Epox 8KDA3+ Wreaking Compatability Hell!

[Zero1]

Well I've had nothing but reformats and BSODs for about a month now. I haven't seen so much blue since the days of Windows ME.

The 8KDA3+ seems to have a grudge against my Sounblaster Audigy 2, and has been doing odd things with my Highpoint Rocket RAID 1640 (once made the card think the array was dead) and more commonly makes it think the 120GB Western Digitals attached are approx 610GB each (we can only wait )

Now I'm using exactly the same hardware as I was on my 8RGA+ (8RDA with onboard graphics for Socket A) the only difference being I have an 8KDA3+ instead of an 8RGA+ and an Athlon 64 3400+ instead of an Athlon XP2600.

You would expect things to work fine wouldn't you? Occasionally it would suffer from getting stuck in BIOS booting and exhibit effects as though the BIOS was corrupt, this is my 2nd 8KDA3+ because I had the same problems before, but wrote it off as an unlucky board.



I'm sick to death with it people, you know when you just can't take it anymore and you feel like throwing it all away and getting a pre-built (oh the horror!), well I'm that stressed.

So I need your help if you would be so kind. I want a new motherboard to try, nothing flashy, in fact the less onboard features it has is probably better compatibility wise. I can live without the soundblaster providing there is some sort of sound card, but the RAID card is a must, regardless of onboard RAID or not.

So, something stable as a brick sh*t house, as compatible as they come but functional. Preferably Nforce chipset (people tell me it's the best, and my previous experience of VIA has been what you might describe as "WTF?"

Would appreciate memory details too, Ideally I'd like something that could run 2 double sided 512MB DIMMS (3 would be absolutely frickin' genius), the reason being I have:
2x512MB Kingston Hyper X PC3500 CL 2.5
1x512MB Kingston Hyper X PC3500 CL 2.0

The 8KDA3+ allows 3 sides max, that is a double sided and a single sided, or 3 single sided DIMMS, bear in mind I cannot find single sided DIMMS for love nor money

Price at this point is no object, I'm so sick of wasting money on so called good boards, and RAM that turns out not to work with it it's unreal.



I really appreciate your time guys, if you manage to get me out of this hole, I'll dedicate my new music video to you guys as a way of thanks. And you can hold me to that

 

[covertclocker]

You should make sure you disabled the onboard sound in the bios. Try to see if that fixes it. Also, try to put the video card in a different slot, i know one cascades to another and can cause problems. Let me know how u make out

 

[Zero1]

Thanks for that, actually I should have mentioned that.

With the BIOS at default settings with the Audigy = no boot
If I disable the AC97 in the BIOS it allows me too boot, but a device shows up in the BIOS as Input Device, and the IRQ says NA.

Unable to move the graphics card because it's an AGP, unless you mean the RAID card, but that's had trouble in other slots, at the moment it's in slot 6 and isn't IRQ sharing with anything (as far as I know)

I'm still quite puzzled, had no probs with my old Epox, I'm beginning to wonder if it's an Nforce thing. When I use the current Nforce drivers it fails to power off at shutdown and freezes (can't even move the mouse) But the Nforce 2.45 drivers seem fine.



I installed XP SP2 today (on XP Pro with integrated SP1a) and that produced a replicable BSOD. I removed pretty much everything that could or should interfere, but no luck, still BSODs.

 

[covertclocker]

Im sorry, I meant to say your sound card. Sometimes sound cards are finicky about where they want to be. What you could do is just disable all of the bells and whistles, IE: onboard sound, sata, NIC, etc etc and just work your way back. SP2 for XP i have heard gives massive problems for some, so that could be exascerbating your problem. Also, try one stick of memory at a time, there is a possibility that one of them could have gone bad. Just some things to try out.