Asus A7V880 Bios problems

I am now on my second A7V880 from newegg. I can't get the bios to work right. I have a XP 2600 Barton cpu and all the bios reports most of the time is AMD Athlon 1.15 Ghz. It also won't detect my hard drive at all, and the cdroms about half the time. I tried updating to the latest bios, version 8, no help. I decided to try older versions, and version 4 seems to get the cpu right about half the time but when it does it gets stuck in a loop and the computer just keeps rebooting as soon as the bios is done. Also when I try to manually set the cpu parameters it won't stick. When I save and exit the computer just freezes, so I cut the power then when I restart it's all back to the defaults.

I 've tried stripping all the not-absolutley-necessary components out (hdd, cdroms, usb, floppy) to be sure that's not it, and swapped the cpu, ram, and video card with my other system, they seem fine.

Did I get two bad mobos in a row? Is there some obscure setting I'm missing?

I'm starting to think it's a bad bios chip. Thinking about trying to replace it myself rather than wait another two weeks plus shipping for a replacement mobo (again).

Anyone have any suggestions?

a7v880

Ok, the 1.15 ghz seems to be where this board defaults to after an error or if the cmos is cleared. What i have found is that you MUST use the AI overclock to set the FSB manually, or else it runs it at 100mhz no matter what cpu you have. I cannot get my system to run anywhere near reliably at 200mhz fsb, which i am rather annoyed about. I suggest working with 133 or so until you have the system working right, and can start tweaking. Set the FSB and the multiplier manually and see what you get.

when the setting "wont stick" whats happening is the computer is locking up (you are probably trying 200 mhz fsb) and the safety is kicking in. keep the FSB low and just use the multiplyer. I really, really wish i knew why this was