Problems... and pictures!

silent-circuit said:
I can't help anymore right now. Too overwhelmed with all the crap my board is giving me. At this point I'd say swap the board for a P35, and the graphics cards for a 9800GX2 or 9800GTX. That's what I'm considering at this point, with a ~$150 loss in there... and right now it's looking more tempting than I ever thought it would.
Click to expand...

...Great. I swear, I just went to Dell's website to look around.. and I can get around the same system for $3200... blah... I spent way less than that..

..But at this point, no one has any clue what is wrong and I can't take it anymore.
 
Well I wouldn't go that far just yet. Building a high end PC can be frustrating, even if your technical skill is high. It's a complex system and there are things that can go wrong. Considering that this is your first foray into the task, I'd say you're doing just fine and to take it slowly.

The best thing to do now is to take a deep breath and step back. Put the project away for a few hours, or for the rest of the day, and do something else to clear your mind. Solving computer issues is largely playing detective, and you'll be at your best when you're not frustrated.

When you're ready, I would come back and take a look at the following. You've done some component swapping lately. Is everything plugged-in and connected properly? Keep in mind that the first PCI-E x16 slot sits high up on the board, and that your graphics card can rub up against the DIMM slots. Make sure that the graphics card and DIMMS are properly inserted.

Consider MrWizard's suggestion that it may be the PSU. When so many seemingly independent hardware-related issues occur, the PSU is often at fault. Errors stemming from a busted / defective PSU will crop up in other areas, thus making a bad PSU particularly difficult to troubleshoot. If you RMA anything, I would consider including the PSU in that list. If the PSU is fine, then the motherboard is the next culprit. It may be that your board is defective. However, where most are struggling with the P7N is in regards to overclocking. It's a difficult BIOS to work with at the moment and finding stable settings takes time and patience. Note that I've never seen issues relating to this board with components running at stock, except for a few USB keyboards that don't work in the BIOS w/o a firmware update.

Consider that the software may be at fault. With everything going wrong, I would strongly consider reinstalling the OS. If you can, I would even try running XP-32 first. It may be that all your issues are driver related. While Vista has matured as a home / gaming platform, the XP driver pool is still a good deal more mature than Vista's.

Remember it's all about playing detective. Nearly all PC issues are solvable given enough time, patience, and clear thought :)
 
What I'm going to probably just do is this.

Since I would have to wait forever for the RMAs to get here, I'm going to bring the computer to this place down the block from me. They build and repair computers, I've brought mine there a few times in the past to be repaired. I'm just going to ask them if they can look at it, and they have all the tools and extra hardware to test with.. so hopefully they can tell me exactly what is wrong. That's not a bad idea, is it?

I just want to get this thing running one day.
 
If they have the tools and knowhow, and if you decide you've had enough trying to fix it yourself, then I'd say that's a good idea indeed.
 
Markyip1 said:
If they have the tools and knowhow, and if you decide you've had enough trying to fix it yourself, then I'd say that's a good idea indeed.
Click to expand...

I'm just not confident that I can get it to work.. My father keeps saying things like "I told you to just buy one" "Wow what a waste of money" etc... and it really discourages me. I try to stay encouraged by thinking.. hey, I built a computer and it WORKS but something is wrong and I can't fix it only because I don't know what it is.

But.. I'm really not optimistic about this. Then again, I started to get really nervous right before I began actually building it.

I also wish I knew more people who lived near me, so I would have someone to show me what I'm doing wrong or how to find the problem.. and also have the tools needed to find the problem and repair it.
 
Syribo said:
I'm just not confident that I can get it to work.. My father keeps saying things like "I told you to just buy one" "Wow what a waste of money" etc... and it really discourages me. I try to stay encouraged by thinking.. hey, I built a computer and it WORKS but something is wrong and I can't fix it only because I don't know what it is.

But.. I'm really not optimistic about this. Then again, I started to get really nervous right before I began actually building it.

I also wish I knew more people who lived near me, so I would have someone to show me what I'm doing wrong or how to find the problem.. and also have the tools needed to find the problem and repair it.
Click to expand...

Also, so far I have not gotten any BSODs that weren't caused by playing a game (And at first, viewing certain screen savers.. but that seems good now. My screensaver comes up fine everytime)... They only have MAYBE on startup (a few times) and mostly always while playing a game.
 
You built a pretty complex system, and you almost have it working 100% -- don't give up! Take the rest of the rest of the day off and start working on it tomorrow (as Mark said, you need a break). I know when I get frustrated with a system, the break helps out a lot.
 
Thanks for all the optimistic and kind words.. they make me feel a lot better about all of this. I was really angry before, but I took a shower, put on my new pajamas (Very comfortable..everyone loves Victoria's Secret ;) haha) and then laid down on my bed (Also VERY comforable) and I feel a lot better now.

I'm so sad to lose Vista already... I actually have a lot of stuff on this computer already :(

The errors I received before were:
DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
IMG_0157.jpg


Then I got this error message while starting up Windows.
IMG_0158.jpg


And I also keep getting this when I try to open uTorrent (It works, but I always get this message anyway):
IMG_0171.jpg

Will this slow down my connection or anything?
 
0xD1 eh? It looks like driver problems. Did you run memtest again?

0x000000D1: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
(Click to consult the online Win XP Resource Kit article.)
The system attempted to access pageable memory using a kernel process IRQL that was too high. The most typical cause is a bad device driver (one that uses improper addresses). It can also be caused by caused by faulty or mismatched RAM, or a damaged pagefile.
Click to expand...

0xA5... not good...

0x000000A5: ACPI_BIOS_ERROR
(Click to consult the online MSDN article.)
The cause of this message is always errors in the ACPI BIOS. Usually, nothing can be done at an operating system level to fix the problem. See the articles linked here for more details.
Click to expand...

Are you using the latest off of the MSI site, or the NVIDIA site? (does it matter? -- directed to whoever owns this board or same chipset board, lol; :::cough:::mark:::cough:::silent:::cough::: ) Keep in mind this is a brand new board, and problems with the BIOS are rather normal when something is newly released.

Will what slow down your connection? Uninstall the NVIDIA Firewall. IIRC, its still buggy.

Here, use this link whenever you get a BSOD: http://www.aumha.org/a/stop.php
 
Hmm, just a hunch but disable the Nvidia firewall. IIRC, back in the day the Nvidia firewall use to cause a lot of problems for people.

Also, when you ran Memtest, did you run it on each stick of RAM separately? Sometimes when you scan multiple sticks, it gives a false negative for errors.

And not to insult your intelligence but you might want to hit up google for those STOP messages:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...zilla:en-US:official&q=0x000000A5&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...n-US:official&hs=qZ4&q=0x000000D1&btnG=Search

Google is one of the best tools out there for troubleshooting:D Saved my ass dozens of times.

And don't worry, we've ALL been there.
 
Danny Bui said:
Hmm, just a hunch but disable the Nvidia firewall. IIRC, back in the day the Nvidia firewall use to cause a lot of problems for people.

Also, when you ran Memtest, did you run it on each stick of RAM separately? Sometimes when you scan multiple sticks, it gives a false negative for errors.

And not to insult your intelligence but you might want to hit up google for those STOP messages:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...zilla:en-US:official&q=0x000000A5&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...n-US:official&hs=qZ4&q=0x000000D1&btnG=Search

Google is one of the best tools out there for troubleshooting:D Saved my ass dozens of times.

And don't worry, we've ALL been there.
Click to expand...
I've actually been seraching Google with the STOP codes for a while now :) Just posting them so those on the board keeping up with this build, and those who want to help, can see them too.

I'm going to try to disable the firewall.. then I'm going to update.
 
enginurd said:
Are you using the latest off of the MSI site, or the NVIDIA site? (does it matter? -- directed to whoever owns this board or same chipset board, lol; :::cough:::mark:::cough:::silent:::cough::: ) Keep in mind this is a brand new board, and problems with the BIOS are rather normal when something is newly released.
Click to expand...

She's running a beta BIOS (v1.1 beta 6) that's only sent to those with problems. I sent it to her. This board cannot use reference 780i BIOSes as it's a non-reference design. Only BIOSes from MSI will work on it.

Syribo, try uninstalling all the Nvidia crap (aside from your video drivers) then reinstall nForce drivers but no mediashield, no firewall, no sata drivers. Just let it use the Vista SATA drivers, they work fine. Then update the SATA controller's driver through Windows update. Sometimes the Nvidia SATA drivers cause more harm than good.
 
silent-circuit said:
... try uninstalling all the Nvidia crap (aside from your video drivers) then reinstall nForce drivers but no mediashield, no firewall, no sata drivers. Just let it use the Vista SATA drivers, they work fine. Then update the SATA controller's driver through Windows update. Sometimes the Nvidia SATA drivers cause more harm than good.
Click to expand...

Same ol' song and dance from NVIDIA, eh? I remember all those problems with my nF4 Ultra-D, and that was years ago! :( I'm so glad P35 came out, lol.
 
Okay :) After I install all of that.. Should I put the other card back in, and THEN try to get it to BSOD?
 
Hmm.. It installed the drivers, but didn't ask me if I wanted to install NAM or the other things. I did unisntall it though. Is that it for that? Now I'll try to get a BSOD..

Also.. my internet connection has been kind of slow... It's pretty fast usually, but sometimes if I'm torrenting it will just stop working for a few minutes and then start again.
 
uTorrent and Vista don't really get along. Try with the official BitTorrent client, or Azureus instead (and yes, I like uTorrent too. I'll tell you if and when I manage to figure out how to make it work properly).
 
I really don't want to jinx it but... After installing the newest driver and uninstalling NAM, not one BSOD yet. YET. I tried with one card.. Then did these things in order: WoW for a bit, 3DMark tests, Crysis for a bit. No BSOD for once. So then I tried the next card and I did the same order of things and no BSOD either for once.

Then I connected them both and did the first two things one more time. No BSOD again. No error things or anything... yet. I still have to try it in Crysis, but I wanted to post first.

I'm hoping it will stay like this... But I'm not that optimistic ;) I'll update when (..if?) it messes up again :p
 
Okay... so Crysis made it crash AGAIN. While I was changing the settings, it was making the transition after I hit Apply and then BSOD.

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
0x0000000A (0x00003E2B503B3E2B, 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000, 0xFFFFF80001D036FF)

I'm so sad :( After 3DMark worked and WoW... and I was getting good graphics in Crysis, 50-60FPS on high settings, until I changed the settings...

Took me 5 tries to boot successfully. Just kept getting black screen after the loading screen. I finally only got in by booting with last known good configuration. Maybe it IS the PSU...?

I tried Bittorrent, my internet is really getting messed up... My other computer right next to me can download torrents incredibly fast, insane speeds.. But this? 6ks a second? I wonder what is causing this... It will sometimes make it so websites won't open up for like 5 minutes.

Edit 2: Okay but then I try a speed test... and I THINK this is fast, isn't it?
hmm.jpg
 
Tried to open COD4 and got an "iw3mp.exe has stopped working" error.
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: iw3mp.exe
Application Version: 0.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 47043f08
Fault Module Name: iw3mp.exe
Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 47043f08
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00276555
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: fd00
Additional Information 2: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160
Additional Information 3: fd00
Additional Information 4: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160

Going to do some 'detective work' and see what it's about, but I'm also updating as I go along.. One day this thing will work!
 
I'm getting tons of problems with IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL (which is too generic an error to be at all helpful) but only when OCed. You may end up RMAing that board, too. Heck, I may RMA mine in hopes of getting a less troublesome one.
 
silent-circuit said:
I'm getting tons of problems with IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL (which is too generic an error to be at all helpful) but only when OCed. You may end up RMAing that board, too. Heck, I may RMA mine in hopes of getting a less troublesome one.
Click to expand...

Yes, I've gotten that an insane amount of times in the past day. I've lost count now.

How many times is it supposed to beep when you start up? I always thought it was supposed to be just one.. but mine does it a few times.
 
Just one. God, if you got a defective board and all of this comes down to that... it'd be horrible, and great at the same time.

I'm going on general knowledge, though, as I don't even have a buzzer hooked up to mine so it's silent. Wait for Mark or another owner to chime in, or tomorrow I'll hook one up and check.
 
I actually put that in one of my posts.. yesterday I think heh. It always makes multiple beeps, I thought that was strange that it was doing that.
 
What if some of the jumper things on the motherboard are on wrong? Can that cause a lot of problems? They're those little colored things with little pins sticking out of them, aren't they? I don't know...

Just got another BSOD out of nowhere. "Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed."

0x00000116 ... nvlddmkm.sys - Address FFFFFA600380E630

Edit2: Can't keep it stable now. I turn it on, don't really do anything at all and the screen flickers black, then I get that same BSOD.
 
That latest one is an nvidia driver problem.

So... you cleaned out your drivers, reinstalled without the firewall/ide/sata nvidia drivers, yet you still get errors. Did you reinstall vista? This is why I hate newly released boards... hard to get stable... AT STOCK!

silent/mark/any_p7nd_owner... would it help her to revert back to the original, non-beta BIOS?
 
I use an old fashioned PCI X-Fi card on my board, so I don't here any beeps (the motherboard speaker seems to be connected to the included PCI-E soundcard.) However, from what I here the current BIOS beeps for every USB device connected. Very strange, and I believe MSI is aware of the oddity. But note that if you are hearing multiple beeps it doesn't mean that its a problem.
 
New drivers aren't working well for you. Go to nvidia.com and go to driver download, get the official WHQL drivers. Uninstall the current drivers (start > control panel > remove programs) and install the WHQL ones.
 
Indeed it's odd, but someone else posted about multiple beeps and MSI told them that the board is configured to beep for each attached USB device. Again, mine doesn't beep at all because I'm using a 3rd party PCI X-Fi.

Reverting to a stock BIOS may help, but I'm inclined to believe that issues are now due either to a corrupt OS or driver install or to defective hardware. After ensuring that everything is connected properly to the board, I would reformat the system and restart. I've read pretty-much every post on the P7N in existence on the Internet (at least in English,) and this is the first I've heard of the board having severe issues at stock (with exception to the nvidia sata driver issue in XP concerning optical drives which affects every 780i board.)

The early BIOSes do have teething issues with overclocking for some configurations, but everyone I've talked to seems to be fine at stock. I've had absolutely no problems with my configuration (which is very similar to hers.) The board works perfectly at stock speed, allows for the easiest Q6600 OC to 3ghz I've ever experienced, and is stable at 3.6ghz (albeit with more vCore than I'd like, but in time i will work that down.) I have not yet tried 1.1B6, but 1.0 and 1.1B4 have been completely stable for my setup.

To the OP,

At this time, my advice is to reformat and reinstall. If you have a copy of XP SP2 around, it would serve as a good testbed for you to determine whether your issues are hardware or software related. If you install XP, I would put your second card back into the system so that it's running in its original and intended configuration.

If you reinstall XP, install all drivers in your MSI XP CD except for the MediaShield / SATA drivers. These are known to be buggy with SATA optical drives and can cause blue-screens. If you are using the included PCI-E X-Fi card, use the drivers that ship with the board. Also, be sure to download and install the latest non-beta XP ForceWare drivers for your video cards.

Note that I am not suggesting that you use XP instead of Vista. However, you can get XP installed with all necessary drivers much more quickly than Vista, and you'll have a mature, bare-bones system for running stress tests. Download 3DMark, Orthos 2.0, and Prime 95 2.5.5+ and let them rip. 3DMark will stress graphics, Prime95 will stress your CPU, and Orthos will stress your NB and RAM. Simply run the default 3DMark benchmark. Run it several times and see if it blue-screens. With Prime95, turn on round-off error checking and run the Small FFT Torture test. If it blue-screens, freezes, or otherwise fails when your system is running at stock, you likely have a hardware issue. A four hour test should be sufficient to test hardware issues at stock. Later if you OC, you'll want to run it for at least 8 hours (although many prefer 24.) Lastly, run a custom Orthos 2.0 test on your RAM and NB for an hour and see if that errors. If it does, you may have a hardware issue.

If you reinstall Vista, do not install with four gigs of RAM in your machine unless you are installing a copy of Vista with SP1 pre-integrated. If you can obtain such a copy, I highly recommend you install from that. Using a pre-integrated SP1 Vista disk, I was able to install the OS in under 20 minutes w/ four gigs installed, and I did not have to sit through the painful SP1 upgrade.

If you are installing from an original Vista disk, you should upgrade to SP1 immediately after you finish the installation. Do this before you install any drivers or before you put that second DIMM back into the motherboard. SP1 will include the 4 gig hotfix, so once you install SP1, you will be able to run with 4 gigs w/o issue.

Once SP1 is installed, you can install your motherboard drivers. The MediaShield driver issue with SATA Optical Drives does not exist in Vista, so you should be able to install those as well.

With the motherboard drivers install, download and install the latest ForceWare non-beta WHQL drivers. These aren't optimized for Crysis, but they are arguably more stable. Lastly, download the latest PCI-E Xtreme Audio drivers from Creative's website. Creative took a very long time getting decent Vista drivers out to the public, and it may be that the drivers on your CD are older than they should be.

With a clean system and clean drivers, try 3Dmark or Crysis and see what happens :)

Good luck.
 
Creative hasn't updated the Xtreme Audio drivers since December -- the latest driver, which arguably makes the X-Fi stop sucking for the first time ever, isn't available for the Xtreme Audio. For that reason alone I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be sticking with the PCIe "X-Fi" the board came with, if I keep this board at all.
 
Silent,

The drivers for the Xtreme Audio and the regular X-Fis aren't related, as the hardware between the two cards is vastly different. The PCI-E X-Fi, like the PCI-E card that ships with the ASUS boards, is more or less an IO processor. Much of the sound processing occurs in the CPU and is software based. Furthermore, the hardware that is on board is much more related to Audigy hardware than X-Fi hardware. If anything, I would think that the PCI-E drivers would be a lot better than the standard X-Fi drivers. They should avoid much of the X-Fi mess and be a good deal simpler to boot.

In fact, you may not even need X-Fi drivers in Vista if using the PCI-E card. I've heard people are having good success using Vista's built in support for the card.
 
My computer was unable to stay on for more than 2 minutes. The screen would keep flickering black and then I got the same Nvidia driver BSOD over and over, or it would just restart. Eventually it got so bad that I couldn't get it to stay on long enough to see my desktop.

So I took out a stick of RAM, flashed the latest BIOS, reinstalled Vista, and am now finishing up installing SP1. Next I'm going to install the nforce drivers.. hope for the best.
 
Okay, is this not strange... And too much of a coincidence? When I first got the computer running and installed all the drivers, for the first time the other day, as soon as I tried to enable SLI the computer froze and ended up restarting on its own.

So just now after installing Vista, SP1, nforce driverse and GPU drivers, I go to enable SLI and the system os frozen.. kinda. It doesn't let me click on anything, and it doesn't DO anything, I can move the mouse around and every once in a while if I highlight the "NVIDIA Control Panel" button in the taskbar, it will show it change color or whatever meaning that I'm hovering over it...

What the heck could be causing this?

Now it's showing the Vista loading cursor thing.. But I hear no sounds out of the computer that suggest it's actually doing something...

Edit2: Okay it finally stopped just loading and now it seems SLI is enabled... Going to run Windows Update then try those tests to see how it goes! :(
 
I still think that one of your cards may be bad. I don't think you should've gone back to 2 cards right away.
 
Silent was right ;) One of my cards is definitely bad. I tried running Prime95 for a few hours. Then I ran 3DMark a few times. Then I ran Prime95 AND 3DMark over and over, and it worked. Then I realized I had SLI disabled. So I enabled it, and on the first try I got a BSOD.

So I took out the second one and started running the tests again and everything was fine. Then I tried the second card and BSOD right away again.

So I have the card packed up and ready to send back.. along with that HDD that was DOA too. Hopefully I can do it on Monday.. But I have some important stuff I have to do on that day, so I don't know if I'll get around to it. But I'm hoping that the card was definitely the problem, and all evidence is pointing to that now.. so I hope it's correct.

My temps look good down.. the lowest they've been actually (32C, 36C, 27C, 30C). Hope it keeps working :) Once it does, I'm going to eventually OC the processor as soon as I figure out how to do it and like.. understand it better ;)
 
Syribo,

Glad you've nailed down the issue. Hopefully the new card solves everything and you'll be off to the races.
 
Hmm, keep playing more games :))) just to make sure that the second card was truly the cause of your problems.
 
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