ASUS P4C800 Problems

[evinco]

I recently put together the following system:

ASUS P4C800-Deluxe
Pentium 4 3.0ghz/800mhz FSB (w/stock HSF)
2*512 GeiL DDR400 RAM running at SPD 2.5-4-4-8 (these are temporary, soon they will be replaced with 2*512 Corsair DDR500 chips)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Gexcube 256meg)
Western Digital JB 80GB/8MBcache (partioned 30/50 for OS+programs/data
Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB (secondary data drive)
ASUS 48X CD-RW
LiteOn 16X DVD

Running in an Antec PerformancePlus 1080AMG case, which includes a 430W Antec "TruePower" PSU.


My first completely built system. First boot, fine, no problems. Connected everything except the Seagate drive, which I was using to put some data on from old system. Installed Windows XP Pro and proceeded to install the drivers for the chipset and various onboard components (Audio, LAN, USB). I also updated the BIOS using the "ASUSUpdate" software (which downloads and flashes the new BIOS from within Windows). No problems there. Then after a few minor software problems (DirectX, WinXP SP1) and the discovery of a set of much newer drivers for the Intel chipset which were best installed after a clean format, I decided to start again. So I reformatted and also at this stage put in the Seagate drive. Installed everything, very latest Intel chipset and Radeon drivers and ran Windows Update. Ran fine for a day or so, left it on running a couple of diagnostics overnight and came back in the morning with no problems. Then later on that day I decided to do a full scan (PC-Cillin 2002) of the two partitions on the WD drive and also the Seagate drive, to make sure no old viruses were on the Seagate and had spread to the new drives. Walked away and left it going; came back about fifteen minutes after to find the computer off. Strange... powered back up, received a "Windows has recovered from a serious error." message. Started the scan again and watched it this time to see what happened. Everything went fine up until the very end of C:\Windows.. system just powered off. No shutdown, just as if a power cutout happened. Now I have read that the P4C800 is a very powerhungry board, but I thought the Antec 430W would be more than capable to power all my needs. However at this stage I still thought it was a virus; decided to scan just the Windows folder. No viruses found. Then shortly afterwards, while listening to music which was on the Seagate drive, a song just finished and about to change to the next one when... whole computer off. Ok, I thought, must be a problem with that drive, (I thought that the PC-Cillin shutdown must have happened when it finished scanning C: (the last directory being Windows) and moved on to the next drive, the Seagate). So I talked to a few people, who suggested that the IDE cables were faulty or similar remedies. I also went looking on the internet and found an amazing variety of "sources" for similar problems. Apparently very bad driver support for the onboard USB, a dodgy soldering job on the back of the motherboard, extremely large power requirements, or faulty RAM all caused problems with the board.
This was a few days ago. Since then, I have (in roughly chronological order):
- unplugged the Seagate drive
- taken out one of the RAM chips (they were running in dual channel, which is also supposed to be a cause of a number of problems)
- swapped the RAM chips around; tried them in different slots, a variety of configurations
- changed IDE cables (to one which I used to run the Seagate in the old computer, and have had no problems with)
- unplugged all the drives except for the Western Digital to test if perhaps the PSU was insufficient
- disabled onboard USB
- fiddled round with various settings on the BIOS, including increasing the voltage to the RAM (I have heard that GeiL is also quite power-hungry)
- tried the default BIOS settings
And finally, completely stumped, I attempted a clean install of Windows on the Seagate drive. Got most of the way through it without a single power cut, and I thought hey, maybe the problem was a corrupt Windows install or something.. until the system once again turned off, near the end of the installation.

Throughout it all, the system will randomly power down. Doesn't matter whether it's doing something stressful or sitting idle, and the length of time after which it powers down is also completely random. It might be as soon as I log into Windows, or (the longest session yet) just under two hours of surfing the net/playing games/running diagnostics. I also thought that it was getting progressively worse; at one stage I had to reboot the computer about 4 times in an hour. But at the moment I am running one RAM chip in Bank 2 and I am able to squeeze an hour on average before it cuts out. Another strange fact; I only received "Windows has recovered from a serious error" the first few times, it has not come up since. Somehow I think it was an unrelated matter...

Another thing; when I installed the P4 chip and applied some thermal paste to the top, I went a bit overboard and accidentally spilt a bit over paste over the edge of the CPU onto the side of the socket where the lever is.. cleaned most of it off, but definitely still a bit on there. I don't think this could be the cause of my problems though?

Anyone have any ideas??? I am thoroughly stumped, but would rather fix it myself than RMA.

Sorry for the long post, thanks for reading if you've made it this far

(Powered down twice whilst writing this post... Luckily typed in Notepad with plenty of saves )

[cysus]

evinco, I need to know a few things...
1) how old are your Seagate and WD hard drives (could have bad sectors)
2) what video card are you using (the P4C800 has problems with some)
3) what type of P4 are you using (what is the speed and FSB speed)-sorry you answered that
3 1/2) is the FSB set to 800 in the bios and all the corresponding bus speeds
4) when you updated the bios of asus' site which one were they and did you get the right ones

[evinco]

Hey Cysus,
An quick update before I answer your questions: the shutdowns have become more and more frequent, and seem to be related to the drives. I can no longer access drives (rhought My Computer, Explorer, even through cmd) for more than a few seconds before it will power down..

1) The Seagate is a Barracuda IV and it's about two years old.. Originally it was a friend's drive but he bought a new computer and had no need so I was using it as a data drive on my old system for a few months. Never had any problems with it on my old system.
The Western Digital drive is brand new.

2) Gexcube ATI Radeon 9800Pro (256MB version)

3) It's a P4 3.0C chip (3GHz, 800MHz FSB).. I have tried running it at various speeds, including higher and lower than what it's rated at - doesn't make any difference.

4) Looked around for a bit to make sure I was getting the right one, (version 1110 I believe it's called) then to update it I used the ASUSUpdate Software which downloads and flashes it from within Windows. HOWEVER: Since then, ASUSUpdate refuses to work.. it claims that it cannot detect an ASUS motherboard! I have tried uninstalling it but now it won't even reinstall, it simply quits after protesting "NO ASUS MOTHERBOARD DETECTED!". I think that PERHAPS the bios may be corrupt in some way? Although everything else seems to work fine.. for example the ASUSProbe monitoring utilities work correctly.

[cysus]

At this point I'd say it is your bios but when I was setting up my system with that mobo it had some problems too. It had a hareware error with my 9700pro and ALOT of other small problems. Not too smooth for an ASUS mobo.

[evinco]

I agree; my first ASUS mobo and quite disappointing.

I think I've solved the problem! After getting *quite*annoyed :P, I took out the western digital hard drive and tried installing Windows on the seagate without the WD plugged in ... then got a couple of errors relating to conflicts with IDE controller or something...

So I plugged the WD in, had a look in bios, disabled Parallel/Serial ports of all things (because they were hogging some IRQ) and.. well.. hasn't shut down since! Current uptime is 11hours55minute (would be about 20 hours but restarted a couple of times for other things). Not POSITIVE that the problem has gone away, but I'm now able to access anything on the drives without a crash, so here's hoping...

However, during my many *many* bootups I have noticed another problem; graphical errors. On every (hard to say) 15th boot or so, the screen is corrupt, and covered in glitches and blobs. This is everywhere (BIOS, Windows loading, in Windows..); the mouse cursor is a blob of distorted colours. Then, shut down, boot up again.. and everything's fine. Think that could be to do with the Radeon/ASUS incompatability?

[cysus]

I think there is defiantly an asus/ati incompatibility. You may try attaching the WD drive to the other drive chain, and then it may not bring back an error. How ever with all the bizarre problems with the P4C800 it may be too risky. I personally wouldn't touch it I got mine working but man it was a pain, I wouldn’t change anything about it for fear of the error screens, or no screen at all.

GOOD LUCK (you'll need it)

[janwal46]

May be this will be of some consolation to "P4C800DL" users or people who are intending to buy it.

I've build my system with the following basic elements:

ASUS P4C800-DeLuxe

CPU Intel P4 - 2,6Ghz/FSB800

Corsair TWINX Dual-Channel 1024Mb DDR PC3200 C2 Heat-Spreader (TWINX1024-3200C2)

Asus V9560 Geforce FX 5600, 256Mb DDR, DVI, TVout

2 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, 120Gb, 7200rpm, 8Mb Cache, SATA-150, Liquid Bearing - configured as RAID 0 (Striping)

This configuration is running rockstable and fast with Windows XP Pro.

Good luck!!!!!!