Hi all,
Let me try to save some people some of the nightmare I went through. First off I will openly admit I am quite the noob. The last pc I built was in 1998 (I bought a Dell 2.66 in 2003) so I've never used SATA drives, or DDR2, nor PCI Express and all the good stuff I ventured in to.
First here is my setup on Windows XP Pro
Build Specs:
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Case = Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum/Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case
Motherboard = ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP Socket T (LGA 775) Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard
PSU Unit = HIPER HPU-4B580-MS ATX12V 580W Power Supply 100 - 120V
Video Card = eVGA 512-P2-N635-AR Geforce 7950GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card
Memory = GeIL Ultra 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1000 (PC2 8000) Dual Channel Kit
DVD = LG 16X DVD±R Super-Multi DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write Black E-IDE/ATAPI
CPU = Intel® Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe Processor 2.4GHz, 1066FSB, LGA775, 4MB Cache
HD = Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer
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There's a lot of people who knock this mother board, and rightfully so, I would of done the same except I wasn't naive enough to think it wasn't possible user fault. It took me hours to get the heatsink on the motherboard, only to find a no post which was because I did not plug the additional 4 pin PSU cord in to the upper part of the motherboard (I am used to only the main 20-24 pin connecter).
Finally got that done and I could not use my SATA drive. It sucked to find out I had to set that up before I installed windows (as I had just spent 6 hours setting up Windows); again, user fault. Of course, it is WINDOWS fault you have to use a floppy because I've not had one since ages ago. Even though I did find one in the midsts of the ol 166-500mhz's sitting in my basement I had no floppy disks!. Hours of google I found out you can use nLite to make a xp cd to implement the driver in to your setup disc (whew).
Anyways, FINALLY get it up and running, after 2 days (I'm self employed and work from home, so I mean damn near 2 days straight messing with this) I decide I might as well update my BIOS. Afterall, I get the wrong readings on my GeIL PC 8000 / 1000 mhz ram (cpuz says it is pc 5300 mhz @ 333mhz for some reason). I had my friend who is a tech in a town pc shop pick all my stuff out since he knows the stuff and I do not but I later learned that the mobo does not support this high of memory. I assumed it would underclock it like it's supposed to but not by this much. Oh well, the timing is off too. I fixed those in BIOS myself (quite easy btw) and got the timing down to the cl4-4-4-12 @ 2.4v like the box says and it seemed ok. I didn't notice much increase in the benchmarks I ran though, infact, it said the same results.
ANYWAYS, sorry for rambling, but SOMEONE has to be doing the same I am so lets get to the common problem (I have been on google/1413241324231 diff forums in the last 3 days trying to fix my problems). I got to the BIOS update, like I said, and again I have no floppy so I opt'd for the windows install. Luckily, charter cable really sucks and kept cutting out [I found out later that ASUS's windows updater usually corrupts the bios beyond repair) so I opt'd for the USB flash drive solution. I did exactly like the ASUS website and manual said. I reset my bios to default and all that.
The BIOS flash sait it was successful, but on reboot it was dead. Nothing. Now I sound like everyone else huh? I didn't want it to get the best of me so I surfed around some more and found a few bits of info accross many forums and pieced it together. I didn't need to take the battery out or use the clear jumper at all. What I did to fix it was to simply unplug ALL my stuff except my CPU.
Unplug this:
Video card
IDE cable to the motherboard (can leave in dvd rom since it has no hook up to the mobo atm)
ALL your ram (don't leave any in there).
Unplug ALL your on board goodies like the firewire thing, the usb ports (If you know my case it has the push thing on the top that has usb slots and such which I ran to the mobo usb part) and unplug your audio jumper (ac or hd don't matter).
Unplug your SATA/HD mobo cable (again can leave it into your hd just unplug it @ the mobo)
With ONLY your cpu left all hooked up turn on your corrupt/failed/whatever-asus-did-to-us-poor-guys bios and you will hear "beep, BEEP BEEP, beep, BEEP BEEP" non stopped. I heard it for 1 minute straight before I turned it off, but alas it had life as before it was a no posting black dead screen.
Slowly put your stuff back in, but the key is the way you put it in (I think). The common problem with this bios fail(even though it says success, most of us reported) is it seems to be happening to only two types of people:
1) People with 1 X gb sticks of ram, and more than one (ie, 2 X gb+; this may also effect a 2 GB stick if those exist, I'm not sure...)
2) People with SATA drives (not sure on RAID, I guess so since it's the same drive type??)
3) I think this might be another factor, but I cannot prove it. A lot of us who seem to have this problem do not have floppy drive, see below for more info.
As I said, put it in this order to get ssome kind of signal:
1) Your HD
2) Your Video
3) Your Memory (only ONE STICK, ONE ONLY!)
Now turn it on. You should see bios checksum error notice but have the option to restore defaults or enter setup [at this point in time my USB flash drive with the 7011 update is still plugged in, as is my ASUS utility cd). I opt'd to restore the defaults because I didn't know if it would fail any other way again.
You'll notice that when you do that and then actually go back in BIOS some weird stuff is going on. You're set back to IDE, not SATA and a few other like I noticed it had a Floppy drive enabled again, which I do not have, and it also had that as my main boot setting, which obviously is problematic. I am sure this is due to the "default settings" being reloaded but what else would you do in my spot?
One thing I do not like is the fact ASUS seems to believe charging for reflashing and such is the only fix and I'm not paying more money for that when it's 100% fixable if you know how. Add in the fact EVERYONE I've seen, EVERY post I've read about this problem came from someone with either sata drives, 1 x GB memory sticks (ecspecially with > then the asus supports), no floppy, or users who "ran everything fine, but upon the 7011 flash [even though it says it works] got dead screen" it had to be the bios or something the bios did.
I am unsure how the bios update works to be honest, but I think it sets some settings to ones we had already changed over rending a lot of things useless.
Anyways hopefully some of this is of help to someone, as I found this thread to be the most helpful to me.
Now I am off to search for a nifty blue led for the other front part of my case and a better cooling unit because I want to try to OC mad. Anyone know a good noobie guide to Watercooling?
Thank you
- Bryan
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edit: one thing I just noticed about 7011 bios is that the chasis fan sensor that does not work now works in the pc probe utility. atleast something got fixed hey...