*** Official GIGABYTE K8NXP-SLI nForce4 Thread ***

[Roomraider]

Your friends prob. is quite simple really, he needs to first make an nvidia SATA storage controller floppy from the packaged cd with a working pc. (states in the manual) Then set to boot from (CRITICAL) an ide optical drive, as the os begins to install press F6 and load the drivers from the floppy. Make sure the SATA hdd is plugged into one of the orange N-force ports, enable sata, disable Raid, Disable sil controller and most important tell your friend to slow down, take his time and read the manual thoroughly, it explains everything about this in great detail.
Tip: when up and running update chipset drivers to Nforce 6.53 from the nvidia web site under stand alone drivers, upon install always refuse the nforce IDE drivers.

 

[ViRGE]

We've already tried that. The system won't even boot off of the CD when we have RAID mode disabled, that's when it throws that esoteric error message.

 

[frals88]

:frown: Hey, RoomRaider, I have a K8NXP-SLI that I have not set up yet. I have two questions for you:

1. Did you have any trouble getting your Corsair memory in the DIMM slots? I have OCZ Platinum memory and had to remove the metal OCZ stickers on the memory in order to fit the memory in the DIMMS. Its a tight fit, but it works.

2. Overclocking. I know AnandTech wondered why the preproduction verison of the board overclocked so well compared to the final release board which was lackluster at best. Are you overclocking and do you know if this issue has been updated with the F7 or F8 BIOS.

Thanks!

 

[Roomraider]

Unfortunately this seems to be the only real setback for this board.
When i installed all 4 512 stix it was just too tight so i pulled 2 of them.
I've since obtained an ASUS SLI Board and the mem spacing is a lot more accomadating. Thats not to say it's a better board by no means.
I still use my Gigabyte as my primary rig.


Overclocking Hmmmmm, to be honest I really don't get into the overclocking aspect as I'm a firm believer that the selecting the fastest and most reliable hardware, you won't need to overclock and deal with all the problems that are related to overclocking. Check a couple threads back and you'll see what overclocking does to the mosfets on this board.


Robowang
Member

Posts: 43
Joined: 09/11/2001
just as a precaution, you should read this thread.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=29&threadid=1531758&enterthread=y



Roomraider
Member

Posts: 31
Joined: 11/30/2004
Robowang, this is quite an interesting and with all due respect ;loooooooooooong story.
This is the first real Gigabyte beating that i've really seen so please forgive me if I seem a lil biased. It has always been my opinion that you build a rig with enough CPU & Memory speed so overclocking is not a real factor to enjoy the benifits of the new system. Having said such, I do understand the OC itch that most of us just can't ignore and desire to scratch. These boards are all new and i have yet to see any reviews that have really made radical OC changes. The Gigabyte board is like the, oh how can i say it without offending anyone who may have went on the cheap and grabbed an MSI,DFI or ASUS?? It's the Elite board on the market. If you just went to your local sports car empourium and brought home a next years model bright red Ferrari would you try to drive it as fast as you possibly could on the way home????? Hmmm I don't think so. Again with all due respect, between your choice in power supplies for SLI boards and overzealous desire to tweak the daylights out of a new board without research, well I'll have to sum up your problems not as a Gigabyte problem but a user problem and if i were the retailer you would have to sue me to get a refund.

 

[frals88]

Thanks for letting me know. I'm a bit concerned about heat dissipation issues because of the lack of space for 4 sticks of 512MB memory. I dont know what Gigabyte was thinking on this one. It did bug me that I had to take the metal sticky labels off of the OCZ memory to fit everything in there.

I have a 7VT600P-RZ from Gigabyte that is getting me by until all of my new hardware gets here for the new system. I'm waiting on the Antec PS. Previously I had an old GA-7DX that I got 4 years out of before it went bad. Now I'm ready to start gaming again.

I'm using the OCZ memory in two of the DIMM sockets on the 7VT600P-RZ board and they are just fine with plenty of space between the memory sockets. I've been debating as to whether or not its worth it to RMA the K8NXP board in favor of the ASUS SLI board myself.

I think the ASUS board might have a slight advantage as to the software and that comes with it over the Gigabyte board, but think the performance differance between the two may be about moot from everything I've read. What do you think? Should I RMA the board in favor of the ASUS? The new hardware will be set for my primary rig while I'll use the 7VT600P-RZ rig as my backup.

I'm surprised that the MOSFETS on the Gigabyte K8NXP board would have a tough time due to overclocking seeing how Gigabyte advertises the whole 6 phase power DPS on their website and for that motherboard, but if thats what happened then well hard to argue with it.

 

[Roomraider]

Note* The posts that I referred to were the direct result of just one idiot whom, in my opinion was just tryin to kill a board not just a Gigabyte but any board.
As far as I know there hasnt been any real problems in the mosfet area.

I wouldnt trade my Gigabyte for an Asus for many reasons: This board just flat out out preforms the others in many areas.
Software: not even in the equation. You wont be able to get it to work proper anyway, even with the Asus. It's just a bundled marketing ploy.
I personally like the Gigabyte bios setup much better than the Asus.
Most RMA's will only repair or exchange for the same item.

 

[frals88]

I've been doing some more reading on the Gigabyte board and I would have to agree with you about the BIOS options. The BIOS for this board is very friendly for the end user and has lots of options to do some minor tweaking for overclocking without screwing things up.

It just bugs me that the memory is packed in like sardines. I've read 3-4 reviews where the reviews commented that this was one of the few things they did not like about the board.

Were the four DIMMS on your set up really hot or were they just warm? Since I ordered 4X512MB OCZ the plan was to use all of them. I have my case maxed out with all the possible fans it cans support. What do you think? Should I just say the heck with it and put everything together once my power supply arrives from FedEx tomorrow.

 

[Roomraider]

The stix i used were tracer ram w/leds.
Heat was never an issue just the spacing. It looked really stupid and stressed the ports.
If worst comes to worst just use 2 stix=problem solved no performance gain or loss.
If you are anything like myself you wont have the knack for waiting any longer and as soon as your psu arrives you'll be assembling your rig.

 

[frals88]

Yeah, you are correct Room Raider. Soon as the board arrived I started setting up the system, hence the delay in getting back to you and saying thanks!

Actually I have had some driver and software issues that I would like your advice on.

I put the system together and used the drivers that came with the CD-ROM. The BIOS for the board came as version 6. I upgraded the BIOS to version 8 after the clean install was done. Anyway, funny things are happening. The first game I installed was Halo and started playing. During the game or upon exiting the game right after, sometimes I get the infamous Blue Screen of Death. Also I've had the game just lock right up and have to do a hard reset - the audio starts to cut and clip and then the freeze. Even IE6 froze on me once too. Halo is up to date for its patch too.

Do you know what could be causing these issues? I am up to date on the latest video drivers from nVidia and sound card drivers for my Audigy 2 from Creative. Is there an issue with the nForce drivers that came with the CD-ROM. Have you upgraded to the newer 6.39 nforce drivers or the newest 6.53 nforce drivers? Can you just install the nForce drivers overtop of the old ones?

I'd be interested in hearing what you think about this.

 

[Roomraider]

Ok I installed the 6.53 NFORCE drivers right over the 6.39 drivers with no probs. Note* I had huge probs when I selected the the Nvidia IDE drivers with the gigabyte board. I cant really explain why but there was an issue with data rate modes and all hard drives on IDE would revert to PIO mode and cause a BSOD Machine Exception Error. I just used the XP Native drivers for Parallel ATA controler and prob. was solved. Install the Nvidia IDE drivers first, transfer a few large files around then check in (Device Manager)(IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers) then (NVIDIA nForce4 Parallel ATA Controller) Then (primary and or secondary) and see if your drive or drives are still set to Ultra DMA 6-Ultra 133 and not PIO depending on which HDD your'e using.
This could have just been a defect in my boards Nvidia controller because I didn't have that prob. with the Asus board, Nvidia IDE drivers worked fine.

Next: If you are running in SLI the only video driver that seems to even work 1/2 way good is 77.30 Now heres where it really hurts: If you are using a wide screen monitor any brand any size over 20" no matter what resolution; you will get random reboots, freeze-ups or BSOD error (NV4 Display driver got stuck in an infinite loop and you must save your work) this is due in large to the Nvidia 6 series video cards hardware and cannot be corrected with a simple driver update. Trust me on this one, I have a pending RMA settlement with BFG right now. Waiting for theyr'e decision on whether they will allow me to swap my two 6800 GT PCIE cards for two 7800 gtx PCIE cards which the problem has been fixed. Nvidia has kept this quiet for fear of a mandatory recall on all the 6 series chipsets because the only consumers it affects are the ones who use widescreen monitors.
If none of these apply to you then there is one other issue that would surely cause your symptoms. IRQ sharing, look in Device Manager @ the very top of the window select (VIEW) then (Resources by Type) Then Interrupt request (IRQ) and see if your sound card is sharing with your vid card, If so switch sound card to another PCI slot and reload your creative drivers because you cannot change IRQ's within Windows OS. This is the most common problem with this board due to the limited amount of PCI slots.

Good Luck!

If and when you reply: post your rig config. including monitor, video card or cards SLI or not single or dual Mode, Power supply HDD, Optical drives,CPU, Mem Ect. in detail.

 

[frals88]

Hi RoomRaider. Good to hear back from you.

That is very weird about the nVidia IDE drivers acting like that. I'll check out your suggestion and see what happens. I'll just upgrade the nVidia chipset drivers then as you've suggested. Did you e-mail Gigabtye tech support about your IDE driver issue?
I asked Gigabyte tech support about the "Top Performance" options in the BIOS for Rev F8 and they said do not enable that setting unless you are using memory with ECC. Nice to know that after the fact. It would have been good to see that posted on the website which it was not.

I'm not running SLI mode, but I just read that Gigabtye is making a dual 6800GT card. Wonder what that will be for cost now that the 7800GTX is out?

How did you know and/or figure out about the 6XXX series of video cards causing random reboots and BSODs' due to the hardware on the video card? I'd be a bit worked if this is true and what in the hardware is causing this?

Do any of the hardware websites like AnandTech, Tom's Hardware, and Guru of 3D know about this issue to verify and help the rest of the people like yourself with this situation?

For all the money we as gamers sink into video cards, its worth everyone knowing to keep the hardware vendors honest. I remember all the bad press ATI took for their video drivers in the past and how hard they had to work to overcome the public perception of their company due to this issue alone. Just so you now, I'm using a 21 inch Sony Trinitron CRT monitor.

I'll look at the IRQ's as you suggest and see if there is a conflict. That would be just like Windows to have two major pieces of hardware to share the same IRQ.

I'm open for BIOS suggestions to tweak my hardware settings

My new rig:

Motherboard: Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI
CPU: AMD A64 3500+ Venice core
Video Card: Gigabyte NX68T256DH 6800GT (just one for now)
Memory: OCZ Platinum 2-2-2-5 (4X512 MB)
Sound Card: Creative Audigy 2 Gamer Edition
HD: Seagate Barracuda SATA 160 GB
Monitor: Sony Multiscan G520 CRT
PSU: Antec True Power 550W
DVD ROM by Pioneer (soon to upgrade to a Plextor SATA drive)
Klipsch 4.1 Speakers
Win XP with Service Pack 2.0

 

[frals88]

RoomRaider,

Check this out. Now I'm pretty frustrated.

I checked the IRQ settings as you requested and everthing was fine.

Installed the 6.53 drivers and then:

1. Upon installation of the latest IDE driver I was asked a question by the software stating that I needed to make sure I did a preinstall of the nvidia drivers if I was planning on using the RAID mode later. I clicked yes because it was already installed from a floppy before the WinXP OS intallation as part of the SATA driver installation.

2. The software then detected an older version of the nvidia firewall and uninstalled it. Then it rebooted to install the newer version. Upon installing the newer version it rebooted again as it is supposed to.

3. Upon reboot all the programs started up as normal until the Firewall asked if the Gigabtye VGA program (came with my Gigabyte videocard) could have permission to connect to the internet. I clicked "allow" an I got a blue screen and then an auto reboot.

Upon the blue screen reboot, the firewall again asked if the Gigabyte VGA program could have permission to acess the internet. I clicked "allow" and I got another blue screen and auto reboot. The third time the VGA program asked to connect to the internet, I clicked "deny" for the firewall and everything was OK until I went into the event manager in the control panel to find the source of the blue screens.

4. Looking in the event manager I saw multiple errors listing a hard drive paging operation.

I clicked on the link which connected to the internet to see what the error listing was on the Microsoft database. Upon trying to connect to the internet I got another blue screen and another reboot.

5. After everything loaded up after the reboot I tried to connect to the internet using IE6 and got another blue screen and reboot. Again there is some type of error listed due to a hard drive paging operaiton.

Do you know what is going on here?

I'm thinking:

1. These drivers are very poor.
2. Should just blow away XP and do a clean install and dont use the nVidia Firewall or their IDE drivers.
3. If this is related to only the Gigabyte board I wish I would have got the ASUS instead and might want to do an RMA for it.

What do you think? Any instructions as to how to fix this. Far too much trouble for just wanting to want to video game.