboard.

Jonny

 

[jonny13]

Well, I went home and downloaded memtest86, but didn't realize before that it was run from a floppy which I don't have in the computer. So, I scratched that idea for now and moved the sound card to the 4th slot. While I had the case open, I noticed I had the memory in the first slot but for the first few days, I ran it with the memory in the third slot (even though the book says to run it in the first blue slot). So, I thought maybe there was an issue with that and moved it back to the third slot and booted up.

Got Prime95 going and within about 7-10 minutes, it was locked up hard. No blue screen, just no movement whatsoever from the mouse and the keyboard didn't work. The highest temp it got to was 45C, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Anybody have any ideas or other windows based tests to run on this thing to isolate a component?

Jonny

 

[JackHawksmoor]

With memtest, you should be able to make a boot CD. I think some of the downloads are in ISO format that you can burn right to a CD. (I've done it before because I had a floppy drive die and I haven't replaced it yet).

Also, you might want to disable the onboard game controller (if there is one) and firewire ports from the BIOS, and just use the Audigy's ports, because there's no way to disable the Audigy's stuff except through software.

(I'm STILL debating what to buy, so I'm following all these Athlon motherboard threads like a hawk )

 

[jonny13]

Well, got home from my second job and the prime95 that I started before I left for work failed within minutes. I took all of the drives offline for that test so it definitely isn't a power issue. After a reboot, the thing is locking up when its not even under load. Then, after the reboot, I could get by the bios. It would either hang right after saying how much memory there was or during Promise's scan of the drives. After letting it sit an hour, I finally got it to boot with some PC2700 RAM and will give that a shot tonight and see how it goes. I will report my results in the morning.

Jonny

 

[jonny13]

Well, after thinking last night, I remember that I flashed the bios a week or so ago to the beta 1004 version, so I thought that might be it. After hooking up the floppy and flashing it back to 1003, I reran Prime95 with the one stick of 256 MB PC2700 ram and it locked up within minutes.

So, with 2 different sticks of ram, it is looking like it might be the motherboard or something. Anybody have any ideas or thoughts? Thanks in advance.

Jonny

 

[jonny13]

Anyone have any ideas? Or is RMA the only answer?

Jonny

 

[blackpool9]

I was debating between the MSI Neo Platinum and the Asus K8V SE Deluxe, and read a couple of different articles/reviews that suggested that the Asus board was very picky about what memory it was running. That and the Nforce3 hardware firewall were the two big things that drove me to try the MSI board. Unfortunately, I can't give you any more feedback than that, since I haven't received my parts yet (shipped yesterday from newegg, probably won't get it until next Wednesday with the holiday).

I'm assuming you've tried manually lowering the latency of your memory chip in BIOS? Try running at 3-3-3-10. Also, which revision of the A64 3200+ do you have, the CO or CG? The CO has more memory compatability issues than the CG.

Sorry I can't be much more help than that, but I've got my fingers crossed myself, even with the MSI board, that my 2x512MB OCZ PC3500 memory will run at a minimum of DDR400 in my system. If I have problems with the memory running at speed, I may just bite the bullet and rma all the parts and lay out the extra couple of hundred for a Socket 939 3500+. The socket 939's don't seem to be having the same kind of RAM problems the 754's do, probably because of the dual channel.

 

[jonny13]

Yeah, I thought it was a memory thing, but after trying all three of my available DDR sticks in my place, I decided it must be the board/cpu combo. So, I called up tech support and let them know what was up and they are cross shipping a new bundle back and I will return the old CPU/motherboard to them. Hopefully this next one works out.

I am still a little bummed this didn't go better so far as this is my first AMD system and it definitely doesn't stand up to my previous 3 intel ones. Hopefully it was just a bad board. I didn't realize till after some research that I can't even have all 3 dimms full and run at PC3200 speeds and there is also a limit to how many banks I can have which is kind of odd considering most of the other new chipsets don't have these limitations. Oh well, I will let you know how the new combo runs. Thanks for all replies.

Jonny

 

[calam63]

have you tried running memtest?

i am running that board and yeah it is very picky with memory - my ocz pc3200 512 plat edition enhanced latency had some errors - stuck in my spectek pc2700 and all is fine - rmaing memory too right now

 

[jonny13]

I was finally going to give that a shot the other night but it couldn?t even get past the bios. It would lock up at different times in the bios. I did get memtest loaded once and what do you know, lock before I could even begin. I am not sure how it got so unstable since it worked fine for about 3-4 days but then it quickly went downhill.

 

[nloki]

I got an Athlon 64 3000+, Asus K8V SE Deluxe and two Kingston value DDR 3200 512mo (so no overclocking either). I got absolutely no problem at all with my ram, running it with CAS 2.5, stable as rock.
For the three banks limitation, it is due to core C0 of the Athlon, the CG core removes it (as far as i know).

 

[Bad Dude]

Originally posted by: nloki
I got an Athlon 64 3000+, Asus K8V SE Deluxe and two Kingston value DDR 3200 512mo (so no overclocking either). I got absolutely no problem at all with my ram, running it with CAS 2.5, stable as rock.
For the three banks limitation, it is due to core C0 of the Athlon, the CG core removes it (as far as i know).

Are you sure that the CG core removes it? If so can you give me some link to literature to read on?
Thanks.

 

[nloki]

I've read that a long time ago, just before CG went out. I'll search my bookmarks and tell u that...

 

[imported_shaper]

Hi nloki I have the same setup as you could you please post your RAM details i.e. chip numbers model and what slots they are in.
I have problems with my computer locking up the ram tests fine but not sure if the 64 3200+ supports dual DDR400 512 ram. i have played around with the CAS settings and checked the vid card in another computer.
cheers

 

[imported_billh]

After I flashed bios my system would not boot. First thought it was bad flash butl later found it didn't like one of cheap memory sticks. Removed cheap stick and left Consair memory. Ran 10 days prior to flashing with vs 1004 before having problem with memory.

What I am trying to say is look at memory first when having problems.