ASUS A8N-SLI Premium/Deluxe - Problems/BSOD's

RHollister said:
People getting BSOD i would suggest pulling out only the required hardware. Video card memory CPU see if you still get it. SEcondly I would go into the BIOS and disable all onboard stuff see if maybe you are getting some conflicts. Thirdly what is the timings on your memory? if you set the timings to tight windows will either blue screen or just reboot. If you have cheaper value ram you need to loosen those to 2.5 Cas and maybe 2T. Dont get frustrated, its just a matter of trial and error, try something to see if it stops the errors if it does then you can work from there. I have built two completely stable machines around this board, the reviews out there are very flattering for this board. Dont give up hope, once you get it to work it will be worth it. Is anyone overclocking here? RAID can be a tricky beast to get going try not using the RAID array. Get a different HD install windows if it works fine then you know its the RAID. There are the things that I do when I am troubleshooting a computer. Dont be to affraid to mess around with things, there isnt a whole lot that will hurt it and even less that will hurt you.
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RHollister,

Thanks for the words of encouragement, helps alot. Any advice for those not getting BSODs but having POST problems and random freezes ?

Does the advice remain the same ?

Best Regards,
Caspanis
 
Holler!

Well, caspanis...
here is what I got in terms of the voltages: (taken straight from MarcusOCZ's post over at http://www.bleedinedge.com/forum/showthread.php?t=14562)

There is only a few minor memory timings that are different than what MarcusOCZ posted,
so technically it should not matter as to what they are due to the fact that your ram is different
than my ram and quite possibly the CPU as well - I don't remember what CPU/RAM combo you got happening

"TCCD/TCC5 based memory, 2X512mb configuration: (3200 Platinum rev. 2, 3700 Platinum, 4200 Platinum, 4800 Platinum and the 4800 Platinum Elite)
CPU Configuration at 250 fsb/htt

Dram Configuration:

Timing Mode: Manual
Memclock index value: 400 mhz
Cas latency (TCL) : 2.5
Min ras active time (TRAS) : 7 <-------- 5
Ras to Cas delay (TRCD) : 3
Row precharge time (TRP) : 3 <-------- 2
Row Cycle time (TRC) : 16 <-------- 10
Row refresh cycle time (TRFC) :22 <-------- 12
Read-to-write time (TRWT) : 3
Write recovery time (TWR) : 3 <-------- 2
1T/2T memory timing : 1 <-------- 2
S/W Dram over 4gb remapping : Disabled <-------- Enabled
H/W Dram over 4gb remapping : Disabled <-------- Enabled

Hyper transport frequency : 3 <-------- AUTO
Amd K8 Cool'nQuiet : Disabled

Jumperfree Configuration:

Overclock profile: Manual
CPU frequency : 250 <-------- 200
PCI Express : 100mhz
DDR voltage : 2.8 <-------- 2.7v for ME
Chipset voltage : 1.6 <-------- 1.5v
HT voltage : 1.25 <-------- 1.20v
CPU multiplier : 8 (or whatever the max is on your cpu) <-------- AUTO
CPU voltage : 1.550 <-------- 1.450
PCI clock syncronization mode : 33.33mhz

Most TCCD based does a lot higher than 250 and we have tested 2 pairs of 3200 rev.2 at as high as 301 fsb/htt completely memtest stable with the above configuration except for a little looser timings.
Also, the alphatimings can be tweaked a bit tighter to gain performance. The above settings is pretty much failsafe to use."
 
caspanis said:
RHollister,

Thanks for the words of encouragement, helps alot. Any advice for those not getting BSODs but having POST problems and random freezes ?

Does the advice remain the same ?

Best Regards,
Caspanis
Click to expand...

I have worked with many motherboards over the years and I find that the newer motherboards are much more resiliant to bad hardware. Meaning that even in some of the worst of times they will atleast POST with an error. I would think that the POSTing problems are seperate from teh random freezes. But then again after all the debugging it may show that the motherboard is bad. I assume you are not overclocking. Looking at your hardware since you are using a Creative sound card make sure the onboard is disabled, that could cause conflicts.Secondly when you install the chipset drivers it is a good idea to not install the IDE drivers that come with it, people have reported that those cause problems. I dont know for a fact if that is still true but like everything else its worth a shot when you dont have a working computer.After going back through the thread and carefully reading some posts there are some things that I thought of:

1. If you put in a new motherboard I think that a reformat is almost required even if you do get windows to work it will run much much better ona clean install.

2. I think i read that you went through certain steps when reinstalling windows, and once you reinstalled you were prime stable. thats good. then oyu installed the video drivers and now get BSOD. This would lend itself to a videocard/driver problem.

3. Windows install is a fairly good test of your hardware. If you get through windows install I find that its a good indication that your hardware is ok. Things beyond that are often times software.

4. If fans in your case are not spinning or barely spinning DONT RUN THE COMPUTER especially if the HSF on the CPU is spinning slowly. Its definetly a PSU issue that needs to be fixed before powering up.

5. Try older versions of drivers. Stranger things have happened.

6. Trial and Error. BSOD dont hurt anything except your pride. Keep trying stuff.

7. Set memory timings to 3.0-4-4-8 and set the command rate to 2T. Try upping the voltage on the RAM and the CPU a tad see if that helps.
 
When I got my a8n-sli deluxe, I installed my drives as raid 0 on the onboard asus raid controller. After XP installed to the harddrive, Windows would always screw up and reset the computer at the loading screen (even when attempting to boot in safe mode). I decided to move my drives to the nvidia raid controller (iirc the nvidia controller is the one with the black SATA connectors), disable the asus controller and enable the two sata drives in the nvidia controller options in the bios. I also made sure that the nvidia raid was the first device to boot, set up my array, reinstalled windows, and haven't had any BSODs or bootup problems since. ymmv
 
Ok, so I talked to Asus directly today. The phone convo went like this:

"Thank you for calling Asus this is *can't remember the guy's name* do you have a problem number or task file? *or something to that effect*"

"No."

"Ok, what can I do for you?"

"In the past year I've bought 3 Asus motherboards and none have I ever run into so many problems with than this new A8N-SLi Premium."

"Ok sir, what exactly is it doing?"

"Ok, I get it to post. I've reinstalled Windows XP Home and installed the new Nvidia drivers for my SATA drives but it does not load Windows. It gets to where it wants-" And he cuts me off.

"Lemme guess, flashes a BSOD for a split second gets caught in a loop and reboots itself constantly?"

"Yeah, exactly that. I'm thinking it's some sort of a driver problem but can't put my finger on it."

"It's exactly a driver problem. If you are running a JBOD configuration it is not necessary to isntall any other drivers via F6 in the windows installer. The board is designed with the SATA JBOD drivers necessary already and it will recognize it. The other thing is, remove the soundcard, and one of your CD drives if you have two. Do a fresh install and then load the drivers of what you want from the ASUS disk, then install the sound card and all it's drivers then install your sound card if you do not wish to use the onboard sound. The BSOD is a common issue people have and it's fairly easy to fix."

So, I got home tonight, disconnected the Audigy 2 Platinum Pro and one of my CD drives and the thing booted right into windows. So, I'm following his directions, loading everything from the ASUS disk that I want. Next I'm going to install the drivers for the video card. Then I'll install the sound card. Hopefully everything works like it should and I'll be gaming again tonight.
 
Never an issue with mine beyond problems I caused (fragged my Windows install due to a bad OC). Was stable at 310 FSB as well but I don't run it that high on a regular basis.
 
interesting because I haven't bothered to hookup my Audigy ZS or other dvd drives, but was planning on making several system changes next week, hooking everything up and then reinstalling XP
 
I was told that a lot of the issues people are having with BSODs is due to swapping the hardware and thinking you can use the old installed OS with all the original drivers. They state that you need to do a fresh install with just the bare minumums then once the MoBo is installed, updated you can go ahead and one at a time install everything else.

I also asked about the rumor that the A8N Premium doesn't like XP32 and they said that rumor is untrue that the board is designed to be used with either 32bit or 64bit and both sets of drivers are included on the CD.

Once I got mine to go into Windows I didn't bother doing a reinstall without the Nvidia RAID drivers, I just left them on there. I haven't noticed any thing out of the ordinary but I"m still in teh process of updating it, installing various vide drivers and formatting my second HD.
 
Well, in reply to the original post of this topic, I just got my A8N-SLI Premium yesterday, hooked everything up, reformatted my 250gb Maxtor, installed XP Home and everything has been running without a hitch.

I had been reading a lot about the shoddy nVidia Firewall and IDE drivers, so I just avoided those entirely; everything has been running fine. Here's my setup, currently:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Manchester Core)
Zalman 7700Cu
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
1GB Corsair ValueRAM (2.5-3-3-8)
eVGA GeForce 7800GT 256mb (Latest nVidia drivers, whatever they are, 81.84 or something)
Antec TruePower 2.0 550w
SoundBlaster Audigy 2
Maxtor 250gb 7,200RPM (IDE)

I have the latest chipset drivers (minus the audio and storage drivers), and I do not have the nVidia firewall installed, as I said above. I kind of had no choice to reformat - I plugged in my drive, it started to boot windows, but immediately after the loading bar it would restart. So I made sure I had salvaged what I needed and reformatted. Everything is in top shape; RAM is running at 400mhz as it should (I've heard people saying their RAM isn't running at full speed; I haven't noticed anything like that in my brief experience).
 
Well...I hooked the fan controller up, the sound card and my DVD drive.

It gets to the screen where it lists all the devices and crashes. Or rather hangs up and does nothing.

I've got no errors, no beeps or anything. It just hangs up at the PCI Device List.

I'm so fucking aggrevated this computer is about to take it's frist god damn flying lesson out my second story window.

I did have the sound card 1 pin off on the 12v and the computer wouldn't even boot. I removed it made sure nothign was burned up and plugged it back in. PC boots fine like I said, I'm not getting any errors, there are no motherboard errors or beeps. It just hangs up.
 
I have a a8n sli premium and today I walked in the office and noticed the comp was real quiet.
When I rebooted I got this error

Bios ROM checksum error
Detecting IDE ATAPI device
Found CDROM
Automatic load AWDFLASH.EXE
!!Error- Awdflash.exe not found with CDROM

Is this like the errors others are getting? Mine has been working fine for over 3 months. Very stable. I assumed it was the MB since I couldn't get into the bios.

Should I try to flash it or will it likely fail? Is it just unable to read it's own memory(broken)?
 
I'm actually extremely disappointed in this motherboard. I'm thinking of returning it and going with an Abit or something. I was loyal to Asus for a few years but this board is leaving a real bad taste in my mouth.
 
Oddly enough. What everyone says is true. If you walk away from a project for a while things have a tendancy to work themselves out.

I don't have to go to work just yet. I'm the late guy so I decided to screw around with it some more before leaving for work.

I decided to reset all the BIOS settings to default. Not that I really had changed much aside for Boot prioritys and such. Well, once I did this the computer booted right into Windows. I was able to install my sound card, finish updating Windows and hopefully I'll be able to get my fan controller working properly. It still has readouts from the A8V so all the device names are incorrect.

Looks like I'll be able to play FEAR again tonight. Now if I could only figure out a way to repartition the two drives so that I can allocate some of the 300g Windows drive so that I can easily store more games on it.
 
caspanis said:
Ronbo,

1) I have the Seasonic S12-500 500W power supply :
http://www.seasonicusa.com/products.php?lineId=9

2) Is there such a bios for the A8N-SLI premium ? I've seen this for the A8N-SLI deluxe and higher , I think they are up to 1015 by now but 1009 is the highest listed for the A8N-SLI premium.

Thanks for the help thus far :)

P.S. I am using a Leadtek GeForce 6600GT video card.

Cheers,
Caspanis
Click to expand...

,
I got pretty much the same setup... I think im on the 1007 bios. 6600gt, Asus premium, seasonic 500 watt works like butter. Except it hates teh nvidia 81.85 drivers. Blue screens all the time. It seems to like the 81.84 though. Totally stable other then that one driver issue
 
solo16 said:
,
I got pretty much the same setup... I think im on the 1007 bios. 6600gt, Asus premium, seasonic 500 watt works like butter. Except it hates teh nvidia 81.85 drivers. Blue screens all the time. It seems to like the 81.84 though. Totally stable other then that one driver issue
Click to expand...

solo16,

Which video card drivers are you now using given the problems with the 81.85's ?

P.S. Off-Topic : In the market for a new PS , I'm thinkin' to mix it up a bit so I am playing with two (2) options:

1) The Seasonic S12-500
2) The OCZ Powerstream 520

Cheers,
Caspanis
 
BTex said:
I have a a8n sli premium and today I walked in the office and noticed the comp was real quiet.
When I rebooted I got this error

Bios ROM checksum error
Detecting IDE ATAPI device
Found CDROM
Automatic load AWDFLASH.EXE
!!Error- Awdflash.exe not found with CDROM

Is this like the errors others are getting? Mine has been working fine for over 3 months. Very stable. I assumed it was the MB since I couldn't get into the bios.

Should I try to flash it or will it likely fail? Is it just unable to read it's own memory(broken)?
Click to expand...

i got this same error after resetting my cpu due to a non-stable overclock. I believe I just turned the computer off for a couple minutes then it booted normally.
 
unfortunateson said:
Did you try my suggestion in post #44?

http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1028555004&postcount=44
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No, I didn't. Mainly because I'm not using any type of RAID setup. I wasn't having an issue of not having the drives recognized or even installing. In fact, I'm not using any type of RAID drivers I just plugged my SATA drives into the SATA slots and they immediately worked.

I sort of rescind my comments on being disappointed in the MoBo. Because since I've gotten it to work it has been very stable, incredibly fast and I can play CoD2 maxed out. In fact I plan on buying a second 7800GTX this weekend.

Things I dislike about the board is the fact that installing it is a pain in the ass. The documentation for it was kind of lacking. Asus Tech Support and quality control sucks now that I've officially had to deal with them on a personal basis.

The other thing I don't particularly like is the eVGA 7800GTx. I didn't like the fact that it came with no software of any kind aside for drivers. At least with BFG I always got nDVD 2.0 software. eVGA gives you trials of the software where BFG gave you retail.
 
no problems here overclocked at 2.8ghz, raid set up fine, disabled onboard sound, also did not install nvfirewall im also using the marvell ethernet.
amd fx55
2x 7800gtx
3 wd raptors raid 0
1 160gb hitachi
pc power and cooling 510 psu
asus a8n premium
ocz titanium 2gb
i think that about covers it,no problems at all.
 
Found this thread on a search, thought I'd post my problems with this board.

My first build ran perfectly with a 500 MHz overclock, using a Venice 3200+ CPU. Well I upgraded to an Opteron 175 and the 1009 bios and well, my CD-Rom drives stopped functioning in Winblows. The drives work during bootup but when windows loads they do not work. I can SEE them, they are there, but if I put a disk in they just spin up then slow down, spin up slow down, etc. Then I get an error to insert a disc. I havve a Plextor 716A and an older Toshiba, I have tried it with one drive, both drives, secondary IDE channel, Primary, slave/master, etc. I have literally tried EVERY possible configuration for these drives, so Im sure its not a connection error.

Nobody here seems to want to help me so I am desperatly posting here and searching, with the hopes that someone has some advice to offer. I've reinstalled WinXP about 6 times since last weekend, loading the 6.70 chipset drivers/6.65 drivers, etc.

I honestly thing my IDE channels took a dump and that part of my motherboard is faulty, do you think thats possible?
 
Only thing I can honestly suggest is a fresh install of Winblows. I know it sucks but I ran into this problem as well.

Do a fresh install with one CD drive, a floppy drive and your video card. Nothing else.

Then get all of the Updates for Windows. If you have a second CD drive install that and your sound card. Run Windows Update again, just in case you missed anything.

Then install the video card drivers and what ever programs that came with your video card that you are going ot use.

Reboot.

When Windows comes up everything should be there and function as normal.

I had this same issue with mine and that's what I was told to do by Asus Tech Support. And as much of a pain in the ass it is, it did work.
 
Thank you so much for the advice, I'll do this again with the order you told me. So where in there should I do the Chipset driver install, and what version are you running? 6.70 or the ones Asus says on their site, the 6.65? The order I think I'll do it in is this:

Format reinstall WinXP --> download updates insluding SP2 --> Install Chipset drivers --> installl display drivers --> install sound and other misc. drivers.

Does this sound correct? Also, if you dont mind, can you tell me what you have your Plug & Play OS setting in your BIOS set to? Is it "Yes" or "No"? I am considering setting it to yes before the reinstall.


Also, are you running the 1009 or 1009.004 BETA BIOS?

Moose777 said:
Only thing I can honestly suggest is a fresh install of Winblows. I know it sucks but I ran into this problem as well.

Do a fresh install with one CD drive, a floppy drive and your video card. Nothing else.

Then get all of the Updates for Windows. If you have a second CD drive install that and your sound card. Run Windows Update again, just in case you missed anything.

Then install the video card drivers and what ever programs that came with your video card that you are going ot use.

Reboot.

When Windows comes up everything should be there and function as normal.

I had this same issue with mine and that's what I was told to do by Asus Tech Support. And as much of a pain in the ass it is, it did work.
Click to expand...
 
I'm running 1009.

I installed the Nvidia drivers but Windows XP doesn't use them. Windows XP automatically recognizes the HDD's and the chipset and automatically installs the drivers for you. So as for the version number I couldn't tell you. I don't think I completely installed them as I didn't need to.

And I left pretty much everything in the BIOS as is. I didn't change anything. The only thing I did change was OC'd my AMD 64 3500+ from 2.2Ghz to 2.4Ghz but I did that through the Asus utility in Windows. The only time I've gone into the BIOS was pretty much when I originally set the rig up because I can OC the proc and reclock the memory through Windows using that Asus utility that is provided on the Asus disk.
 
Thank you so much for your help, however my A8N SLi Premium no longer even recognizes my CD-Rom drives. I have two that I have tried, seperatly or together. The two IDE Channels no longer seem to work at all. In BIOS and in Windows it shows me they are there, but it does not read froom them. I can't even load the WinXP CD to reformat or anything. This board is such a nightmare, I have no idea what to do now. I'm paralized without the ability to use those two IDE channels. Somehow they just stopped working, and the board is only 30 days old or so. I can't even return it to the store I bought it because its past the time. I guess I'll be RMAing it to Asus. :mad: :mad: :(
 
That sucks. I'm sorry to hear that. At least it's still under warranty through Asus. It sucks that you are going to have to wait a week or so before Asus either repairs your board or sends you a new one.

Again, I'm sorry.

I do agree on teh board being a PITA to setup. It took me 3 days to get my computer up and running with it.
 
Ok A8N Sli Pre board was so easy to install. I have set up a hanfull of the A8N series and never had a glitch. Though I always used approved memory and PSU were alway top name brand 500+ watts
 
AppaYipYip said:
Thank you so much for your help, however my A8N SLi Premium no longer even recognizes my CD-Rom drives. I have two that I have tried, seperatly or together. The two IDE Channels no longer seem to work at all. In BIOS and in Windows it shows me they are there, but it does not read froom them. I can't even load the WinXP CD to reformat or anything. This board is such a nightmare, I have no idea what to do now. I'm paralized without the ability to use those two IDE channels. Somehow they just stopped working, and the board is only 30 days old or so. I can't even return it to the store I bought it because its past the time. I guess I'll be RMAing it to Asus. :mad: :mad: :(
Click to expand...
I I


First if you can see them and use them before windows then it's not the drives or the board.

I will read the rest but poor PSU can/will cause CDroms not to work properly. Have you tested out of case on wood or so? shorts can do the same thing.
 
I can see them in the BIOS but it does not use them at all. It did use them yesterday morning, but it stopped doing so later on in the day. I can read the names of the drives but it does not try to access them at all anymore, thus, I cannot boot from a CD or anything, and winblows makes no attempt to access or read from them if I click on the drives. Take note that my first 3 weeks of owning this board, it DID work just fine. For some reason, the IDE channels just decieded to STOP working for no apparent reason.

My PSU is not poor quality, it's an Enermax Noisetaker 600watt SLi certified, a very high quality unit. There are no shorts or grounding issues that I can see, I will look over the board again.



END said:
I I


First if you can see them and use them before windows then it's not the drives or the board.

I will read the rest but poor PSU can/will cause CDroms not to work properly. Have you tested out of case on wood or so? shorts can do the same thing.
Click to expand...
 
Moose777 said:
It took me 3 hours to get teh AWDFlash program to function properly from DOS, I finally got the most recent BIOS to flash then when the computer rebooted I expected it to load windows (I ran an A8V Deluxe up until 3 days ago when I decided to change over to SLi so I didn't bother uninstalling anything cause I thought I could just swap MoBos out update the BIOS and fire it up.) But instead I get this "boot Disk" error.

I don't know if I need to install new RAID drivers or what, the manual doesn't exactly tell you whether or not you do and it doesn't tell you which ones you'd need anyway even if it did.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately a re-install may be in the cards, Windows is notorious for screwing up hard when you swap a mobo.... Are you using SATA drives?? Was the raid set up on the black NVraid ports or the red promise ports?? If it was on the black ports then you should just need to enable raid in the BIOS.... the red controllers are far more twitchy due to the windows drivers for Fasttrack being unstable at best...

I wortk at VoodooPC, and the A8N-SLI is our standard board for the Omen computers.... and we've never encountered any serious stability issues....
 
All,

I couldn't take the pain any more. The lockups , the not posting ............ all of it !

I RMA'd the board , hopefully the one I get back will work :(

I just hope and pray that this isn't the beginning of an endless RMA cycle . I gone through one like that before and its a damn nightmare :mad:

To all other owners with problems ............ good luck !

Cheers,
Caspanis
 
Moose777 said:
So, I got home tonight, disconnected the Audigy 2 Platinum Pro and one of my CD drives and the thing booted right into windows. So, I'm following his directions, loading everything from the ASUS disk that I want. Next I'm going to install the drivers for the video card. Then I'll install the sound card. Hopefully everything works like it should and I'll be gaming again tonight.
Click to expand...

make sure when you get to the sound card install, go to the creative website and get the newest drivers.... anything older I have found to cause serious stability issues, especially if the card is in the bottom-most PCI slot.... most notably the older drivers prevent Windows from properly shutting down, and will usually cause it to hang at the "Windows is shutting down" screen....
 
I just assembled one last night without any problems. It started right away. I haven't tried overclocking yet, but so far it's very stable at stock speed. I installed Windowx XP 3 times to see if any problem arises but so far none yet.

Set up:
A8NSli Deluxe
Opteron 170
EVga 7800 GT
Mushkin HP memory
PowerPC 510 SLI PSU
1 Maxtor SATA 300g and 1 Maxtor IDE 80g
Plextor 708A burner

The only problem I encountered is that when I install Windows, this board gives higher priority on IDE than SATA. For example, C drive is being assigned to IDE even though I assigned SATA to boot first in BIOS. If I leave both drives attach when installing windows, SATA drive becomes D while IDE becomes C. I haven't encountered this with my old K8V deluxe.
 
Floppyrn said:
The only problem I encountered is that when I install Windows, this board gives higher priority on IDE than SATA. For example, C drive is being assigned to IDE even though I assigned SATA to boot first in BIOS. If I leave both drives attach when installing windows, SATA drive becomes D while IDE becomes C. I haven't encountered this with my old K8V deluxe.
Click to expand...

Same thing here. My SATA drive (Win. Dir) is also set up as my 1st drive in BIOS and show up D:\ in XP. My second drive which is PATA shows up as C:\ in XP. I wouldn't say it's necessarily a problem though. Drive D:\ is still globally recognized as the Windows drive. I also still get better performance from the SATA (D:\) drive and their both the exact same model drives just with different interfaces.
 
BarBarian said:
make sure when you get to the sound card install, go to the creative website and get the newest drivers.... anything older I have found to cause serious stability issues, especially if the card is in the bottom-most PCI slot.... most notably the older drivers prevent Windows from properly shutting down, and will usually cause it to hang at the "Windows is shutting down" screen....
Click to expand...
Actually I'm using the old drivers on my SB Audigy 2 ZS Plat. Pro.

In my experience I've found that they work better. That and I hate the Creative Update utility. It can never seem to find drivers for my sound card so I usually end up DLing every driver they have in a "poke-and-hope" type of fasion. And it never seems to work out for me.

The only issues I've had are random video problems with NFS:MW but they are little annoyances more than anything, like the cars resetting themselves in the middle of races.
 
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