Bad motherboard or something else?

M

MercuryAE

n00b
Joined
Aug 27, 2008
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At first I posted about my problem in General Hardware, but now I have a little more info, so maybe you guys can help me.I just put together a system with the following specs:

Asus p5q-e
q9550
OCZ Reaper 2x2 8500
XFX GTX 260 XXX
WD 640 gig Hard drive
Samsung s223Q dvd burner
Vista 64 Home Premium
*note: system not overclaocked and temps are cool (20 C cpu and 35 C mobo)

Throughout the installation of Vista, it hung up a couple times, requiring me to reboot and start over. However, I finally got vista installed and thought I was in the clear. Since then the system has begin crashing on me at random times. At first, I was getting a bunch of garbage on the screen accompanied by an unresponsive system (looked like static with colors). Now, its doing that much less and just freezing up the old fashion way.

I was thinking bad video card, but I swapped that with an identical 260 my roomate has and got the same result. I've also tried swapping my ram out with a couple OCZ 1 gigs and updated to the latest BIOS. So far, no luck, so I'm beginning to think I may simply have a bad motherboard, but I'm not sure what else to try. I seem to be able to get it to lock up pretty consistently if I run 3dmark 2006 in the Demo mode. Outside of that, its pretty random. Thanks to anyone that may have input.
 
Some additional info, I had the opportunity to test each of my components individually in my roommate's machine, and everything works fine, including the cpu. However, here is where it gets a little murky. My q9550 appears to funtion normally in his p5n-t. I borrowed his e8400 and dropped it into my p5q-e and it ran flawlessly. I ran through several 3dmark runs and COD4 with it, and was thinking maybe I just had some minor software issue or setting that had resolved itself. So, I removed the e8400 and popped in the quad again. And it promptly started freezing on me again.

So now I don't know what is bad, the q9550 or the p5q-e? They seem to work fine seperately, but together its a disaster.
 
running the latest bios? if your running the bios that came with the board originally.. there was a bios update for certain quad core cpu's "Version 0704".. theres also about 6 other updates that have to do with memory that came out after that one.. hopefully this helps you
 
I'll go back to asus' website to be sure, but yea, I updated the bios as soon as problems started appearing.
 
Success! (at least for now).

After seeing a comment in the official p5Q thread recommending the version 0803 BIOS, I flashed it to that release, it appears to be smooth sailing. If anyone here is having trouble with a Q9550 and P5Q-E, ditch the newer BIOS 1306 and try 0803.

Thanks sirmonkey1985 for your input.
 
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