A word of warning for Asus K8V SE Deluxe Users

I, like many of you I assume, just received my motherboard and processor deal from the AMD Retail Pro web site. Here is the experience I had with the board that comes with the package, the Asus K8V SE Deluxe. I hope this helps others out.

I install the board and all my parts and it booted on the first go. I was even able to install Windows. Soon after the install I started getting BSOD's on everything. I could be in the middle of installing an update, running 3Dmark 2001, hell it BSOD'd when I came to this forum to find out what the hell was going on. I tried quite a few things in hopes of fixing the problem and finally figured it out what the problem was when I ran Memtest86+. While I was running two sticks of Asus approved 512MB PC3200 DDR Ram, the board didn't like having both sticks in and gave me massive memory errors. At one time I got over 2000 errors during testing. When I yanked one of the sticks of Ram it worked like a champ. It didn't matter which stick, I tested them both in all three slots and they both came up 100% stable. I downloaded CPU-Z just to see if that would give me any insight and it did. I found out that the chip they processor they sent was the Newcastle version of the Athlon 64 3200+. I went back to Asus' website and downloaded a new bios that added support for newer A64's. I through in the other 512MB stick it is now running stable. I hope this helps others who have similar problems.

On a side note, this whole experience almost gave me a heart attack. The memory instability caused the bios flash I tried in the beginning to fail. I thought I killed the board because it would not boot, it just kept saying "Bios recovery mode, searching for boot media" and search my CD-Rom. This is when I found out that the Driver disk that Asus sends you is also the Bios Recovery Disk. If anything goes wrong during a flash boot your computer with that disk in the drive.

One last thing, I'm using the beta 1004.001 Bios from Asus. I don't know if the official 1003 Bios fixes the problem.

I suggest you don't use the EZ flash to flash the BIOS. I was having trouble getting my PC to run using 2 sticks of 512 Corsair DDR, so I wanted to flash to 1003(which supposidly fixed this problem). Anyway, the flash crashed and now my BIOS chip is corrupt. There's no way to fix this. The recovery cd doesn't do jack. Asus return policy is utter shit. I have to pay shipping to them and pay shipping back...and you can't pick what shipping. It's UPS ground.

Seems like a lot of people with these boards are having the same problem. This is the last ASSus mobo I'm ever buying.

Harkamus said:

I suggest you don't use the EZ flash to flash the BIOS. I was having trouble getting my PC to run using 2 sticks of 512 Corsair DDR, so I wanted to flash to 1003(which supposidly fixed this problem). Anyway, the flash crashed and now my BIOS chip is corrupt. There's no way to fix this. The recovery cd doesn't do jack. Asus return policy is utter shit. I have to pay shipping to them and pay shipping back...and you can't pick what shipping. It's UPS ground.

Seems like a lot of people with these boards are having the same problem. This is the last ASSus mobo I'm ever buying.

Click to expand...

I had the same problem using EZ flash on this board. Ordered a
new BIOS chip from www.badflash.com. don't want to spend the time
sending the board back.

So we can assume you ran the full gambit of ram timings and acceptable voltages to find an appropriate speed stability trade off? Is there any hope of getting 4 sticks stable on a 939 with decent timings when 2 on a 754 can be an issue?

jmanning95 said:

I had the same problem using EZ flash on this board. Ordered a
new BIOS chip from www.badflash.com. don't want to spend the time
sending the board back.

Click to expand...

One more thing I downloaded BIOS 1003 again off the German FTP
site. This time there was a text file says thar it could only
be flashed with - ASUS LiveUpdate v5.28.01 - ASUS AFUDOS v2.07
When I downloaded it the first time off the USA Asus site it didn't have this warning that I could find.

i came home tonite to find my amd64 waiting for me on my stairs.
run upstairs, tear down my case, rebuild, plug everything in, push the power button and....nothing.
check all connections, reseat all cards/ram, etc. and still nothing
pull the 4 pin power connector, press power, everything turns on, but no video.
try turning it on again with the 4 pin connector in, nothing again...

i dont understand what the deal is, but if anyone has an idea, id be delighted.

im also very intrested as why such a cruddy board was used for this EPP.

oh well, heres to waiting to buy a good board.

Asus has a reputation as one of the top motherboard makers so this is a concern. Hopefully you guys can get it worked out or it may just be that you are the unlucky few with a bad board. I know some people at places like AMDMB have boards that work without any hitches.

As for Bios updates I used the Asus Live Update and did it on me SK8V right from the internet and it worked without a hitch.

I had horrible luck with my last PC as the original Nforce2 Chaintech board I had would not run in dual channel mode or it would like up in games - one stick would work fine but at the cost of some performance. My replacement board was a MSI which worked great until I reformated my hard drive to do a clean install of Windows so I could sell it to my friend. I ended up having to put in a Shuttle board after that since it turns out the memory slots had issues.

It seems a lot of problems with motherboards like these are because of issues with the memory slots.

Asus K8V SE

I also have a few complaints about this board. First no floppy to install SATA on windows install. Second it doesn't overclock worth a CRAP I got 210FSB out of it and that was all I could get. Third memory configuration screen sucks. Fourth it undervolts the CPU.

The only thing I like about it is Live Update which doesn't work unless you download the file from ASUS first. Auto download and update doesn't work anymore.

I'm glad I'm only using this board for a few days. Can't wait till my Epox comes in.