Hi.
I bought myself a new system last week. The parts arrived on Friday and I assembled it yesterday. All went pretty well and after a couple of hours the system appeared to be up and running with no problems.
So, I Installed & updated the operating system (XP) & set about getting the latest drivers for everything. It all seemed to be going well and it looked like it was going to be a flyer. Thinking that it would be a good idea to start with latest BIOS, I downloaded the 14 BIOS from the abit site and used the Uguru facility to flash it.
Unplug PSU, clear CMOS, reboot
...Black screen and bleeping from the system speaker.
Checking the post error code pointed to it being a memory problem (sorry, but i can't remember the exact code), and after a little experimentation trying both sticks of ram in different slots, found that it didn't for some reason like DIMM 3. The BIOS seemed a bit buggy in other areas too (hanging a couple of times on start up and not booting for e.g.), so I decided to flash back to an earlier version of the BIOS.
This time I chose version 13, and again using the Uguru facility flashed the Bios. It got to about 90% and then froze. I left it for some minutes, but in the end could do nothing but hit the reset button. When it rebooted I was greeted with black screen almost immediate incessant multiple bleeping from the system speaker.
The BIOS is now dead & I can't do anything about it, including flashing it again from a floppy.
The motherboard is less than a day old...
This is the second Abit mobo that I've had BIOS problems with, the first being an AV8 series and it not recognizing a Winchester CPU, & TBH I was a little bit weary about buying another Abit, but after reading some good customer reviews and looking at the specs of the AW9D-Max I decided to go for it. Now I'm not yet sure whether to regret that decision or not, but one thing i do know is that I'm not a very happy bunny at this moment.
My specs:
Abit - AW9D-Max
Intel - Core 2 DUO E6600 (1066 fsb Conroe)
GeIl - GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz
EVGA - GeForce 8800 GTX
OCZ - GameXStream 700w Silent
Seagate - Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA-II 16MB (2 in raid 0 and one as a dump drive)
So, where do I go from here, do I RMA the board or get a new BIOS?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Conduit