My board is PMSing!

I

ilkhan

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Sep 23, 2002
Messages
13,791
Pink Matrix Shitting.

I recieved my P5N-E SLI and the rest of my parts today. Awesome I thought. Assmbled, got it to power up. Fans turn on, loud screeching noise. OK, didn't plug the power into the GPU. Fixed that.

Keyboard error. BIOS checksum error. AWDBIOS.exe not found.
Power on again, try to get into bios. nope. try to continue. Nope. ok, switch to a PS2 keyboard. ok, keyboard error goes away. the AWDBIOS.exe thing remains.

So read through the book, asus has a bios recovery thing on the support disk. Put that in.
Pulls up the bios loader, almost immediately goes into shock. little smiley faces in a column for a second or 2, and then this.. Which I will now refer to as PMS. The page is refreshing in sections, not all at once. And its just sitting there doing nothing.

I gave it about 30 minutes, was stlll cycling through. Reset it.

Loaded the bios thingy again, went alright. erased, wrote. erased, wrote. "this is going pretty well". Hung on the 50k block. Just stopped dead. Shit. Gave it another 30 minutes, reset again.

Did the pink shit again. reset
Did the erased thing and then hung on the first block this time. Reset.
Did the pink shit again. reset.
Its just alternating through. Currently letting it do the pink shit again. But this time Im going to stay away from it for an hour. Since I gave it so much time the first time and it got pretty close to finishing, Im wondering if the pink shit is actually doing something useful for me. So in an hour Ill go back and try again.

Is the board just plain fucked? Advice?
 
Board is having trouble with the memory, what is the exacty model number of the memory you bought ? A linky to where you bought it is cool.

Try with just one stick of ram. You will probally have to boot with the bios recovery disk in and hopefully it will try and recover the bios again.
 
OK, that sounds like a good option.

Heres the wishlish I used to organize everything. http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishlist/PublicWishDetail.asp?WishListNumber=3882525

With the same ram it did "complete" a bios flash, but it didn't fix anything.

On another note,it recognizes a PS2 keyboard, but not a USB one. WTF? Hasn't USB been around for ages? If I use a USB keyboard it spits the keyboard not found error at me and still gives me the floppy not found message.
 
seems to have done the trick. Dropped to one stick, let it reflash, and bios came up fine. No issues since then. Tried to boot at 3Ghz...that failed. :(

Any idea what actually causes this memory problem?
 
ahahahah was just typing up a long list of things , and asking if you did try the one stick.

go into bios and raise the ram voltage to 2.2 V because

Here is the specs.
Patriot eXtreme Performance
Model PDC22G6400LLK
Capacity 2GB (2 x 1GB)
Speed DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Cas Latency 4 Timing 4-4-4-12
Voltage 2.2V
Heat Spreader Yes
Features EPP (Enhanced Performance Profiles) Ready

and remember the one stick trick you will need it if you have to clear the bios, more coming ....
 
I shall indeed remember to pull the stick for the bios update. BUT...memtest is at 61% right now without having touched the mem voltage. You are right though, Ill increase the voltage to the levels it wants.
 
yep (good call on the memtest) up it anyway like you said or you will get random windows freezes , I would just abort memtest, raise it up and run it again for a "warm fuzzy"

about why, you really dont want to know, in short INTEL and the MB guys and the memory guys didnt talk well enough to one another. Its been a big problem with newer boards (the high voltage memory not working).

have fun, out.
 
Im 92% done with my first pass. Ill finish that and then raise the voltage (and the FSB. have it at 210 right now). See how that goes.
 
And it was doing so well. :(
Flashed to the newest bios after a clear memtest run. I then tried memtest again. Complete failure. errors on almost every block.
Going from memory, I tried to get back into bios and it failed. Gave me the same "bios corrupted" message as before. Put in the support disk and reflashed to original bios. System would hang at various points of boot. Before the CPU data showed up, after that, nv raid bios, etc. Tried moving around the memory and now Im getting nothing. No boot, no beep codes, no video. Fans power up, but nothing else.
 
You didnt mention if you raised the memory voltage, its critial as you are finding out, Try the one stick with the resore cd or the floppy with the newer bios in the dirive and see if it boot. If so asap go immedatley in bios hit the "restore factory defaults" and only raise the Vdimm. make sure memory timings are all set to auto or SPD. Check the manual on how to set the memory divider/speed and make sure it is set for 1:1 or however they descripbe the memory running at 2 x the FSB. need to calm down and proceed slowly.

all I can suggest is try the one stick deal (if needed try both sticks but one at a time) with the cd in and pray someone with that board and sticks comes along with a tip I dont know about.

unplug everything, mouse too, you dont absolutley need till we get it so you can get into the bios and fix stuff and get a clean reboot several times in a row. If you have a sound card, rip it out etc. just video card memory and drives.
 
I have to get to class, so Ill get to this afterwards.

FYI: only card in the machine is the GPU. :shrug:
 
swapped to a 6200TC I had lying around, pulled the front panel USB/FW/audio connections, pulled the drives, stuck only a single stick of ram in each slot, reseated the CPU, reset the cmos, cant think of anything else.

Still not getting any post beep. I dont have anything I can swap the CPU, mobo, or ram with which would be my next option. I can pull the mobo from the case, if you think thatd actually do anything..

pulled the board. Does the thing look *bent* to anybody else? And would that be the issue? http://ilkhan.com/misc/IMG_0349.JPG
 
I cant tell what it is exactly, but the fact you got it to boot with just one stick and where going along fine there for a while, makes me pretty sure that board and that memory are not going to get along. I think that is a good board (in general) and would swap for some different memory but another board would also probally solve the issue but I dont know of one that will work with that for sure.

wonder is there someone around you could borrow a stick of ddr2 memory from, cheap non-fancy stuff. If it will boot again with the bios cd in it might come back alive. Even if you could get it to beep it would pretty much verify its a memory compatibility issue.


I will spare you the details but you really dont need fast overclocker memory almost any pc6400 will be able to get you to a 3.2GHz overclock if your heatsink can handle it.

I like corsair, if for no other reason than a corsair rep vist the memory forum almost every day and will help if an issue arrises.

anyway some memory specified to run 1.8 1.9 or even 2.0 volts will probally solve the whole deal.
 
Ill probably run down to CUSSR and pick up a cheap stick of ram then. But again, Im currently getting nothing. no video, no post beep, nothing.
 
ahhh I cant really see but just thought of something that could be happening. The backplate that those connectors all poke thru so they stick out of the back of the case. That backplate usually has a bunch of little metal "fingers" that are susposed to press against the metal housings of the connector shells on the motherboard. I have see where one of those "fingers" will slide up inside one of the connectors and short stuff out. When you put the motherboard back in (if you put it in ) make certain all those fingers fit around the outside of the metal shells and none of them slip inside any of the connectors.

Just a swag.
 
Arcygenical said:
No post beep generally means dead board...
Click to expand...
Thats what I was afraid of. I'll try remounting it tomorrow (off to bed now), but doubtful. Off to CUSSR for a S3 (since they dont carry the DS3)

Im liking the g15 and MX518 though. Threw them on the server for the moment. The macros are fun.
 
The gigabyte S3 will have the same problem with that high voltage ram, you might get one that due to the manufacturing tolerances will work but it would be an iffy thing.
 
The S3 didn't have any issues with the ram. 40 minutes from getting home with it posted perfectly. 20 minutes after that (built with a dif card and 1 stick) it was memtesting at 2.7Ghz. And now its formatting the drive for XP.

Moral of the story: Im going to stop recommending asus. Just a bad board or not.
 
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