A7N8X Deluxe v2.0 Bios 1007 flashed. Memory Controller question.

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 19:19:41 -0400, "Paul D. Motzenbecker, Jr."
wrote:

Don,
Greetings and hallucinations from just north of Fantasy Land (Washington,
DC)!

Hi Paul,

Greetings from Minnesota!

What, pray tell, were you trying to fix? Flash a BIOS only to cure a
problem. Flashing to just have the lastest and greatest is courting the
bitch Goddess Disaster with red roses, Godiva® chocolates and a 10 karet
water white flawless diamond from Tiffany's. With that on offer she is sure
to pay you a call. You will find that she is a lousy date.

I realize that it's not a good idea to flash the bios 'just because'.
That's why I was still at 1003 until I updated this board to 1007 in
preparation for a new SATA drive I had ordered. I had read that the
1007 included improvements to the SATA bios. I suppose my mistake was
in not just seeing how well the 1003 handled the SATA drive.

That being said, have you reinstalled the nVidia drivers for the board?
Sometimes they get confused when the BIOS is changed.

This I haven't done. Wasn't sure whether to reinstall the ASUS version
or go ahead and try installing the nVidia reference ones over the ASUS
version. I really have no idea how to uninstall the ASUS so it'd be an
install over them if I went that way.

Since I posted the message and responses below, I've done a few more
things.

I've uninstalled the video drivers and reinstalled new ones that came
out the day I was updating the drivers.

After unchecking the "Restart on Error" option in WinXP, I had one
crash to the BSOD where it pointed to an ATI file as the problem. I've
also had the system STILL completely reboot, and one occurrence where
it appeared all that happened was I lost the video. My LCD went blank,
yet the computer seemed to still be running.

I tried timing the reboots. It appears the first one occurs around 1
hour, to 1:10. The second one around 20 minutes later. (This was while
in-game, playing DAoC. The only crash I've had out of the game was
after five hours of playing MP3s with Winamp while playing Kyodai
Mahjonng.) When I opened the case and directed a fan on the innards, I
was able to put the reboot back to another hour. I suspected heat
problems with the video card, but it felt merely warm to the touch
after these reboots (as far as the ram chips,anyway. Wasn't able to
touch the actual GPU obviously).

ASUS Probe shows the MB and CPU temps to be around 30C and 40C max.
Usually about 27 and 35 or so, so I don't think the CPU is
overheating.

I blew out the case in case dust was a problem. I didn't really see
any standing dust on the CPU or Video card (though I am unable to
extract my dust filter from the front of my Antec Sonata case. After a
few attempts at pressing on tabs and pulling the filter out, both tabs
broke and the filter hasn't budged).

I've ordered a new video card in case the 9700 Pro is failing, and a
new power supply (current one is Antec 380), just in case the BIOS
somehow caused the board to use a bit more juice. I admit, I have no
idea if that's even possible, but it seemed that the problems only
occurred when there was a lot of video activity so I leaned toward it
being either the card actually going, or the card demanding a bit more
juice and putting the PSU over the edge and causing a reset.

In all cases, I am able to use the system immediately after one of
these reboots, and there never is any weird graphical artifacts prior
to a reboot.

Sorry this got so long. I do thank all of you for reading and posting
possible ideas.

Peace,

To you also,

Paul

Don

My system is fairly plain:
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe v2 1007 bios
Athlon 2500+ Barton core
1g Kingston PC 2700 ram (as mentioned, passed memtest for 19 hours and
38 passes)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
120GB WD IDE hard drive
LiteOn DVD/CD-RW combo drive
LiteOn 52x CD-RW drive
Samsung Syncmaster 191T monitor


"Don Reese" wrote in message
.. .
snipped
Thanks for the information, Peter. I may wind up just reinstalling
from scratch and using Nvidia drivers only.

Ever since the bios flash, my computer has spontaneously rebooted
while playing (in this case) Dark Age of Camelot. I never had this
problem with the prior bios (1003).

I haven't seen it happen while doing anything else, though, so I'm
thinking perhaps an uninstall and reinstall of the video drivers may
help. (One message after a reboot said the problem appears to be in
the ati-something.drv so I'm thinking it's worth a shot.) I have an
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro installed.

Also, I noticed my monitor (Samsung 191T) is listed twice in the
device manager. This may have been something that was there all along,
but in this case I doubt it. That would be something easily noticed as
I scanned the list every now and then. Should I delete one or both of
these entries? Both say they are working correctly.

In my post above I mentioned people having trouble with sound drivers.
I guess I should have said, I read they had problems with the control
panel and not being able to access it after installing Nvidia drivers
over the ASUS ones. If you've had no problems, I may yet give it a
try.

Thanks to all who have helped so far. I appreciate it.

Don

Although I have an older board (1.04), I also have the 5 memory
controller items using the 1007 BIOS. Nothing says Ultra though. I'm
using the latest nVidia platform drivers (version 4.24) and the
current ATI drivers (version 4.6) for my Radeon 9500. I'm using the
same monitor as you, but it only shows up once. However, the display
device shows up twice, but that's normal for this graphic card.

Yes, once for primary and once for secondary.

When I flash my BIOS, I always boot from a floppy with no drivers on
it, but with awdflash.exe and the BIOS file. I then flash the BIOS
using the command:
awdflash AN8D1007.BIN BIOS.OLD /py /sy /cd /cp /cc /LD /E

This was the first time I tried the 'automatic' method. The process
itself didn't leave a very good taste in my mouth, what with no
message at the end that the flash was complete - just a reboot and a
couple beeps and the 1007 showing as the current bios on the boot
screen.

This wipes out the old settings, saves the current BIOS as "bios.old"
and then flashes the BIOS. You need to reboot and finally re-set all
your BIOS settings to the way you want it. I've never had a problem
doing it this way.

Sam

Thanks, Sam. I'll try reflashing the bios after whittling down my
monitor entries to one.

Here are the things I've done so far to try track down the cause of
the random rebooting since flashing 1007:

1.Uninstalled old Radeon Drivers and control panel.
2. Installed new drivers (newest at the time, 4.5) and control panel

Computer still crashed.

3. Unchecked the option in System Properties to automatically reboot
on error. Hopefully when it happens again I'll be able to see on the
BSOD what caused it.

4. Ran memtest86 for 19 hours. No errors on 38 passes.

I'm now about to go remove one of the monitor entries in the Device
Manager to see if that makes a difference. If not, I'll reflash the
bios using the method you mentioned.

Thanks to everyone who is trying to help with this. Your information
is very much appreciated.

Don
--
Don Reese

--
Don Reese