Hi have found this forum very helpful. I just about have my FX53 running. I had all the trouble with the memory. Went through three matched pairs of identical 512 DDR 400 memory. One pair worked in every slot, singly or inpairs and every voltage and speed etc. The other two pairs only came up as 256. In fact, is I had the "good" pair installed and running at 1 gig, if I installed either of the "bad" pair, the BIOS saw all four slots full but Windows only saw 256 meg of RAM. After reading everything here, I finally gave up and exchanged the two "bad" pairs for one pair of matched 1 gig DDR 400. They work fine when by themselves, but if I load them with the "good" pair, all the MB sees is 1 gig of RAM from the 512 pair. Again, I swapped them around and changed speeds and no difference. So Im running with the matched pair of DDR 400 at 2 gig of RAM.
I am running two Raptor SATA stripped and no ATA HDs. I have an 800 Pro video board and Creative sound card. When I loaded XP, all went well until I loaded the SATA driver from the Gigabyte CD. Every time I load the SATA driver XP will not boot. At all. I can and have reloaded XP in about half an hour - 6 times. So I ran it for a week without the SATA driver loaded in XP - I loaded from a floppy the driver I downloaded in order to get XP to see the drives as covered elswhere in this forum.
The first problem I ran into was the memory. Since going to the two 1 gig DDR it runs fine, with them in 3/4 (closest to the CPU) or 1/2.
The second problem I encountered was the SATA driver. After running in XP default mode, I crossed my fingers and let XP load the driver of choice and wonder of wonders it worked fine and is running like a banchie.
The third problem I encountered was the power supply. I R&Rs my existing AMD 2800 in my favorite case. It had a 550 watt power supply. I was also running four case fans. When I went to the new configuration, the first time I booted after loading XP it ran fine until I fired up Halflife. When it went into full up mode the screen went black and all went silent. It ran out of watts and just shut down as near as I can tell. So I unplugged the fans and rebooted. It came right back up and I could usually plug in one of the case fans before it went TU. So I went to Tiger and got a 600 watt PS and now I am running two power supplies. The 600 for the MB, 800Pro video, and the second PS for everything not connected directly to the MB. It now is very stable and has had no crash problems at all.
The final and continuing problem I have not figured out yet but on boot up, as soon as XP starts it gives me an error message about the ATA RAID having a problem and shutting down. Not sure what this is about as the only disks I have are the Raptors on SATA which are working fine and two DVD / CD drives, one player one burner.
I am planning on installing the IDE RAID - a matched pair of 20 gig WD drives and loading up XP64 to see how it does.
The reason for all the above is - the only reason that this thing is running is because of the tips and help that I found in these pages and I wanted to say thanks, and share my experience with all.
I love the machine, it does some stuff so fast that its almost like it happens before I ask it to do it. I play Planetside a LOT. My frame rates with the same video board and working through the same 4meg/356 cable connection used to be ~ 20-80. Now with the FX its ~80-200. Very cool!