Flaky bios access and high temps

[tsmori]

Recently I was getting some lockups when playing a few games, I chalked it up to the games in question being in beta. Then Dungeon Siege II started throwing exceptions and it had been working fine.

The other night I reboot, and it won't let me into the BIOS setup. It would reboot into windows fine, so I updated the BIOS, which was probably not a great idea as it reset all the BIOS settings to default, which if anyone has one of these puppies and has a SATA RAID 0, knows, it's tricky getting the settings right to both recognize a boot disk and the raid.

Anyhoo.. got that corrected, eventually I can get into the BIOS after rebooting it a bunch of times. I downloaded MBM and SiSoft and it's reporting one of the temps at 160F. Can't be accurate since the case temp is only 70F. CPU temp is only reading 104F. I'm not even sure which sensor it is.

Sound like this motherboard is dying?

 

[evilharp]

Originally posted by: tsmori
I downloaded MBM and SiSoft and it's reporting one of the temps at 160F. Can't be accurate since the case temp is only 70F. CPU temp is only reading 104F. I'm not even sure which sensor it is.

Sound like this motherboard is dying?

No. MBM and Sisoft are not the best choices for temp readings. Both are out of date (MBM not being updated since 2004, Sandra has always been weird with temps) when it comes to sensor readings.

Try Speedfan. It works with most everything (including Dells), and it can be tweaked to work if not natively supported.

As for your bios problems, are you using a USB keyboard? I used one in the past, and had nothing but trouble (on mulitiple systems). PS2 may be legacy, but it works.

 

[tsmori]

Alrighty, I'll give that a shot.

I am using a USB keyboard, but I never had trouble getting into the BIOS before. And it does recognize the keypress, but would at times, just hang.

To be more specific. I'd reboot, and hit the "DEL" key to enter BIOS, I'd get the message "Preparing to enter set-up..." and it'd just stop there.

Sometimes it would advance to the RAID utility and stop there. A few times, I'd just get a cursor stuck in the upper left corner of the screen and that's all I'd get.

When the RAID detect errored out, it'd let me into the BIOS. Sometimes this required a half-dozen or more reboots.

One other thing. The system crashes when I run 3DMark05. The graphics tests run fine, but I get a BSOD when it runs the CPU test.