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not again...now the bios seems b0rked

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__TRONIK__

Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2003
Location
washington d.c.
arrgh. after getting the NIC problem fixed...now this. I was experiencing the boot problem - that is, the board never wanted to. Holding insert would always make it boot, but at default settings. from there you could get into bios, but then when you saved changes, it would only reboot maybe 1 out of five times. So I decided to use cmos reloaded. I backed up the bios settings I wanted and rebooted. nothing, like I thought. So I powered off and booted holding the "1" key, which is supposed to load the first saved profile. Now the board will not post. not with insert, not with unplugging, not with manually resetting cmos , not with popping the battery.

I swapped teh 2500 for the 2400. Ditto. That cpu worked fine when I took it out. I took out my radeon and put in a pci vid card. Still nothing. I tried the reset+esc trick, no go.

only thing i am left with is to leave the battery out all night and hope for the best.

Angry games said something like DFI would send you a bios chip before RMA'ing the board - I hope this is the case.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated
 
I have almost the exact same problem...

I'll even UNDERclock the settings, and the board won't post.
It just sits there with a black screen, hard drives spinning up and slowing down, LED lights turning on and off.

I've yet to get CMOS reloaded to work a single time...


whenever that happens, I completely clear the CMOS (remove power, battery, change jumper, change jumper back, replace battery, power on). Sometimes it STILL doesn't post after doing that. I sit there pressing the reset switch over and over and over, until eventually the mobo starts beeping, like an alarm. Then it finally posts. And it posts with the settings I set before the whole problem started.


What a flaky board.
 
mine wouldn't even do that. I never even got a siren, and I spend like a whole day trying everything I knew or could find to get it to post. hence the returnage. It flaked out UN overclocked too. Try UNDERclocked. They need to put a jumper on there to disable reloaded or something - so like, you know, you can actually clear the cmos and have it work.

I have no idea why I asked for a repair (IE another one) I should have asked for a refund and stuck with this NF7-S, (also a refurb) which has been bullet proof, and oh yeah, clocks my mobile about 200mhz higher. I guess the lure of 250fsb for my BH-5 is jsut too much

The first Infinity I got was a refurb, had a bad battery, then had the same boot issues as this one had, and would ONLY run the ram at 3.45 - 3.55v no matter what you told it to.
if the third board has boot issues, and gives me that black screen on a regualr basis, then I am done with DFI. Until they get some semblance of quality control.

there are a lto of DFI aplogists out there right now - 250fsb will get you a lot of those - and I am sure someone will post with "joe over there has this problem with his abit, blah blah.....

but the fact remains, this board IS super flaky, and if DFI wants to stop a flood of RMA's boards that just need a simple bios refresh, they had better get on it soon. The word of mouth on these problems will follow shortly behind the word of uber fsb. And it ain't gonna be pretty.
 
I'm glad I cancelled my order for one of these on discovering my ABIT was still alive - I've heard about the BIOS issues this board has, but wasn't aware it was such a severe issue in some cases such as yours. It's representative of the prodctwhen you have this many issues with it.

In my opinion 250+ FSB is not worth the hassle of BIOS corruptions, and boot issues. My old ASUS A7N8X Deluxe had countless (well, about 30) BIOS corruptions, and I eventually just got tired of hotflashing it every other day.

I really think it's about time major board manufacturers started producing their products with a physical factory installed BIOS savior device - essentially two physical BIOS chips which you can flash and switch between via an external switch - so you can use one as a backup in case of BIOS corruption.

You can buy an Aftermarket one from www.frozencpu.com for about $25 - well worth it when you flash a lot, and like to mess around and hack your BIOS. The model you want is RD1 PMC-4.
 
I second that - course gigabyte beat us to it. Their boards ar enot the best either though. If we could pick the best attributes form among the various mobos we'd have a hell of a frankenstein.

Too bad, the bios savior would likely not help one bit with an Infinity, since the proble, seems to be in the reloaded feature, which stores the info in a location other than the bios chip, and is immune to leaving the battery out/clearing cmos.

some people HAVE gotten totally trouble free boards, but it IS a frightening number that have these probs.

Wierd, I asked Angry_Games (who is MIA from this board, and is instead rebutting the compliants on the AMDB forums) why the baord was able to clock so high vs other boards. He said that part of it was using superior components.

perhaps the NB/SB steppings are better, and that is what he meant, but for example the battery used is "Newsum" which I have never heard of - 99.5% of all boards use Maxell - and the batt I got on the refurb board was just plain dead. Wonder if that plays any role in this circus.

Oh yeah, Angry said early on in this forum that those who had bios problems could get a new bios chip from DFI instead of having to RMA the board. This was before everyone was talking about the boot issues - think he knew something? I emailed him about it but have not heard back. I also mailed DFI support and got no answer.
 
Yeah these boards do have some cold boot issues....I know b/c it happened on my first board. AG has issued statements regarding the issue basically saying that they are working on the issue but it is not TOP priority b/c 1) it seems to be tied [mainly] to overclocking stability and 2) he'll be better adept that fixing the situation if he ever experiences the problem himself [which he says he hasn't]. So I do understand where he's comin from as it is a relatively new board and is most concerned with making sure people can even run these at stock settings. Lemme know if I misinterpreted :/
 
angry has said alot fo things on this subject - but i fyou check on the amdb forums there are quite alot of people who experienced these issues WITHOUT being overclocked. I am one of them. As ofr not having experienced them, I find it hard to believe that with the proliferation of problem boards people are reporting, as in dead boards, plus the fact that many people who are still running see the problem regularly, that he has not seen it himself, or that he cannot get his hands on a board from the company he works for that is displaying the issue. From the sheer amount of reports I am seeing there is no way that under 25% of these baords are not showing the issue - getting a hold of a problem board should be cake for him - either straight from the company or from any one of the users who cannot get a post.

Now, the guy works for DFI - it is not a good idea from a PR standpoint to say that the vast majority of these things are anything but totally stable - and it is wiser yet to imply that all problems are typically seen when overclocked. However from all indications, this is not the case.

Fact is, there may be a bios revision that totally solves the problem forthcoming, or there may not be. It may require a hardware revision, and that would leave many out in the cold (boot) so to speak. If anyone is looking around trying to decide whether to get one of these boards I would SERIOUSLY wait a few weeks and see whether a fix is imminent. If it is not, I would recommend looking elsewhere for a mobo. This is not like a cpu situation where you miight get a 2.6ghz ooverclock or you might get a 1.8ghz overclock, this is a scenario where it is very possible that your board will one day simply refuse to pose ever again, and for no discernable reason. Many of those the are "working" will still see the problem and require various tricks to get a post screen. Course if you are into big performance, it is still a scintillating piece of kit, which is why I am willing to give it one more shot - but as I said, if I am to keep what I get, I had better be one of the few that "can't reproduce the problem".
 
I can say I am one of them also. Even getting the DFI Lanparty II Ultra B going for the first time, "thee very first time I booted this board up" was a pain in the rear. At that point I was not even able to get into bios to change anything. So the problem does not lye with people that are overclocking but bios itself. I returned the board (thankfully I got it semi-cheap at a local PC store that luckily exists in my area) the next day & put the new board in & it fired up immediately. Have not had any problems since I returned the previous board. Also.....doesn't DFI welcome overclockers to use their board? Seems to me it's designed to do such things. My MSI K7N2 ILSR died on me when I pushed it to 227 fsb (reason I went with the DFI board).

I'm currently at a stable 227x11. =] RUNNING TO!!

I would like to make this statement though. Generally speaking you only hear about problems or recognize them. I can honestly say I don't post frequently about my working DFI board. Why would I? People would think I'm retarded........But the DFI Lanparty II Ultra B does seem to have some problems I really hope they fix, cause I love the feature of this motherboard.
 
that's a common arguement - but it is not quite true. I don't really consider this particular forum to be a "help" kind of a forum. sure, the people here are so knowledgeable that if you have a problem, the people here are an excellent resource to call on, but IMHO, this forum is based on the shainrg of one's setup (IE bragging) and primarily the sharing of information concerning products, and techniques. Read people' sigs...that gives you a good idea how many are running hardware and not having problems with it. IN the case of this mobo, i think people are absolutely posting when it works fine - they are posting cuz they are psyched it has hit 230/40/50 fsb or whatever. others are posting because they can't get it to work. Remember, some will not post if things are allright, but others will not if things are not allright. they will jsut send the thing back - or worse yet, if they don't know you can do such things, it goes in the back of the closet. I still have a cpu and a couple mobos from back in my initial days of building computers where looking back, it should have been RMA city. I jsut assumed at the time there was nothing you could do, even if you didn't do anything to the product that should have made it malfunction.
 
all of my nf7 series boards were gay about bios's to me.. all 3 are laying here w/ dead ones :p the dfi has been great to me so far, aside the cold boot isue where u have to restart for it to post.
 
well how bout that lol!
are you willing to part with them? I could use some boards to play around with soldering on and it would be good to have spare parts for when I eventually do something stoopid to mine. PM me if you could swing that - of course I would pay all S+H.
 
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