Official DO's and DON'T for ASUS A8N-SLI (PREMIUM)

Page 20 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

smut

Golden Member
Dec 4, 2005
1,269
0
71
Originally posted by: M9ACE
I have a couple of questions regarding some of the settings in the BIOS of the A8N SLI Premium.

The first question I have, which may be a bit of a stupid question, is that what are the advantages or disadvantages of having the ?Plug and Play O/S? option set to ?Yes? or ?No?? I should note that I believe I have a basic understanding of the Plug and Play concept. My question is more along the lines of what does this really mean for my PC? Does it really make a difference to my Windows XP setup? Would having this setting set to ?Yes? allow the OS to benefit from any additional information/control of lower level functions/information as opposed to the ?No? setting?

My second question is that under the ?Advanced? tab, PCIPnP, should I have the ?Init Display First? set to ?PCI Slot?, or ?PCIEx?? Basically my question is; does it really matter what this option is set to when I only have one video card in the system (a 7800 GTX-which is PCIe of course)?

Hey man, in my experiences and I've tried both options, it didnt make any difference at all. In some rare situations with old or non plug and play OS'es it may be different but on Windows XP I have noticed no differences between the two.

And for the Init Display first question i've always kept it on PCI-E, Ive always done it because I feel it would slow down boot time/bios check if its set as PCI when your not using a PCI card because the mobo is looking at the PCI slot to see if there is graphics card there to initiate the display. I believe it would skip that step completely because youve specified the display card is in the PCI-Express slot. I could be wrong at how that works but thats what I've always though and why Ive always specified PCI-E (as long as i'm using a pci-e card of course). So I would just set it to PCI-e, it cant hurt so why not? And if it speed up your boot time even a milli-second its better the nothing =)

If anyone knows exactly what the BIOS does in regards to that function please post so I know the facts.
 

compwarez

Senior member
Jun 14, 2004
616
0
0
is ocz plat. rev.2 (512x2) 1 GB compatible with this board (a8n-sli premimum) or not?

this is my spec:

x2 4600
asus a8n-sli premium
ocz plat. rev.2 (512x2) 1 GB
7600gt
antec SP 500
1 sataI 80 GB
 

Superguy

Member
Sep 12, 2005
132
0
0
I still have this board and it's still a POS.

vCore was never fixed, and I still get random problems with it. Just did a reload about 3 weeks ago and it still won't boot all the way into Windows sometimes.

Dumping this for a Conroe once the P965 C2 stepping comes out.
 

PsyStal

Junior Member
Oct 15, 2006
8
0
0
Ok, so I've not had any major problems with this board and my hardware configuration. However, I have been experiencing serious issues with downloading, and after extensive poking and prodding, I believe it may have something to do with the mobo. The issue is this, I can upload just fine, without interruption. Downloading, on the other hand, is spotty at best. Most of the time when I download a file it is somehow corrupted and I am unable to run it. Anyone else here have similar issues with this mobo?
 

virtualrain

Member
Aug 7, 2005
158
0
0
Corrupted files are not likely going to be caused by the motherboard...
although what do I know. How did you come to this conclusion?

IMHO, It's likely either a bad HD, RAM, or CPU causing that. The only thing I can think of is if you are overclocking or your RAM is not stable or your HD is on it's last legs. All of these can corrupt files.

You should run memtest on your RAM to ensure it doesn't error and then ensure your computer is Prime Stable.