M2N-SLI Deluxe issues

S

slackerjack

Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 27, 2004
Messages
118
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
4GB Corsair DDR2 800
AMD 6400+ BE
250GB WD HDD
EVGA 8800GTS 512 (x2 for the moment)
XP Pro

I've been running the above rig, minus one video card for about the last six months with no issues. Worked like a champ. Then I got the bright idea to SLI it so I got another 8800GTS 512. Same EVGA card.

I installed the card last night, booted it up. Enabled SLI in nv control panel, and all was well. Then I ended up rebooting later on, and I noticed that boot process hung at the bios screen just prior to it turning over the box control to the O/S.

So I turned it off, restarted and it booted right up. Except now it would freeze at the desktop after running for a few minutes and the speaker would emit a high pitched tone. So basically, I can start the box from a cold boot and not hang, but not a restart. And it freezes after being on a few minutes, even with 4 fans and the side off of the case.

I tried removing the extra videocard, updating the bios to the most current, etc. No luck. I googled the problem and found out that I wasn't alone, however no one really has a good answer. So I figured I would turn to the guru's here. Its just weird that I've had no issues with this box, and that just adding another card in SLI would cause these type of problems. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
 
This may be totally unhelpful, because the speaker squeal may represent a general lockup condition resulting from a variety of problems, but my experience with the "lock up + speaker squeal problem" was associated with overclocking the FSB and/or memory speed/voltage issues.

You say have upgraded your BIOS. After that upgrade did you reset the CMOS by using the jumper on the motherboard (right next to the battery)? I mention this partially because many people found they needed to do that manual reset when going from BIOSs of 1302 and below up to those 1404 and above. For me it was a no boot situation until I manually cleared the CMOS. It sounds like your issue began before the BIOS upgrade, but this is a good measure no matter what.

A CMOS clear will bump everything back to defaults (including DDR2-667). You might want to run in vanilla mode like that for a bit just to see if things improve? For my Crucial DDR2 800MHz I find I have to manually set the voltage to 2.2V before boosting the memory speed from DDR2 667 to DDR2 800. If my voltage is too low there, however, it's usually a crash+reboot instead of lockup + squeal.

If you have nTune installed, I would also suggest uninstalling that (at least temporarily). I ran into problems of old overclocked profiles sometimes being loaded and resulting in crash+squeal (this is probably more of an issue with my Phenom than with your chip).

That's just me in trouble-shooting mode. It may not solve a thing (and/or you may have tried these things).
 
Thanks for the response. I'll try your suggestions and report back. The one thing I have noticed is that it will eventually let you into the bios from a restart, however it takes this side of forever to get into it once you hit the "del" key. The HDD light on the front of the box also stays lit once it "freezes". Eventually it will start the boot process into the o/s, but it extremely slow. Booting from a cold start, it cruises right to the desktop though.
 
1. Cleared CMOS (using bios 1502).
2. Uninstalled ntune
3. Moved memory modules from 2/4 to 1/3
4. Disconnected the hard drive, still hangs and moves slow on hot reboots.
5. Set DDR2 voltage at 2.2V

Still taking forever when i reboot. The desktop screen freeze/lockup with loud tone happened again as well. Motherboard issue perhaps? I think its either the motherboard or the CPU. Not sure which.
 
Bleh. Sorry to hear that things are still hosed.


Just to clear one more checkbox on the troubleshooting sheet, I assume you are using the SLI bridge cable that came with your M2N-SLI Deluxe to connect the cards?

Wish I had something to help out.
 
I was using the bridge that came with the motherboard. I took one card out, and its still thrashed. It did quit with the high pitched tone from the speaker, but now its just doing intermittent freezing when its up and running. The whole box freezes, HDD LED light stays bright red, then it goes back to whatever its doing. And the reboot slow hang at the bios is still going on. I'm gonna start RMA'ing things until I figure out which part it is. Thanks for the help though. When I figure it out, i'll post back.
 
Well, I RMA'd both the motherboard and the CPU. Got new ones back and had the exact same issues. I ran across a forum post on some site from 04. Dude had messed with IDE settings in his bios when his box froze at the POST screen. Even though it was a bit different issue, and he had IDE and I have SATA, i was like "wtf", can't hurt to try. So i disabled my HDD and my DVD, and after a hot restart, it would give me the "no disk error". So that was some progress. At least I made it past the POST screen.

So I enabled just the harddrive, and it would reboot on a hot restart. Soon as I enabled the DVD, it would freeze at the POST screen. So I think I'm still having issues with the box freezing once I'm at the desktop, but I'm checking that now. This is definetely a weird problem. I'm gonna swap out DVD players this week and re-enable it in the BIOS to see if it is something to do with my DVD burner.
 
hah i wsih i found this eariler.


i had the same problem.. my sata DVD drive would fuck everything up.

i had so many problems with that board i eventually gave up and bought intel (and a nice upgrade ^^)

i still use ti in my media center, its has constant SATA problems >.>


a small fix i found was putting the DVD drive in the sata6 port, whilst having the main HD in sata2-4 (1 and 5 cause a freeze, dont ask me why >.>)
 
Sippie,

Same deal with me, its my SATA DVD player. The freezing at the desktop and the freezing at the POST have stopped with it being disabled. I'm gonna try it on a different SATA port and if that doesn't work, I'm going to get a PATA DVD player. What a weird ass problem. Pisses me off that I had to get a new mb and proc just to find out it was the DVD. At least I can use my SLI now. :)
 
Wow. That is a challenging one to track down.

For the record, I do use a SATA DVD drive on my M2N-SLI Deluxe so this may boil down to a specific DVD model and/or, like has been already suggested, a specific port problem. On my system I use the following SATA ports:

SATA 1 - Western Digtal Raptor 150GB
SATA 2 - Western Digital 7200 rpm 250 GB
SATA 4 - LG Bluray/HD-DVD reader - DVD burner

This reminds me of one I ran into years ago with one of the first AMD-chipset motherboards for the Thunderbird processor. Me and a few others were getting IDE data corruption (forcing me to reload about every 3 days for 3 weeks - I had a good image thank god) and it turned out to be the exact witches brew of that particular motherboard and a particular model of Netgear NIC. The NIC worked great in a different box I made for somebody else later, but replacing it with anything else on that motherboard fixed the problem. Over the next few months several people came to that forum with the same problem and, at first, they always thought we were crazy for saying to change their NIC. Then they would spend $20-30 on a different brand and all of their problems went away. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top