Striker II Formula

[skippo]

So the MSI seems to be the 'one' to get. ?

Hahaha, I think the problems with this Striker II Formula board are mainly related to the nForce 780i chipset, and not with Asus (although there may be some issues here as well).

But good luck whichever motherboard you decided to get!

 

[skippo]

BIOS 0101 - crap!

OK, so I was too optimistic about the updated BIOS 0101!

My system was seriously unstable, and freezing the moment I hit the desktop, no matter what settings I had in the BIOS, and whether the NCQ was on or off.

Therefore I have since downgraded to the 0902 release, which is sort of stable with the settings that I am using. Let's hope this period of stability continues, and that a future, better BIOS release will solve all!

I have emailed back ASUS tech support telling them that the 0101 release that they recommended I install, is rubbish. I will post their response as soon as I receive it.

The saga continues.........

 

[ScottiB]

why wouldn't they?

because their 680i flopped?

I don't know why they aren't, but they aren't

I used to think all the Asus problems were down to the chipset until the XFX & MSI ones turned out to be virtually trouble free.

 

[skippo]

I think you're looking under "disk drives", look under "storage controllers"/"Nvidia Nforce Serial ATA Controller" (this is listed three times)/then the "port 0" and "port 1" tabs.

I was looking in the wrong place!

I don't think I will disable it, as I seem to have a relatively stable system at the mo.!

Let's see how long it lasts!

(btw - no word back from Asus yet)

 

[balth_dire]

I used to think all the Asus problems were down to the chipset until the XFX & MSI ones turned out to be virtually trouble free.

My P6N Diamond died within a month - never tweaked a single thing.

Had 2 factory overclocked XFX video cards that showed artifacts within minutes of use and which XFX insisted were fine (when tested on an open bench ) and refused to replace.

Never tried EVGA after hearing the horror stories regarding their original i680 board.

Hence my loyalty to Asus.

Until I hear that somebody has run 4gb of 1066mhz+ memory at the guaranteed timings, together with a qx9650 and, in Vista, completed a 12 hour run of this:

ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v255a.zip

together with this:

http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/archives/rthdribl_1_2.zip

I will not be convinced than any 780i board differs from one to the next.

By the way Skippo, I now have a P5N-T Deluxe, which I opted for instead of another Striker 2 due to its slightly better track record with 800mhz RAM.

For the first time I was able to run the the stress test above, for a full 12 hours without a BSOD or crash and without altering the multipler or increasing mem latency.

Here are the exact components/settings I used.

BIOS 802
4gb G.Skill (F2-6400CL3D-2GBGA). Timings manually set to 3-4-3-8-2T
Mem voltage at 2.33 (very high but this particular RAM uses the older Micron D9s which are not so vulerable as the GMHs)
NB Voltage - 1.4
FSB/Mem at defaults of 1333mhz/800mhz
Qx9650 at stock (x9 multi/3.0ghz)

All else on auto.

I noticed that the CPU's Vcore on this board is automatically set to 1.3, higher than the default 1.23 of the Striker ii.

I still wouldn't recommend that you go ahead and get one though, as you're mem is 1000mhz and it would seem that when it comes to memory, on this chipset, the higher the speed, the less stable things become, have you tried running at 800mhz atall?

One other thing, the artifacts that were present on 3dmark06 with my Striker ii are now gone, so it would seem that there was definitely a fault with my particular board, hence I doubt yours is the same, since you say you didn't see any artifacts.

 

[ScottiB]

My P6N Diamond died within a month - never tweaked a single thing.

Had 2 factory overclocked XFX video cards that showed artifacts within minutes of use and which XFX insisted were fine (when tested on an open bench ) and refused to replace.

This applies to the nForce 7 motherboards how?

Are you trying to tell me that Asus are just unlucky with nForce7 boards? I don't think the boards are bad, far from it, I just think that Asus launched without enough testing, especially where the bios is involved.

Future bios releases may see the Asus boards turn out to be the best on the market but at the moment I think that all the hype is causing Asus to panic and release one bug filed bios after another.

 

[balth_dire]

This applies to the nForce 7 motherboards how?

.

Well, we can only speak from experience.

I've had dozens of Asus boards over the last five years and only now do I encounter one that has a definite fault - I don't count the known issues with their 680 boards as faults as the chipset was indigenously buggy - my original Striker, though not entirely stable, never had a terminal problem.

The first MSI board I purchase dies within a month, bad luck? Perhaps...but it's enough to put me off subsequent products.

Same with XFX - who I know for a fact OCUK caesed trading with for a while due to "differences" with their RMA dept - if they've improved now, fair enough, but they' won't get my custom again.

 

[ScottiB]

I'd be the first to admit that I wouldnt touch an MSI board with a barge-pole until recently.

Their P35's were good, there X38's were very good & this P7N is brilliant!

The P7N Diamond is the first MSI board that I would actually buy for myself (unfortunately my 8800 GTX just went bump & I bought an ATI 3870 X2 to replace it so it would be a waste for me now)

& if you wanted any more reason to get one I have just put them on our Top Ten Deals page for an insane price, I just hope that MSI can keep up with demand

 

[balth_dire]

What a devilishly cryptic sales pitch.

 

[ScottiB]

I never claimed to be subtle

 

[Reality|Bites]

cheaper than the rest but still expensive for a motherboard

Remember the good old Socket A days where you could get an Abit NF7-S for £80 lol

 

[helmutcheese]

Hi everyone,

After getting in touch with Asus technical support, they have suggesting installing the latest BIOS update, which I thought I had already installed (0902). It turns out that Asus have messed around with their BIOS revision numbers, and the latest one is in fact 0101.
(0902 was released a day earlier on the 16/01.)

Link to all the BIOS revisions showing the release date on the right:
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?modelname=Striker%20II%20Formula&SLanguage=en-us

Latest 0101 release:
http://dlsvr01.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket775/Striker_II_Formula/S2F0101.zip

After you have updated, I would clear you're CMOS, and then enter all of the same settings you had before in. I didn't because I had a look in the BIOS briefly and saw that my settings were still in there. Well, when I loaded into windows, I got as far as the desktop, then FREEZE!

Anyways, cleared the CMOS, re entered the settings, then I am now currently writing this now!

I will leave a few stress tests running all this morning, to see how far they get; but I am remarkable optimistic about this!

This is also what the ASUS tech guy said to: "If the problem still remains, please change LDT frequency to 4X, test again. Please refer to the manual 4-24." - I haven't tried this yet, as everything seems to be running OK for now.

Good Luck,
and I will report back once I have given this latest release a bit of a test.


Matt

Thats totally wrong m8, and someone on XS found out the hard way after flashing to 101.

The dates are either wrong or simply the dates they were added to the site.

Bios 101 is the Initual Release (it even states that) and IS NOT newer than 902.

The latest Bios is the 1001 Beta I was running, and it does not fix any real issues, the board is a POS.

Im now back on my buggy (but better than Striker II) Striker Extreme, I cant run same 2000FSB but at least Im not getting as many issues as with the Striker II.

No Sata ports or NIC's going missing or delays in Posting due to weird msg on LCD screen.

I now see what peeps meant about high temp on Wolfdales, Im reading 46c idle (I know its false) as I was getting proper readings on the Striker II.

Had to use 1503 Beta Bios for the Stiker Extreme to get full use of the Wolfdale CPU and 1/2 Multi's and actually read Temps.

 

[sniffsunder]

Well what can I say ..... I've just got rid of the POS that is the S2F as it was driving me insane, my vendor offered to replace the board but I've just read so many threads where people have been having the same issues that I decided not to bother myself with soft reset issues, weird stalling issues, overheating etc etc. ever again. The board is just not fit for purpose and doesn't do what is says on the box.

So call me stupid I've gone and purchased a Maximus Formula, and do you know what? I connected it all up and bingo it worked straight out of the box, recognised my CPU and memory straight away without any tweaking.

I was never likely to upgrade to SLI in the foreseeable future so this suits me just fine at the moment and the XFX 8800 Ultra XT handles my Viewsonic 22" widescreen monitor no problem. I'll probably ditch the Ultra in the future and go for a couple of ATI cards in Crossfire mode but until then at least I've got a system that'll run my games and let me tweak away at my hearts content.

Good luck peeps with your endeavours trying to get the S2F stable….

Sniffs out …….

 

[skippo]

Thats totally wrong m8, and someone on XS found out the hard way after flashing to 101.

I know, I realised the moment I installed the BIOS and everything went wrong really quickly!. The Asus tech guy must have been on something when he told me to install the latest (0101) update! what a load of rubbish that was!

I have since reverted back to the 0902 release, which is semi-stable, but still when I leave a stress program on for some time, it fails and crashes my PC about an hour in.

If I use the PC for watching videos, internet browsing, etc etc, (no games - as haven't even tried this yet!), the PC runs like a dream!

I think I will RMA it, and ask for a X38 instead, the sacrifice of SLI will have to be made unfortunatly! v.

BTW, I think I have found the 'solution' to the NIC problem. When I enabled the WOL in the BIOS (ES selection i think??), the NIC wouldn't work at all. With this disabled, I am having no problems at all - no need to clear the CMOS or completly power off the board. Also I noticed that in Windows Update this morning, an nForce Network driver update was there! Don't know if that was supposed to sort it out too?

 

[sniffsunder]

I think I will RMA it, and ask for a X38 instead, the sacrifice of SLI will have to be made unfortunatly! v.QUOTE]

Good idea, I tell you the sacrifice of SLI is nothing compared to the heart ache the S2F will give you. IMHO the Maximus appears to be a good board, only up and running for about 24 hours but as I said, works straight out of the box and recognised CPU and RAM without any tweaking, CPU running at 3Ghz and memory at 1066MHz, I'm sure if I'll be able to get the memory running at 1142MHz no problem.

 

[helmutcheese]

I know, I realised the moment I installed the BIOS and everything went wrong really quickly!. The Asus tech guy must have been on something when he told me to install the latest (0101) update! what a load of rubbish that was!

I have since reverted back to the 0902 release, which is semi-stable, but still when I leave a stress program on for some time, it fails and crashes my PC about an hour in.

If I use the PC for watching videos, internet browsing, etc etc, (no games - as haven't even tried this yet!), the PC runs like a dream!

I think I will RMA it, and ask for a X38 instead, the sacrifice of SLI will have to be made unfortunatly! v.

BTW, I think I have found the 'solution' to the NIC problem. When I enabled the WOL in the BIOS (ES selection i think??), the NIC wouldn't work at all. With this disabled, I am having no problems at all - no need to clear the CMOS or completly power off the board. Also I noticed that in Windows Update this morning, an nForce Network driver update was there! Don't know if that was supposed to sort it out too?

I do not use WOL and my NIC went missing at times, so does SATA ports, its a Bios issue.

There is some newbie spreading BS on Asus forums that aint helping anyone, he claims a new drvier fixes the NIC, if it was a driver it would not work after a Reset of Cmos (I only loose NIC and/or SATA after messing in Bios, not on a normal Startup).

This newbie told peeps to repair their Windows install as if the files are missing when you need to rewrite the Master Boot Record, that aint the error the Striker II was giving me after failed OC's (nearly same but not), so a reset of bios gets it back eventually.

I also had to remove all Ram but 1 stick and remove ESATA HDD (from AKASA Bracket and remove USB Readyboost to get PC to boot to windows after a failed OC on Memory.

If I did not do the above, I got a faded Vista boot screen and the little Bar would not move.

I could run the Mobo all day at 2000FSB with Memory at 1000mhz and 4GHZ with all fans at 50% but all the other aspects were drving me mad and gaming stuttered a bit even after refiting Heatpipes but it did improve the 3DMARK06 score not wandering from 7000-13000, now back at 14500.

The temps were near same after refitting pipes so it must have been the little PCI-E Bridge Chipset that was getting bad contact.

The Mobo runs the NB and SB red hot at stock and my temps were not much higher at the 2000FSB over a 1333FSB, both were too high for my liking.

I did mess with window open on freezing nights and extra fans and got temps down real low into 30's but it was no more clockable or stable.

 

[skippo]

1920x1200 at high graphics settings without SLI - a naive move??

regarding my possible/enevitable move to the X38 chipset (Maximus Formula (as already have DDR2 sticks)), I will be without SLI...

Now, I like to run my games at native res (1920 x 1200), and also on max graphics if poss. Therefore when newer game titles come out, that will test any set up to their limit, I don't want to have to down the resolution at all, or graphics settings down too much.

Therefore, at my res/ desired graphics settings, would it be completely naive to sacrifice SLI support? Surely Asus have to get this board 'working' at some point!?
Is everyone in this forum topic a prophet of doom? Surely there are some optimistic S2F people out there? Or have Asus made one hell of a **** up regarding the hardware, that means future BIOS updates won't help!!!
We all need ANSWERS! - Why is no one getting any solid answers from Asus, or indeed NVIDIA??


(Also, I still haven't had a reply from Asus tech support yet, suprise, suprise - (useless IMO))

 

[sniffsunder]

Asus made one hell of a **** up regarding the hardware, that means future BIOS updates won't help!!!
We all need ANSWERS! - Why is no one getting any solid answers from Asus, or indeed NVIDIA??


(Also, I still haven't had a reply from Asus tech support yet, suprise, suprise - (useless IMO))

I sent Asus two inquiries regarding the S2F the first on 5 Feb then another on 12 Feb and I still haven't had an answer on either enquiry.

 

[sniffsunder]

Has anybody got any experience with the Maximus Formula using a single Nvidia 8800 Ultra?

 

[Smiler.Shaw]

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...del=Striker+II+Formula&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

found this on ASUS forum, so going to try these settings, I'm already running stable on the board .

I'm now running BIOS rev 1001 which seems stable after 902 wasnt... I've ignored the response from ASUS to go back to 101 as this slowed my system down!