Asus P5Q Deluxe powerup and post problems

[sev]

Hi all,

I've recently finished a build and finally installed W7 beta on my raid array.

It all seemed to be fine, but when I went to startup after a night's rest the board wouldn't post.

The fans would all spin up, but there were no beeps or nothing.

I shut down from the power off button on the case, and restarted.

The board spun up, died, then reboooted again - again with no post beeps.

I took the box out, fiddled with connections, and thought maybe it's the GPU, so changed it to another pcie port, and third time it started.

restarted a few times, and all ok.

This morning, went to start, and exactly the same again.

I've tried to update the bios, but the BIOS won't see the USB stick I have - 4gb formatted to fat32.

When it decides to post, it boots fine and works like a dream, but it's almost as if from cold it just doesn't want to know.

Bios on board 1004
8gb corsair ddr2 c6400xms (the ones with big heatspreaders)
Q9550 CPU with an arctic cooling Freezer 7 pro (which is waaaay louder than my old CP9500 cooler )
NVIDIA Quadro 4500 running DVI-D
BT dongle
Be-Quiet 650W modular PSU with fanPWR lead on the motherboard
other than that it's just my V-raptor raid and the 500gb WD Green I use for backups etc.
Oh, and all the hardware apart from the GPU are brand spanking new.

This is starting to really dick me off.

Have I bought a duff board? is this a known problem or should I just return the peice of junk to the reseller and say give me an intel branded P35 board instead?

I'm getting very tired of all this - i'm sure it's something really simple as well, and i'm not seeing the wood for the trees!

All BIOS settings are set to factory default.

All help gratefully appreciated!

 

[Big.Wayne]

Hey sev,

Welcome to OcUK forums!

Sounds like you got some quality kit there however you may need to upgrade the owner!

It sounds like a memory or northbridge related problem so a nice simple start would be to remove two of the four sticks of RAM and see if that makes a difference.

It may just be a simple case of adjusting some voltages or memory related timings, probably the motherboard isn't setting things up properly?

The *auto* reboot you experienced is part of an ASUS safety feature which is meant to roll back the BIOS to the last known working config so at least you can get back into BIOS instead of having to clear CMOS, It sounds liie something is gOOfed if the board cannot boot back up after the *auto* reboot!

Have I bought a duff board? is this a known problem or should I just return the peice of junk to the reseller and say give me an intel branded P35 board instead?

Well there is a chance any piece of hardware can arrived bOrked but more than likely it's just a simple mis config that can be sorted with a little knowledge!

 

[sev]

Hey sev,

Welcome to OcUK forums!

Sounds like you got some quality kit there however you may need to upgrade the owner!

It sounds like a memory or northbridge related problem so a nice simple start would be to remove two of the four sticks of RAM and see if that makes a difference.

It may just be a simple case of adjusting some voltages or memory related timings, probably the motherboard isn't setting things up properly?

The *auto* reboot you experienced is part of an ASUS safety feature which is meant to roll back the BIOS to the last known working config so at least you can get back into BIOS instead of having to clear CMOS, It sounds liie something is gOOfed if the board cannot boot back up after the *auto* reboot!

Well there is a chance any piece of hardware can arrived bOrked but more than likely it's just a simple mis config that can be sorted with a little knowledge!

Thanks Wayne

I really do hope that it is something like that.

I've got the settings on Auto default throughout the board so i'll use this as a starting point.

I'm sure that the memory is listed in the most up to date QVL on the asus website as well, but i'll double check.

Also, I don't have a floppy drive on the machine, so would it be advisable to remove this option in the boot sequence (i've set it to look last, but i'm wondering if you can eliminate it entirely.)


The memory is:
Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB) in each paired slot.

 

[Big.Wayne]

Yup just disable the floppy from the main BIOS page and arrange your boot order DVD-ROM >> SATA 1 etc

Anyway what may be handy is too see a screenshot from CPU-z showing both the memory tabs, look through the [SPD] tab and make sure all the sticks are the same i.e they have the same SPD info.

If all sticks are matches (which it sounds like they are) then manually set the vDimm voltage according to the ASUS specs. If that doesn't do the trick then you will maybe have to boost the motherboards northbridge voltage to help it cope with four sticks!

The suggestion to remove a pair of sticks would demonstrate if its a Northbridge related problem. Failing all of that you may need to hand test the sticks using something like Memtest86+ V2.11 burnt onto a bootable CD-ROM.

Let us know how you get on and good luck!

 

[sev]

Wayne,

I've taken the easiest route first, and taken out the sticks in slots B.

So now i'm running with 2 sticks.

The new QVL has the sticks i'm using, but they're not in the original manual.

As far as matching sticks goes, I bought two packs of matched pairs, and put a pair in slots A, and a pair in slots B.

So, i'm going to leave it overnight, as it's now stupid o'clock, and come back to it tommorrow.

Thanks for your help so far!