p4p800 problems

[perpetualdark]

I am sitting here pulling my hair out trying to decide what to do. I upgraded today to a asus p4p800, kingston hyperx 3200 matched set, p4 2.8ghz (800), ATI 9700 pro. I kept my ibm deskstar 120gxp drives. I had a raid setup before, but the new mobo (via raid) did not recognize the array (from the promise reaid controller on my last mobo), so I had to start from scratch. I was running into glitches during installation of windows. I turned off SPD on the ram, and it seemed better, then after a few more glitches, I turned it down to 2-3-2-2-5 and it seemed to run perfectly. I got windows xp installed with no difficulty after that, and I went to install the inf drivers from the asus disc and when it rebooted, it went to a black screen following the raid post, and hangs in a hard lock. I can still get into bios and tweak settings, but even dropping my memory to the slowest settings, and disabling all performance enhancements, I cannot get anything but a lock after post. I cant even seem to get into a safe mode, so I am suspecting a hardware issue. The status in the bios shows the cpu temp at 49 and the case temp at 46. The fans are all working and nothing SEEMS to be getting excessively hot.

I chose this setup for hardware because the ram (i thought) tested good on this board in anands article on memory with 865/875 chipsets. I found out today that the kingston he used was 3500 instead of 3200. I am completely unsure where to go from here. The only bios patch out there enables the "PAT" enhancement which I dont care about unless I can get this thing working good. There is a "smart" overclocking feature that I think was enabled earlier but once I dialed down the settings on the ram, I got a POST message saying overclock failed, and I found the setting and turned it off. I get no errors, no beeps, no voice saying something is wrong, i just get a cursor in the top left for a second then it goes to black screen like it is gonna start the windows loading screen, and then it hard locks. Have to reset or kill power to get anything from there.

If anyone can offer up clues, I would be grateful

also have in it:
Aluminum case w/ 300 watt antec psu
sb audigy
hp cd rw drive..

Was running gigabyte 845E mobo with promise raid controller
2.26 ghz p4 (533)
gf4 4400
2 sticks corsair CL2 2700

was rock solid stable before.. cant imagine the psu is an issue.. drives ran flawlessly since day one..

Perp

 

[LiLithTecH]

Are you sure it is not hanging on the network?

I doubt that WinXP has native drivers for that
3Com Gigabit network card.

Did you install the 3Com drivers initially with the OS install?

 

[perpetualdark]

Well, it was a long night last night, but I finally got it all taken care of.

thanks for taking a crack at it lilithtech, but I had not even gotten the gigabit ethernet drivers installed yet, and I did think to disconnect the network cable and try it, just in case windows was trying something funky with the hardware it couldnt find a driver for.

After posting here, I decided to just start over, and dropped my winxp cd in. Upon reboot, I entered bios to change the boot sequence, and just to be safe, dialed my memory down to the lowest setting. I also turned off the quiet boot, so I could see the post sequence better. The first thing that happened after rebooting was I got stopped in POST with an error. The error was "overclocking failed". I was a bit confused. There is a setting in the bios that allows for the bios to decide the clock settings for the cpu, and then there is a setting that allows for the bios to decide whether it can safely overclock. Well, this feature is garbage and works about as well as SPD. I set the clocking to manual and set the turbo feature to disabled from auto. I then rebooted, and things started making sense. I let it go past the "press any key to boot from CD" and instead of the black screen and the hard lock, I got an error saying pci.sys is corrupt. I spent the ~8 minutes it takes to get to a recovery console (had to load raid drivers, etc) and expanded the file off the winxp cd. I rebooted and got another system file corrupt message and decided I would just reinstall. 30 minutes later I was back in winxp. The problem was the bios was automatically overclocking the system, and causing instability. When I went to load the inf drivers from the ASUS disc the first time, the instability caused the files being copied to corrupt. Hence, windows wouldnt boot. I then installed all the files without a glitch.

But that was not the end of my problems. I used the ASUS update tool to get the new bios, and loaded it up. This new bios enables the "PAT" function on the 865 chipset. I have not even attempted it yet. Upon reboot, I got the overclock error again. I entered bios and all my settings were WAY off. The memory timings went from 23225 to 34437 for some reason, and almost every setting was opposite what I had before. I straightened it all out, and rebooted. No problem. Then I loaded the catalyst 3.4 drivers from ATI. BIG mistake.

I fired up a game I am beta testing (NDA still.. cant talk about it) and about 3 minutes in I got a hard lock. At that point, I installed 3dmark03 to stress the system and troubleshoot. I updated to the latest build of 3dmark03, and fired it up. 556 frames in I got a hard lock. So I rebooted, and turned my memory timings to 3-3-3-3-5 and tried again. Same thing.. 556 frames in it hard locked. hmm.. so I rebooted again, and this time dialed the ram down to 320mhz instead of 400mhz. 556 frames in it hard locked. That was too much coincidence for me so I decided it was a driver issue. I hunted the web for a catalyst 3.2 driver, found one on some european site, and installed it. I rebooted and ran 3dmark03. scored a 4089 off the bat. ran flawlessly. So the 3.4 drivers are garbage.. I turned my memory settings back to 2-3-2-2-5 and 400mhz, and did not have another glitch for the rest of the night. everything ran very smooth. I did have one reboot after installing one more driver where I got the overclock error again, but entering bios did not reveal a problem, and the settings were still manual. 200mhz fsb, 66/33 on the agp/pci, 14 multiplier, everything looked fine, so I rebooted again and no problems.. kinda wierd, but I recall in anands memory article that some of the mobos he tested had an occasional glitch on startup that was not consistentl happening. Even though he had no probs with the ASUS mobo, I think this may be a problem inherant with the chipset.. Just speculation.

I am going to work on tweaking my system this week, and maybe even mess around with the PAT control and see if it makes a difference.

Perp