Totally random crash and BIOS loss

[Zak33]

Yeah....could only happen to Zak, a BIOS issue.

From the top:

Asus A8N-E with an Opteron 146
Tagan 460w
4x512 Corsair value select PC3200
X800XT PE

CPU in cooler weather runs at 2.4 but this last month I've had her at a gentle 2.2

Ram set to 333, fsb upped from 200 to 220, leaving the ram under 400.

On Friday, after an hours gaming, the PC rebooted. The screen blacked, and the mobo beeped and it reset itself.

But it failed to POST....I had a checksum error.

Panic!!! run around, arms above head, wailing at the god of BIOS, who'm I've not sacrificed a chipset to for....ohh....nearly a year!

Text Agent.... he'll calm me down. Not delivery report on my mobile......I'm on my own!

Asus website (which must still be hosted on a ZX SPectrum and a 28.8 k modem) Remember that Asus website works much better in IE and not so well in Firefox (this using spare pc)

Can't find bios download, but that turns out half an hour later, to be an issue with the flash page just not loading the info.

Meantime, turn to mobo box and manual, find CD rom in it.....ponder....put CD in other PC and explore contents...there's an AWD program on there...and a .Bin file. That'll do me.

Reboot PC with CD rom in and bingo, the mobo flashes itself and we have a PC returned

Happy boy.....except Hitting delete does not enter the BIOS....nothing enters the bios...it's just a vanilla, no frills, no options BIOS!

Glance across at othe PC and notice the flash page has loaded, I get the newest BIOS and Award flash program.

Put them on a floppy, reboot pc and bingo...we're back

However....that was three days ago, and the PC has just rebooted again.

Thought Id' just check cpu voltage (as it's been stable at 1.5v since I had it) and it's fluctuating between 1.488 and 1.504 constantly.

Might be nowt.

Any ideas guys, what caused my BIOS corruption? Was it the total crash?

[Zak33]

ohhh

[Curly]

seeing as your using 4 sticks of ram..... check that you have the ram set to 2T, the updated bios could/might default to 1T, this is a limitation of the cpu's memory controller, then try memtest again.

Curly

[Clunk]

another thing, aside from the memory issue, is that for a 2.2ghz overclock, 1.48-1.5 seems a little too much. does it really take that much to be stable at 2.2ghz?

definately take all the ram out and test each one singly, its a pain in the arse, but itll tell you whats faulty and whats not.

[Zak33]

tried each stick singly.....seem fine!

Got work to do on this I think :-/

[Zak33]

another thing, aside from the memory issue, is that for a 2.2ghz overclock, 1.48-1.5 seems a little too much. does it really take that much to be stable at 2.2ghz?

thats what is defaults to....I've tried higher for higher speed but that is default for this cpu.