Success Story! I think.
Hi to all, I've been setting up this board now for 2-3 weeks and I think I might finally be getting somewhere--woohoo! A bit of background: Like many of you I have had problems since day one. My DVD DL that was only a year old and worked fine in my last PC suffered an early dimise when I attempted my first boot whith this machine about 3 weeks ago. Now it doesn't work in the former machine either. Lights at startup, recognized in Windows XP, but no response otherwise. Updated the drive's firmware (after I got this system stable) - no response, shows up in BIOS as weird letters (CHC ? maybe-I forget). Fine, moving on. First harddrive I tried (Maxtor 100gb PATA/133) wouldn't work past the formatting stage--BSOD at the GUI portion of Windows setup. One of the biggest selling points of this board for me was the IDE support. I don't have any SATA yet, so this was a big draw for me, but to this point I've had quite a bit of conflict with IDE's. Fine, moving on. Fortunately I had enough old equipment lying around to swap some drives and get this thing up a running-somewhat. I'm only trying to run a stable system -- no overclocks.
What worked for me was the same stuff that's been repeated ad nauseum around here (thanks to Core2 & Adder!)
MEMORY IN BLACK SLOTS ONLY!
MANUALLY SET RAM TIMINGS AND VOLTAGES -- SEE SIG!
Everything else set to "Auto" for now
I repost these things just for any other newb like myself who may be considering or trying to set up this board for the first time
So far, everything seems stable. I still get a few reboots when windows comes up, but usually starts up the second time. I've checked the PSU, both in BIOS and manually with a volt meter-everything checks ok. I've checked the memory with MemTest-everything fine after switching to the black slots. No overclocking, day to day computing seems ok--not great, but ok.
Just to sum up, most of this post was just cathartic for me--AHHHHHHH, much better--but I do have a few questions:
Why is this board so difficult to deal with? My other ASUS A7n8x Deluxe was a dream compared to this.
Will future BIOS releases clear up some of these issues? I'm scared to try right now as I've got everything going ok, and I haven't read much good about newer releases.
My next harddrive will be a SATA drive. Does this board (and all the new generation boards) play nicer with that spec?
Should I stick with this board? Is it any better with any of the other C2D boards? I think they're all having similar issues right now, but I almost wish I had just built a 939 system-LOL.
Thanks in advance to anyone who actually reads this post-whew!