I sent this to asus today - have you spoken to scan at all yet??
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing with regard to the ASUS P4T-533 motherboard that I have recently purchased, with 2x256MB 32-bit Samsung RIMM modules.
I have owned many asus motherboards over the years and am generally very happy with the quality and stability of your products. I was given the opportunity to build a system to my own specification for mission critical applications and decided to use the P4T-533 as a platform - I had heard it was the fastest P4 board available, and also runs the fastest memory available.
I was running a 1.8A P4 for the first few weeks with no problems, after stability testing using Prime95 the board seems very stable and fast.
I then upgraded the CPU to a new 2.50ghz C1 stepping P4, and started to get stability problems, I have been running RAM at only 800mhz and FSB 100mhz, default vcore, RDRAM Turbo mode off, but I still cannot get stability in Prime95. I decided to look around the forums and see what results other users have had with these boards.
From what I have found it seems that most people running the new C1 stepping chips of 2.50ghz, 2.66ghz and 2.8ghz, are having stability problems with this board. I looked into things a bit more and it appears that the voltage regulators are the problem when supplying so much power to high speed CPU's, the core voltage deviates a lot. I now know of 4 other people who cannot get stability and are having to RMA their boards. In fact the P4T-533 is getting a bad reputation on most hardware websites as being an unstable board altogether, although the P4T-533C does not have such problems. I can supply e-mail addresses of other people with the same problem as me.
I was going to RMA my board to the people I purchased it from, but am also unhappy with their service. They want me to spend up to a week without the motherboard, which I feel is unacceptable considering I have spent over £2000 building a system from what I thought were the best components - not to mention my time building then taking apart and rebuilding the system. My reseller will also offer me another P4T-533 which I do not want as it seems instability problems are there on all P4T-533 boards. I am also unhappy that my reseller seems to be taking the RIMM modules out of the board and selling them seperately. I purchase the board, and then the 2x256mb RIMM's as seperate products.
I am therefore respectfully requesting that ASUS should do something about this problem. I suggest that ASUS should send me an advance replacement motherboard in order to keep my downtime to a minimum. I will now be switching back to an ASUS DDR board, and would consider either the A7V8X or your new Intel chipset board due to be released in early October. I will return the P4T-533 to yourselves on receipt of another motherboard. I will also return the Samsung RIMM memory modules to my reseller to swap for some DDR333 modules for use in the Motherboard you send me.
I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.