A8N SLI Deluxe - annoying 2 second pauses

At The Gates

At The Gates

At The Gates

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Joined
18 Oct 2002
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1,417
Hi,

I just got the above board and a 7800 GT to go with it and all is fine apart from 1 thing. I keep on getting random (although very frequent) pauses of about 1~2 seconds, where everything locks up (mouse, keyboard etc) and if any sound is playing it starts stuttering. At the lockups the CPU usage jumps to 100%

This happens in XP, games etc. In fact in every task from using Notepad to Photoshop.

Any ideas on where to start? Is it likely to be the board..maybe a power supply issue? I have a Hiper Type-R 580w PSU powering whats in my sig.

Thanks.
 
There is actually loads of these:

"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation."

Not sure they correlate to the times of the freezes though. Looks like they're only at bootup
 
Dont suppose you have ai overclocking or ai *** enabled ? as i found i had similar problems with them enabled?? just a thought
 
Personally I had the same symptoms and it was connected to the disk subsystem - either a faulty IDE driver, faulty motherboard or faulty HD. Now this was on a different, Intel, system quite a while back, and the pausing was caused by Windows falling back to PIO mode due to too many errors on the hard drives. Are you using 2k or XP?

I've just been having loads of problems with the nforce4 SATA data corruption bug, which is covered in detail here:

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t8171-0.html

If you can't be bothered reading the whole thread (although it's an idea as different solutions seem to work for different people), it all seems to be to do with the nforce4 choking when too much data is transferred at once over the onboard SATA/ATA channels. I'm probably not explaining it very well!

In your Device Manager, are your drives listed as using DMA or PIO mode (you may need to check the NVIDIA nForce4 Serial/Parallel ATA Controllers instead, listed under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers)

My problems (DFI UT Expert, SATA-2 WD and SATA-1 WD drives) were solved (hopefully, I am not completely sure they are over) by a combination of:

1. Operating the SATA-2 drive in SATA-1 mode (1.5Gb/sec)
2. Turning on SATA Spread Spectrum in the BIOS
3. Plugging both the SATA and Molex power connectors into both drives

Some of these steps seemed a bit too much like black magic to me but they seem to have worked. Or at least I can play DoD Source and CIV4 without entire machine lockups now.

Sorry this is a bit random, but I thought it might be worth you checking out, particularly if your drives have stepped down to PIO mode.
 
At The Gates said:
I haven't installed any Asus AI stuff. In fact no Asus stuff at all. Just latest versions of the 7800GT drivers and the latest nForce drivers
Click to expand...

These are settings in the bios m8 :o
 
haha. Well in that case no, they're not on. Everything in the BIOS is off except for the nForce SATA controller and the AC97 audio.

My drives are listed as SATA 1-1.5G and running in DMA mode. I've had a read through that thread. Turned off NCQ and its helped a little bit. My drives dont support it so there's no speed difference but still shouldn't have to go backwards. I guess only step is to re-install XP and not use the nForce IDE SW drivers.

Complete pain. I though nForce chipsets were supposed to be rock solid. My old VIA chipset A8V was better than this board..
 
I found, regardless of what 'people on the internet' claim, that it was perfectly possible to roll back to the MS IDE drivers from the device manager - although I accept that maybe what XP says has happened and what has actually happened may differ a bit ;)
 
Sorry to bump, but this prob is back. I thought it was the Hiper PSU, but its just started happening again with my Akasa.

I've rolled backed to the MS IDE drivers and my drives are in ATA6 mode. No dropbacks and no errors in any Event Viewer logs.

Any ideas because this is driving me to the point of ditching the whole thing and going Intel chipset.

Thanks!
 
Thing is, the whole machine pauses so there's no way to tell. All i can see is a spike in the CPU History.

Oh, also tried with no USB devices. Same thing.

Everything in this machine was working perfectly in an Asus A8V. The only new kit is the gfx card and the motherboard.

So annoying.
 
Try loading your machine with only basic devices and services. Run the System Configuration Utility (Start/Run then type "msconfig" (without the quotes) and press enter).

Select "Diagnostic Startup" and reboot - see if it still does it. If it does then it could be hardware related; if not then it's a piece of software or a driver that's causing the problems
 
Not sure if it's relevant, but i've been trying to copy some data (4.5Gb each / 2 DVD-Rs) over from DVDROM to the HD and XP always bombs out (on the exact same file - i burnt each disk twice) saying "CRC ERROR". Thing is: The DVDs are fine, i've copied the data on them to 3 other PCs fine.

I plugged in a USB DVDROM drive and the files copied across to my PC fine.

I checked Event Viewer and i get this error for the DVD drive:

"An error was detected on device \Device\CD ROM0 during a paging operation.

The device\Device\CDRom0 has a bad block."

So i plugged the DVDROM into another PC and it works fine.

Really doing my head. Is the controller on the motherboard dodgy?

Thig is i can read other stuff fine. I installed HL2, FarCry, Doom III and FEAR with no issues at all.
 
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