Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 Owners - Did you install the new BIOS?

[guskline]

Old version was 0301. New Version is 0402. It's been out only 5 days now. (Repeat: Mobo model is P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3).

I'm curious if anybody installed it and if it's working ok for you. I'm preparing to update my SSD firmware as well (I got my Vertex 3 running on a 2.08 firmware and the newest is 2.15).

I just bought this mb with a 2500k to upgrade rig 2 below. I updated the BIOS to version 0402 with no problems. I let the software do the "Fast" autotune overclock to 4426Mhz. Absolutely solid in every stress test. What a nice MB!

 

[bankster55]

nvm

 

[nealh]

I just bought this mb with a 2500k to upgrade rig 2 below. I updated the BIOS to version 0402 with no problems. I let the software do the "Fast" autotune overclock to 4426Mhz. Absolutely solid in every stress test. What a nice MB!

What Is the vcore at 4426?

 

[Axonn]

guskline: thanks for the confirmation man!

 

[Skypix7]

Hi guys, this may be a bit off topic but does anyone know why one of my two DVD burners shows up but the other doesn't? They both have power and both are plugged into a SATA port on my P8z68 pro/gen3 board, and both flash on the DOS boot up screen, but only one makes it all the way to the desktop.
thanks and Merry Happy Joyful Holidays to all

 

[Axonn]

Go to Device Manager see if it shows up. You may have a driver conflict there.

 

[Skypix7]

Thanks Axonn, nope, all's kosher there. Only shows one optical drive.

 

[Skypix7]

I just flashed my ASUS p8z68v Pro/Gen3 board to bios 0402.
Steps for those who aren't familiar with the process:

I formatted a 4 gig USB thumb flash drive
copied the extracted 0402 bios to it
rebooted and went into bios
clicked on the EZ Flash Bios thing
it showed the USB drive with the bios file
I clicked on that file,
A yellow progress bar moved across the screen, the first 30 seconds it went about 1/4 of the way, then raced across to the other side in 5 more seconds and said "success"
It wanted to reboot, I let it do it's thing. Started and stopped five or six times without showing the ASUS splash screen. I didn't touch it until I did see the ASUS screen, then went into bios and changed many but not all of the settings (for instance, didn't disable C3 or C6 cpu power settings) that I'd made in the past week or two to get it running, saved and rebooted to the SSD, everything opened without a hitch and here I am.
So far (only half an hour), it's solid as a rock.
It seems as long as you proceed with caution (making sure you know what you're doing and have downloaded the correct file and extracted it first, then copied to iso CD or flash drive - I had tried to do it with the ROM file on my system drive but it didn't work) and use the bios EZ Flash utility, it's a snap. I didn't need to change the name of the ROM file or anything, as I'd read someone else had to, and having it on the USB thumb drive worked like a charm, and my guess (only a guess so far) is 0402 cleaned up some of the instability issues I was having, because it feels stable.
Will report back if I have any problems down the road.
For now, I"m going to leave C3 and C6 enabled, and see if maybe that's been cleared up by the 0402 update too...maybe they've found a way to work with the SSDs without doing that.

 

[Skypix7]

C3 and C6 switched back off. Guess why? B. S. O. D.

 

[nealh]

C3 and C6 switched back off. Guess why? B. S. O. D.

You really need to leave C3 and C6 off for the SSD. I know some are mad about this but who cares you need a stable setup. I never enabled them and I have never had BSOD( except trying to hit 4.5 ghz ).

I would rather have the showed of the sand force controller and stability. My CPU throttles appropriately, so whats the real advantage.

I love this mono. The easiest to setup and tinker. I have tried many over the yrs, from the big guys and this has been the smoothest start to finish by simply take simple advice to tad just a couple of settings.

Please just look at the first page. Very nice info. Kenmitch gave us this link in a thread.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1012874/the-official-asus-p8p67-p8z68-p8z68-gen3-series-owners-club

 

[Kenmitch]

You really need to leave C3 and C6 off for the SSD. I know some are mad about this but who cares you need a stable setup. I never enabled them and I have never had BSOD( except trying to hit 4.5 ghz ).

My 2700K is good with these enabled up to the 5ghz that I stress tested so far. It's a hit and miss thing but most of the time you need to play around with voltages more than the C3 and C6. Trial and error is what it takes.

Tip: Only use the intel SATA controller if possible. Disable the Marvell,etc if not using them. Speeds up boot time(post) and they suck anyways!

 

[nealh]

My 2700K is good with these enabled up to the 5ghz that I stress tested so far. It's a hit and miss thing but most of the time you need to play around with voltages more than the C3 and C6. Trial and error is what it takes.

Tip: Only use the intel SATA controller if possible. Disable the Marvell,etc if not using them. Speeds up boot time(post) and they suck anyways!

Sky pix and I are using a SSD with sandforce controller and the C3 and C6 need to be disabled to avoid BSOD. intel SSD don't seem to suffer from this issue.

I agree I only use Intel SaTa 6g ports. Marvel seem to be poor controller. It was on badaxe2 as well.

 

[plion]

Thx. I am still waiting to see what happens but feel very lucky so far.

In boot menu, there is an Option Rom Messages, this has caused many to have reboots issues on initial boot(?). It is recommended to set to keep current.

I turned off onboard video as I have dedicated videocard( if you call a 7300 gt a videocard, good enough to run my monitor and is fanless)

Do you need on board video? Is there an adv. to using the on hip videocard a dedicated videocard?

how exactly do you turn off the onboard gpu? There is not disable option unless its 'render standby'?

 

[gizbug]

Wonder when the bios for the non-pro will get updated

 

[bankster55]

how exactly do you turn off the onboard gpu? There is not disable option unless its 'render standby'?

There are 4 options in bios under APM initiate graphics adapter:

iGPU - PCIe/PCI - PCI/PCIe - PCI/iGPU
Just set PCIe/PCI

 

[Mem]

Wonder when the bios for the non-pro will get updated

If there are no issues it won't unless its for new CPU updates ,personally my V/Gen3 board is running great.

 

[guskline]

What Is the vcore at 4426?

I upped the multiplier to 44 and kept the fsb at 103 for 4532! Absolutely stable with prime 95 and the Intel Burn test. vcore at max when running stability test for Aida64 is 1.344 (cpu-z 1.59)

 

[Skypix7]

There are 4 options in bios under APM initiate graphics adapter:

iGPU - PCIe/PCI - PCI/PCIe - PCI/iGPU
Just set PCIe/PCI

That's the one, I had some video issues until I disabled the iGPU and set the PCIe/PCI switch.

Since the 0402 bios update I've been more stable...although Google Chrome kept crashing my system. I'm using IE now, much as I don'lt want to, and it's doing just fine.

Side note: last night I bumped the computer case with my foot as I was getting up...and it BSOD'd! That tells me I've got a loose connector somewhere, I'd better get back in there and check everything. It was an f4 error msg, so must be something like that. Didn't bump it much either! And I have SSDs so wouldn't have been a HDD shake I don't think.

Happy New Year everyone!

 

[kknd1967]

I think I found one minor issue with the new BIOS.
I can no longer boot from my external USB optical drive (it was a IDE-USB2 enclosure with Samsung 22x IDE DVDRW inside). I used it to install Windows7 and did Memtest under old BIOS.
Today I realize it will go through constant boot loop if I set the external optical drive to be the 1st boot device.

Another question is, (I am not sure whether it is only on this BIOS or even with old BIOS)
Intel Rapid Storage Technology tray icon shows "service not running" if I set BIOS to be "Asus optimal". It is fine otherwise.

 

[blackened23]

I think I found one minor issue with the new BIOS.
I can no longer boot from my external USB optical drive (it was a IDE-USB2 enclosure with Samsung 22x IDE DVDRW inside). I used it to install Windows7 and did Memtest under old BIOS.
Today I realize it will go through constant boot loop if I set the external optical drive to be the 1st boot device.

Another question is, (I am not sure whether it is only on this BIOS or even with old BIOS)
Intel Rapid Storage Technology tray icon shows "service not running" if I set BIOS to be "Asus optimal". It is fine otherwise.

First question: set it to "windows boot manager" in the bios. if you have a bootable optical drive disc or bootable usb flash drive, it will boot from them , if not, will boot from whatever drive has the system partition.

Your BIOS should have an option to "force bios", disable that to enable UEFI on your system. That toggles between bios mode and uefi mode.

 

[gizbug]

I upped the multiplier to 44 and kept the fsb at 103 for 4532! Absolutely stable with prime 95 and the Intel Burn test. vcore at max when running stability test for Aida64 is 1.344 (cpu-z 1.59)

Great to hear!

 

[coffeejunkee]

You are wrong sir. Only *C1* is tied to the CPU turbo state. That should be left enabled.

C3 and C6 are fine to disable. They do not affect the downthrottling or turbo states of the CPU. In fact, C3/C6 interact with SSD performance and will lower read/write speeds slightly, google "c3 c6 ssd". I recommend turning c3 and c6 off.

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology in Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture (Nehalem) Based Processors
http://download.intel.com/design/pro...ots/320354.pdf

Read page 5 please.

 

[imaheadcase]

When i try to flash the bios i get "not a valid UFI bios". It also won't let me backup bios in the EZ flash bios update..?

So i decided to try the windows bios flash utility. Except you can't even run the freakin AI suite they have. For some god knows reason you can't download each component or install each component itself to.

Apparently not many people can install the suite anymore and asus never fixed it from a year ago.

 

[Skypix7]

Update: my P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 board stopped letting me get into bios, and came up lame with a VGA LED light always on. Breadboarded it (outside of case on non-static surface, no monitor, just power, cpu, one mem chip, reset CMOS several times etc etc etc), recycled through MEM OK attempts, switched mem sticks around and never got a single POST beep, and VGA LED stays on.
Dead board.
Called ASUS on Saturday.
Never, ever call ASUS on Sat if you can help it, they are incompetent and poorly trained. Took 10 minutes for the first guy to realize what I was talking about when I mentioned the board post LEDs: CPU, DIMM and VGA. He would just go silent on the other end for a minute or two. "Anybody there?" I'd ask. "Yes, I'm still here...so what board do you have?" This after the second go around. Good grief.
One tech was nice and actually apologized for the previous two guys I talked to, one of whom said he would get me a supervisor and kept me on hold for 15 minutes...though he knew there are no supervisors working on the weekends. Nice.
I may not be able to RMA the board either because it does not have a serial number sticker on it. The box does, the board does not. I took ten pictures and sent it to them by email, because they thought I was so lame I couldn't see a fracking sticker on a motherboard. I wish I knew how they train these folks.
Will arm wrestle with ASUS west coast supervisor tomorrow, danged if I'm going to eat a mobo that's been messing with my head for 5 weeks.
Bankster55 was very helpful, suggested I try a deluxe/gen 3 instead of the pro. It's on its way from Amazon along with a water cooler. If I have problems with it, I'm going to take a long walk off a short pier.
Sorry I don't have better news. Sure like the Pro/Gen3 board when it was running, between BSOD.
Bankster55 says Deluxe/Gen3 is solid, he builds systems as a pro so I'm giving that one a try. What they hay, not like I have anything else to do...

PS: could somebody snap a photo of a serial no. sticker on any ASUS board so I can make up my own from the barcode sticker on the box? That's one way I could get around their silly "policy", by making my own sticker from the one that's on the ASUS box, which has the barcode and everything, but since I've never seen the serial number on the board as it wasn't there when I got it from Newegg, I need to know how big to make it, what size the sticker is etc. Much obliged for anyone willing to do that. you don't have to even shoot it in focus, or can fuzz up the numbers or whatever, I just need to know the dimensions and the ratio of the characters to the sticker itself, and its size. Thanks!
EDIT: And where it should go on the board!

 

[Skypix7]

Hahaha...I'm cracking myself up.

After spending all that time yesterday, looking for the stupid P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 sticker that those guys at ASUS told me was somewhere near the PCI slots, and shooting and emailing 10 shots of a variety of angles to them, I did some more digging on this site and saw where some folks had said to look at the bottom of the PCI slot.

"Alright," I said to myself, "self, get back up there for the fourth time and find that sticker! Stickers don't fall off; somehow, even though you've been a professional photographer for 30 years and have a sharp eye, you must have missed it."

I peered and pored all over the board...especially around the PCI slot. Someone in the forum had suggested it would be on the "bottom" of the slot, whatever that means. To me, that meant at the end of the slot, on the board.

But NOOOO0000ooooo...oh, it was indeed on the board alright....on the side of the second PCI slot, not exactly in plain sight but jeez, it was there after all. So I can RMA the board, huzzah, huzzah,Life is good again until the next red LED.

Guess who's the idiot?

Yeah.

Me.

But I'm posting this in case someone else, and there seems to be a lot of us on the boards, can't find that pesky sticker and the ASUS phone tech guys are clueless as to how to help you overcome your obvious myopia.

Good grief. I really can't believe I couldn't find it...although it's not an easy find...but still...and I got so worked up about it. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Sigh. Time for a beer.