I just got this board earlier this week and I've been experiencing some reboot problems. I was going to post questions to this thread looking for help, but I think I have things figured out and thought I'd share my experience (sorry for the length of the post).
Components:
ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2
Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 Allendale 2.2GHz, 800 MHz FSB
Crucial Ballistix Tracer (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 (PC2-6400)
WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
LITE-ON 20X DVD±R, Model DH-20A3P-08
420 Watt Power Supply
AGP Video Cards Attempted:
ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 9600
Diamond Viper II Z200
At random times, usually within 15 minutes of bootup (after XP is loaded and I'm doing things at the desktop), the PC reboots. I'm not playing games or doing anything intense, just copying files, setting up XP, trying driver updates, etc. Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of a blue screen. Most of the time after the first reboot, it will reboot again while still loading XP and repeat a few times before XP loads completely again. Safe mode with or without networking does the same thing. I found a handful of people in various forums that seemed to have the same problem.
I tried every version of every driver from ASRock & VIA, different BIOS versions, different video cards, disconnecting non-essential components to decrease power consumption - then I started investigating the RAM a little deeper.
With only one stick of RAM (mobo defaults to single channel mode), the reboot problem went away. Then I discovered memtest86+, and ran that a bunch of times. The results:
Ran memtest86+ on both sticks of RAM installed together (#1 in DDRII_1, #2 in DDRII_2)
- 70 errors, all in Test #5
- Ran overnight, 20 passes, 1558 errors in Test #5
Ran memtest86+ on RAM #1 in first slot (DDRII_1)
- PASS
Ran memtest86+ on RAM #2 in first slot (DDRII_1)
- PASS
Ran memtest86+ on both sticks of RAM - swapped this time (#2 in DDRII_1, #1 in DDRII_2)
- Average of 2-3 errors in Tests #3 & #4 each
- ~1.5 million errors in Test #5
At this point I was convinced the motherboard had something wrong with its Dual Channel Mode functionality. I tried setting the BIOS to force Single Channel Mode with both sticks installed, but memtest86+ immediately started showing errors on what looked like almost every read/write, so I didn't run the full test.
Then I found and enabled the "Flexibility Option" in the BIOS. Memory speeds reported by memtest86+ were ~15% slower (i.e. 2092 MB/s vs 2449 MB/s) but all tests PASSED! Both in Single and Dual Channel Modes.
I also noticed that my RAM was only being recognized as DDR2 533, so I forced it to DDR2 667 in the BIOS. It didn't affect the speed reported by memtest86+, but it still passes the tests.
Based on everything above, does anyone have any helpful insights? (i.e. other things in the BIOS that I should tweak, other tests I should run, did I merely mask a greater problem, etc)
I've seen some posts in this thread where people are against using the Flexibility Option - why? Do you have any other ideas how to get around my problem?