Nice Graphics cards Nvidia...shame about the Motherboards

balth_dire · 23 Mar 2006 at 17:35

After two whole days of BIOS tweakery and perpetual no-posting on this damn p5n32-SLI, I have finally come to the conclusion that Nvidia currently do not manufacturer a motherboard which is able to support BOTH SLI AND Intel's new 955 Extreme Edition CPU.

My system fully satisfies every one of this board's requirements, yet even with the latest bios installed (308) as soon as I shove in the 955 CPU, it simply fails to boot.

As a company which has steadfastly refused to validate any chipsets other than their own for use with SLI, I find this utterly pathetic.

I also must take issue with Asus...who claim openly on their site that this board fully supports the 65nm series. Irresponsible, thoughtless and incompetent.

Please Nvidia, just validate Intel's chipsets and save everyone any further bother.

Alexrose1uk · 23 Mar 2006 at 19:40

Is it possible that
A) Your board is a dud
B) Your CPU is a dud

Just got a new AMD NForce4 board and its looking excellent.
Have you also checked to see if your mobo has any newly released BIOSes to go with the new chip?

EDIT: IMO its the otherway round anyway, I like the nforce boards, not the cards lol

balth_dire · 23 Mar 2006 at 21:20

Alexrose1uk said:
Is it possible that
A) Your board is a dud
B) Your CPU is a dud

Just got a new AMD NForce4 board and its looking excellent.
Have you also checked to see if your mobo has any newly released BIOSes to go with the new chip?

EDIT: IMO its the otherway round anyway, I like the nforce boards, not the cards lol

A) Board ran 4x prime stable with 840 extreme CPU.
B) CPU runs 4x prime stable in a Gigabyte G1975X board.

Sorry, guess I should have mentioned those facts

.

BIOS 308 is supposed to be the one which addresses this issue, though judging by the feedback on Asus's own forum, it's only yielding around 50% success.

Glad to hear it's all going well for you in the AMD ranks

Alexrose1uk · 23 Mar 2006 at 22:46

Mmm, might try overclocking this at some point, but I'd rather wait til my luck is better, then I'll see if I can get a dual core 2.4GHz AMD going... should run very nicely have 4.8GHz of combined AMD lol

If the issue with your BIOS is that bad though, I'd imagine driverheaven and anandtech etc are pushing for the new BIOS if they know about the issue.
Good luck with 309! Hope its quick!

(Glad I didnt get an ASUS AMD board now, seems my fears were founded)

VeNT · 24 Mar 2006 at 10:48

I've used a load of A8N-E from asus recently, 100% good boards, not one dud and nice performance (I know its not for overclocking realy, but then my clients don't NEED overclocking),
I feel that tbh its just your bad luck

AWPC · 24 Mar 2006 at 11:45

Asus are the issue here. They have not released the proper bios which supports the newest Intel CPU steppings yet. Their bios writers appear to be permanently asleep!

What stepping is your CPU as I know Intel recently upgraded the XE to the C1 stepping but only mobo that supports this is Intels own 975 badaxe model.

Would not even be surprised if your mobo does not confirm to Intels specs for this CPU as my Asus mobo based on the i955X chipset is supposed to fully support the 955XE according to Intel but Asus left some capacitors off the mobo so it is not compatible which means my future upgrade path is totally screwed. These same missing capacitors mean that if I use the x14 multiplier to overclock it does a shutdown before rebooting or entering the bios everytime in the space of 5 secs so as it is not good for the PSU to have twice the loading in a short space of time am forced to run @ std clock speeds even though I can easily hit 4.5Ghz on air with std vcore.

balth_dire · 24 Mar 2006 at 12:37

Agree with all of the above AWPC.

Apparently my chip is rev B1, not C1.

I've got a feeling this is a memory issue, the reason I'm suspicious is that if I try and boot up with no memory in the board at all, I get the warning beeps, which suggests the board is at least getting as far as recognizing the CPU, - I'm using Corsair 5400ul, which worked fine when I was using an 840 CPU, but perhaps the 1066fsb is forcing it to run out of spec.

Sadly, I've got rid of my 840, so I can't tweak BIOS settings, though before I sold it, I went through just about every vital setting there was.

I've also repeatedly blanked the CMOS, but to no avail.

AWPC · 25 Mar 2006 at 00:58

balth_dire said:
Agree with all of the above AWPC.

Apparently my chip is rev B1, not C1.

I've got a feeling this is a memory issue, the reason I'm suspicious is that if I try and boot up with no memory in the board at all, I get the warning beeps, which suggests the board is at least getting as far as recognizing the CPU, - I'm using Corsair 5400ul, which worked fine when I was using an 840 CPU, but perhaps the 1066fsb is forcing it to run out of spec.

Sadly, I've got rid of my 840, so I can't tweak BIOS settings, though before I sold it, I went through just about every vital setting there was.

I've also repeatedly blanked the CMOS, but to no avail.

If your ram contains 16 memory chips per side per ram module or the chips are 128MB each then that could be an issue as most Asus mobos do not support modules which have either 32 chips per module or if any of the chips are 128MB each.

Have a look around here as there may already be a custom bios you can use or even ask someone to create one for you as there are several guys on there who will do this if they can as sometimes the bios contains hidden features!

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=136