Hello from a long-time lurker/occasional poster to these forums!
About 4 years ago I bought a [email protected] w/Rambus (4x256MB @ 1066Mhz) on an Asus P4T533-C motherboard - good, reliable system, and it ran great, up til November last year, when everything suddenly died (brief BSOD and looping sound before blank screen, only to never boot again), with no indication from the m/board about what could be wrong (no beeping - i assumed the board had died).
So, I figured it was time for a brand new system (including new gfx card, case & PSU, etc, etc.)... I grabbed an AMD 4400+, 2x1GB crucial 'ballistix' (dual chan), Asus A8N-E m/board.. which had all been running ok until just a couple of days ago (although it had been crashing a fair bit in WoW) when it suffered exactly the same problem as the previous computer.
The difference was that this one gave me the long beep, indicating a memory problem (Award BIOS).. so, I assumed my ballistix sticks had gone... until a conversation with a guy at crucial (when I rang for an RMA), who asked if i'd tried just one on its own... so, in a brief flash of inspiration, I decided to switch both sticks into different banks, forcing it to run in single channel - and, to my surprise, it boots up fine.
In another similar flash of inspiration, I also decided to go back to the old board (which is in another box) and start fiddling with the configuration of the RIMMs in there.... Wow! It worked! .. at least, for about half a day... but now it's most definitely dead as a doornail.
I'm rapidly losing faith in Asus motherboards here... It seems pretty obvious both have developed almost the same faults (luckily my A8N-E is running in single channel mode, for the moment..)
What's everyone's opinions on this? am I wrong to assume it's the Asus boards? have I had bad luck with memory sticks? Have I been allowing things to overheat and slowly die inside my cases?
For the record - i'm not overclocking, so I don't have any additional case fans.. i'd rather have a quiet PC
- In both cases, the CPU and Gfx cards have had no heat problems that i'm aware of.. I'd have thought these would be the first to suffer if I'd been getting too hot.
My feeling at the moment is that I should give up on Asus, and buy a Gigabyte board instead (As all gigabyte boards I've owned in the past have been superb for reliability). I don't care for overclocking, all I want is a working computer
Thanks for reading! any comments/flames/suggestions are welcome
About 4 years ago I bought a [email protected] w/Rambus (4x256MB @ 1066Mhz) on an Asus P4T533-C motherboard - good, reliable system, and it ran great, up til November last year, when everything suddenly died (brief BSOD and looping sound before blank screen, only to never boot again), with no indication from the m/board about what could be wrong (no beeping - i assumed the board had died).
So, I figured it was time for a brand new system (including new gfx card, case & PSU, etc, etc.)... I grabbed an AMD 4400+, 2x1GB crucial 'ballistix' (dual chan), Asus A8N-E m/board.. which had all been running ok until just a couple of days ago (although it had been crashing a fair bit in WoW) when it suffered exactly the same problem as the previous computer.
The difference was that this one gave me the long beep, indicating a memory problem (Award BIOS).. so, I assumed my ballistix sticks had gone... until a conversation with a guy at crucial (when I rang for an RMA), who asked if i'd tried just one on its own... so, in a brief flash of inspiration, I decided to switch both sticks into different banks, forcing it to run in single channel - and, to my surprise, it boots up fine.
In another similar flash of inspiration, I also decided to go back to the old board (which is in another box) and start fiddling with the configuration of the RIMMs in there.... Wow! It worked! .. at least, for about half a day... but now it's most definitely dead as a doornail.
I'm rapidly losing faith in Asus motherboards here... It seems pretty obvious both have developed almost the same faults (luckily my A8N-E is running in single channel mode, for the moment..)
What's everyone's opinions on this? am I wrong to assume it's the Asus boards? have I had bad luck with memory sticks? Have I been allowing things to overheat and slowly die inside my cases?
For the record - i'm not overclocking, so I don't have any additional case fans.. i'd rather have a quiet PC

My feeling at the moment is that I should give up on Asus, and buy a Gigabyte board instead (As all gigabyte boards I've owned in the past have been superb for reliability). I don't care for overclocking, all I want is a working computer

Thanks for reading! any comments/flames/suggestions are welcome

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