Weird monitoring reports on A7V

[JimmyD]

I just got my a7v a week ago and all is going well. However, I have one worry. Both the Asus Probe monitor and MBM5 (not running at same time) report sudden voltage spikes and/or dropouts occasionaly. For instance Asus Probe will pop up saying that the +12V has dropped down to +8V or the -5V is at -7V. Now I know everyone's first guess will be my powersupply. However, the case is a New Supermicro SC-760A with the 300W Redundant Cooling PS. I got it new with the motherboard, so I'd guess it is possible that it is defective, however it's certainly not a cheapo one. Stability wise, the board has done fine, I've been running Prime95 (keeps CPU load at 100%) for days now, I've never had it crash on me. My guess is that the fault is with the monitoring itself and not the actual voltage, however, I'd hate for a dead board to prove me wrong. Anybody got any ideas I should try? Here's my current config:

Asus A7V
TBird 750 (at default clock and voltage, JumperFree enabled)
128mb CL3 PC133 SDRAM
Voodoo3 3000 AGP
Maxtor 10gb 7200 RPM drive.
Guillemot Fortismo Soundcard
Linksys LNE100TX 10/100 PCI NIC
Toshiba 6x DVD Drive
Supermicro SC-760A Fulltower Case w/ 300watt Redundant Cooling PS.
Running NT4 SP6a and Redhat Linux 6.2

Your help is greatly appreciated

Jay

 

[juggernaut42]

The only thing i can think of would be another program running at the same time which also tries to read the data (it's on the SMB, isn't it?)

But as you said you weren't running asus probe and mbm at the same time, so i guess you thought about that already.

The only other utility which might be using the smb bus is CPUIdle, but it would be foolish to use it on A7V anyway (See the 1003 vs 1004 temperature issue on my page) ...

 

[deejayshakur]

had the same problems... not sure what it is. however, it seems that the spikes and drops coincide with when my cd-rom or floppy is being accessed.... any suggestions?

 

[loweyson]

Yep, had exactly the same problems, the spikes seem to be reported on all of the V rails at one time or another, which worries me a little because the +5v and +3.3 are both quite critical to the running a usage of motherboard, cpu and the pci bus+ peripherals attached to it. The +12 and -12,-5 aren't too much of a problem as they are just used for higher consumer devices like cd-roms and they read at burst any way, you have the -'ve to double the potential across a rail, which is just a cheap way of getting a bit more power out of a psu.

Again i'm pretty sure it's not my psu, it's brand new and i've checked it with a multimeter and pd divide to test it's load and they show drops no where near the magnitude that asus probe thingy shows. But I would still be curious to here of it's long term implications, especially when the more critical rails such as core drop.

Might be worth dropping the polling rate in asus probe and test it bit by bit, ie. copy some files from cd, should test the 3.3, 5 and 12 +'ve, or maybe run a high intensity open gl app to really test the voltage across the pci bus +3.3 etc...

 

[loweyson]

I've come across something quite interesting that was mentioned in another post and that is check to see if any part or contact is grounded at all against the case or anything else.

Also is it worth checking that any Heatsink greese or glue is not touching anything else other than that little raised square and the heatsink, non of the surrounding cache chips or contacts, apparently it's very slightly conductive. I haven't had the chance to try this yet I've been working, but if any of you that have had this problem had a look and let us know the results.

I was also wondering how hot all of your cpus were, under bios the load is much lower hense so is the temp, the BIOS never seems to show any sudden spike or drops in the magnitude that asus probe shows and the cpu is. while the probe thingy runs under windows, which if you've updated your bios (1004) will never let your cpu idle, so I was thinking that if the cpu is constantly running quite hot (my 900 tbird at around 55ºC/131F) are the results being reported correctly.

Another thing worth checking is what os are you using I'm using win2k, although I have friends running win 98 and winme and neither of those report the spikes or drops, is it an NT thing ?.

I've also noticed that I can't get my agp to get to 4x, It will only let me go as far as 2x with my C/Labs GTS 2 even with the settings at optimal.

Any ideas here would go well

 

[chottoed]

Go here and use the registry page to get agp4x in win2k
Tweaktown AGP4X Fix

 

[deejayshakur]

using win98 and gettin the spike problems, as reported above... still remains a mystery. altho the new ata100 drivers speed up boot up amazingly....

 

[loweyson]

A combination of that patchy thing and Creatives AGP Wizard got Powerstrip to recognise that my GTS 2 can support 4x but even though its not grey it wont let me select it, and I cant' select 4x (it's greyed out) in the CPU-PCI/AGP Bridge, which I assume is why it won't let me change the gts' speed. (Still can't select higher than 2x in the AGP Wizard either).

Would enabling side band adressing or fast write protect help this. ...

Thanks for any help.

NB

That voltage drops/spike do not occur in any other monitoring software, i'm using Motherboard Monitor 5 and it seems pretty good, I think maybe that ASUS Probe thingy might need a bit of re writing

http://Motherboard Monitor 5

 

[JimmyD]

Actually, I've been using Motherboard Monitor 5 for the past few days. You can get it here:

http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~a.vankaam/mbm/

Using this software I'm getting no reports of spikes or dropouts. I kinda figured it had to be a bad reading all along, since a spike of +15V on the +12V or dropout of +2V on the +5V would probably have a pretty quick impact on system stability. It still bugs me a little, but MBM5 is a nice program and it seems to be working fine. My guess is it's a bug (or maybe just oversensitivty) in Asus Probe. Thanks for your tips everyone.

Jay

 

[JimmyD]

Actually, I've been using Motherboard Monitor 5 for the past few days. You can get it here:

http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~a.vankaam/mbm/

Using this software I'm getting no reports of spikes or dropouts. I kinda figured it had to be a bad reading all along, since a spike of +15V on the +12V or dropout of +2V on the +5V would probably have a pretty quick impact on system stability. It still bugs me a little, but MBM5 is a nice program and it seems to be working fine. My guess is it's a bug (or maybe just oversensitivty) in Asus Probe. Thanks for your tips everyone.

Jay

 

[DaddyG]

There's a possiblity that spikes from the fan rpm monitoring are causing the problem.

 

[loweyson]

What do you mean ? If the fan goes up a notch it affects the other readings. ???

 

[cirrus1]

I have also noticed that the 3.3voltage is regardless of bios version around 3.6 for me.

 

[loweyson]

I've also noticed that with all the jumpers and bios settings set to defaul, the 3.3 v rail seems to always be around 3.46 V, which I think is the reason my TBird 900, is always reported to be clocked to 909 mHz