Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Issues

[Lee H]

Last night I sat down and tidied all my cables up, and sort out all the niggling issues with my system that have been occurring for at least 2 months now.

Anyway, over the last 2 month's or so - Everytime I've rebooted the PC it would not load back up again. I found a solution where I had to switch off the PSU, power up the system to drain any leftover charge in there - count to 10 and then power back up and that fixed the issue.

I heard that the latest 1016 BIOS was a fix for this and a few other issues, firstly off I went registry hacking to change 1 field ( X-Fi issue - changed back once the program was installed fully) to allow the Asus updating tool to flash the BIOS and verified the EPROM and successfully upgraded the BIOS. Everything is at stock speed - no clocking at all at the moment.

YIPPEE - thank god it rebooted FIRST time. Now this is where the problems start ;

1) The system hangs with my NEC DVD writer - in order to get passed the Detecting IDE Devices I've had to remove my DVD drive and disable all IDE controllers.

2) System does not Power up at all with 4 x 512 Mb of memory in. It boots fine with 1 Gib installed - yet add the 2nd sticks and voila instant freezage. It sporadically boots with 2 Gib installed running 2T and 2.5-3-3-6 timings @ 400 Mhz - CPU should be fine as it's a Venice cored 3500+

I've ran all the usual diagnostic tools i.e memtest overnight ( 0 errors ) on both sets of memory and the DVD drive works, so I cannot see what is causing my issues now.

PSU is a 480w Tagan jobby.... I do have a spare 500w to see if it is the PSU but I very much doubt it as it's fairly new.

Has anyone else encountered anything like this? If so what was your fix?

[Hottentot]

4 x 512mb of memory has given me problems on two mobos (an Epox and an Asus). The solution for the Epox was to move the memory around in the slots. For the Asus boot into the BIOS with 2 x 512 fitted and manually set up the memory timings (set to 166MHz and 2 T). Then add the other two 512s and it booted up OK.

[Lee H]

I've had the memory set as 200 Mhz and 2t timings for ages ever since I got the board - I've a venice cored CPU which has the updated Memory controller so it does not revert to 333 Mhz when using 4 sticks of memory.

Asus have suggested I try the new BETA BIOS so thats the first thing I'll do tonight (providing I can find my floppy drive lol)

[fat jez]

Asus have suggested I try the new BETA BIOS so thats the first thing I'll do tonight (providing I can find my floppy drive lol)

A USB floppy should work. Failing that, you can setup an emulated floppy on a USB pen drive.

Cheers,
Stephen

[RavenNight]

I'm always wary of flashing a BIOS from inside windows, try doing it from a boot floppy, that way you don't need to muck with the registry or anything.

[this_is_gav]

Best bet is to make a DOS bootable CD with a RAM drive, and to stick the BIOS and flashing program on a floppy, copying them over to the RAM drive, and run it from there. Short of having a UPS, that's about as safe as it'll get. You can include the BIOS on the CD if you wish too, and if you make it a CDRW, then you can reuse it again and again for different BIOSes if you wish.

[Lee H]

Working now - flashed BIOS with 1016 again and this time seems to be stable

DVD drives back on writing and everything.

Oh yeah - and I flashed in windows again