I've experienced some problems with the K8V SE Deluxe 1004sd.001
(beta) BIOS, so I thought I'd mention them to see a) if I'm alone in
this and b) what I ought to do about them:

I've had a stable machine for some time, although I don't overclock.
I've been running the 1003sd.rom release bios since its release, and
haven't had any problems.

I only installed the 1004 beta to see if it made any difference to the
performance of my RAM (bios releases often address ram timing issues,
and there have been timing problems reported with the Athlon64).

I flashed to 1004sd.001 using the Asus Update 5.28.01 under WinXP Pro,
and cold-rebooted once it had completed. I then went straight into
CMOS to re-enter my settings, and cold-booted again.

Win XP booted fine, but froze after about 20 mins requiring a reset.
On re-booting the VIA post (as opposed to the main BIOS post)
complained that the device was missing. A cold (power fully off)
reboot, and the device posted OK.

WinXP then booted OK, but into Chkdsk having found errors on both
SATA drives on the VIA bus. Eventually I got the desktop back, but it
froze again after 5 minutes, and the above process was repeated.

After this, I used my BIOS boot floppy to restore 1003sd.rom and,
after having cleaned up loads of indexing errors on the two SATA
drives on the VIA bus, all is back to normal.

The symptoms suggest to me some kind of conflict being caused between
the 1004sd.001 bios and the bios on the VIA SATA chipset (or the
southbridge?), but it could equally have caused some kind of RAM
timing issue (which can cause all manner of bizarre symptoms).

I concentrated more on trying to recover to a stable system than on
trying to analyse what the problem is, so I don't really have any
concrete info.

Also, are ASUS collecting error reports on their beta bioses?

------------------------------------
Setup:

Asus K8V SE Deluxe, BIOS 1003sd.rom (1004sd.001)
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ @ default speed
1024MB RAM - Corsair TWINX CMX512-3200LL (2x 512) @ default 2-3-2-6
Disk 0 C: Promise ATA IDE Raid 0, 2x 80Gb IDE 133
Disk 1 D: Via SATA IDE 1x 160 Gb
Disk 2 E: Via SATA IDE 1x 160 Gb
Gigabyte NVidia GeForce FX 5200 (Omega 1.5303 drivers)
Zalman Reserator CPU cooling
Stock VGA cooling
------------------------------------


--
Charlie