[A7V8X-X] BIOS died

[Hoshimaru]

Hello everyone

As you probably noticed I'm new here... Unfortunately, instead of bringing you a happy introduction, I've a sad story to tell.

Last Friday I installed an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (Barton) on my Asus A7V8X-X motherboard. Ok... Via KT400 on these boards is not officialy supposed to run at 400Mhz, certainly not if you've bank 0 and 1 containing each 512MB DDR3200. (see manual).

So I installed it and it was detected as an Athlon XP 2500+ and for the rest, runs stable with Linux and Windows.
Next, I changed the bios settings to make it run at 2200Mhz. It was detected as Athlon XP 3200+. CPUID detected a 400mhz fsb
I was very pleased, exept that I got a memory read error trying to start Half-Life 2 or 3D Studio Max 6.

CPU speed fluctuated between 2200.0 and 2200.2Mhz.
CPU temperature reached 65° C (AMD Boxed cooler & heatsink)
Case temperature reached 38° C (Chieftec Full Tower, no case extra fans)

After reading a lot on the internet, I shouldn't run it at that speed after all and get the newest bios revision from asus: revision 1013.

I downloaded that file and copied it to a 1.41MB disk. Then I rebooted the system and entered the EZ-Flash utility. It recognized the image and asked me to confirm to proceed. Like I did last time, I flashed the bios and the boot block.
EZ-Flash than told me to press a key to reboot and that's when nightmare began.

The first line I could read on the screen was BIOS ROM Checksum Error and the system asking me for a disk with the bios image. Luckily for me, I made a backup of the bios before flashing.

Bad luck for me... the keyboard doesn't respond. I had no other choise than press reset of do a soft power off... I choosed for the reset button.
I think that's the choice that killed my bios.

Screen went black, no keyboard, no mouse, no A: drive being accessed... I don't even think it did POST at all.

Ok... keep calm... get the manual and start reading...
CMOS clear. I did it step by step. No change
Removing the battery and power cord again, and pressing that damn power button in the hope to drain all remaining charge... also no change at all.

Apart from trying a hotflash, which I'm not gonna do , I've no idea what else I could try. Replacing the AGP card by a PCI one doesn't work either. I didn't try to remove one bar of memory yet, but it doesn't look like it will sovle boot problem.

For first time ever, it looks like I'll have to get my pc to a technician. The guy in the store told me to bring the whole case. I don't like that. I've personal information under Linux which should be not accessible by them, but they might destroy the data by picking the wrong hard disks when trying to recover Windows XP for instance. Or when they send the whole thing to a Asus service center... I don't wanna think how they'll handle my baby.
Worst of all, I went to see my retailer about it forgot to ask what it's gonna cost me. Maybe I should give him a call first.

I feel really bad that I can't solve this myself.

Ok ... I could get a pair of PLCC pliers and order a new chip with the software preloaded on it. That's probably the cheapest solution. 6 € for the pliers, 25 € for a new chip with preloaded bios software of choice. I'd might try that one.

On the other hand, if it's the store solution and it's gonna cost me more than 50 €, I could just order a new motherboard, certainly after that Barton fsb lock story seems to be true (see below).
My idea was to buy a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2
It looks like a good product. People seem to be happy with it and it has 2 bios chips... The board cost less than 100 €.

I'm starting to question Asus' reliabilty here... I downloaded that same bios chip twice at ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/socka/kt400/a7v8x-x/A7v8xx13.zip and had 2 different MD5 checksums for the same file saturday.
Today helpdesk.asus.com is down. Yesterday it was the download site which was down...
And my Asus gforce4 also returned once to their service center for a burned gpu as the fan (dirt-less) stopped working. I had to wait 3 weeks for getting a new one.

Can someone tell me what I should do to get that bios back to life or give me some advice on possible solutions ?

Thanks in advance

FSB Lock story...
It is said that the barton core cpu locks themselves to the fsb they're running on after 39 weeks of useage. I read that on several tech forums and still don't know if it's some kind of hoax or real stuff...
But if it's true and that the A7V8X-X runs at 166 - 200 or 333 Mhz, I'm better of with a new motherboard with 400Mhz fsb.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

The Asus A7V8X-X motherboard isn't known to have a repeated BIOS corruption unlike the early Asus A7N8X motherboards. It's likely that running the FSB at 200 mhz caused BIOS corruption if you did. It's also likely that the BIOS image file you got was corrupted.

 

[jkbanman]

i have the same board with a 2600+ running at 2400mhz 12*200. It has been fine. I have had it upto 2500mhz but is kinda unstable. After an hour or so.

 

[Hoshimaru]

I did run it at 200Mhz. But the bios broke after the flashing. The bios image itself was downloaded on a seperate machine as I thought the memory read error might corrupt the downloaded file.

Apart from the Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2, what would you suggest as a motherboard with good performance, being stable and leaving some space for future overclocking?

The choice for gigabyte mainly comes from the fact that it comes with 2 bios chips and few people complaining about it.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I did run it at 200Mhz. But the bios broke after the flashing. The bios image itself was downloaded on a seperate machine as I thought the memory read error might corrupt the downloaded file.

That's why you get and run Memtest86. Then you can tell if the RAM is unstable
without attempting to boot Windows and thus risk corrupting your Windows installation.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

i have the same board with a 2600+ running at 2400mhz 12*200. It has been fine. I have had it upto 2500mhz but is kinda unstable. After an hour or so.

That's probably because the motherboard you have is the nForce 2 version, which is called the Asus A7N8X-X, NOT the Asus A7V8X-X!!! There's NO PCI and AGP lock nor /6 divider with the KT400 version of the Asus motherboards, AFAIK!!! The only KT400 motherboard that I gotten wording about having a /6 divider is the Soyo SY-KT400 Dragon.

 

[JetEngineMech]

I asked the same question and decided on the NF7-S v2.0

thread

i have the same board with a 2600+ running at 2400mhz 12*200. It has been fine. I have had it upto 2500mhz but is kinda unstable. After an hour or so.

Wow, 200 fsb? I can't get past 167! Is is my PC2700 memory causing it?

Edit: Looks like I posted a few seconds too late, thanks for clearing that up RJARRRPCGP.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I asked the same question and decided on the NF7-S v2.0

thread



Wow, 200 fsb? I can't get past 167! Is is my PC2700 memory causing it?

You shall at least be able to get higher than 167 mhz!!!

Also, when I tested an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard, I found out that my 512 MB Kingston PC2700 DDR SDRAM, which has Infineon chips can do 195 mhz!!!! At 200 mhz, the Asus A7N8X-E POSTed, but Memtest86 failed. Memtest86 displayed 10 errors when at approximately 1 hour and a half.

 

[JetEngineMech]

Right now, I'm running at 13.5*168/34 1.75v (2.267 GHz). 13.0*173 1.7v (2249 GHz) also works. Which is better, the higher fsb or the higher overall speed?

 

[ILR]

Right now I have the same motherboard (A7V8X-X) and I just gotta say that its a total piece of crap :\. RJARRRPCGP said what I was going to say, that there's no PCI or AGP lock, and overclocking is like gambling with your harddrive. (I found that out here, actually. The thread is porbably buried somewhere...) The mobo also will randomly POST for no apparant reason... I can't wait to get rid of this -_-;

Right now, I'm running at 13.5*168/34 1.75v (2.267 GHz). 13.0*173 1.7v (2249 GHz) also works. Which is better, the higher fsb or the higher overall speed?

Dont quote me on this.. but I think the FSB talks directly with your ram, so when you increase the FSB, your speeding up your ram. When I adjusted the FSB during my one fling with OCing, I did notice cosmetic speed increases around windows, but that might just be because my ram was being accessed faster. My computer stopped booting before I could do any benchmarking.

 

[Jumpin Jack]

You shall at least be able to get higher than 167 mhz!!!

Also, when I tested an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard, I found out that my 512 MB Kingston PC2700 DDR SDRAM, which has Infineon chips can do 195 mhz!!!! At 200 mhz, the Asus A7N8X-E POSTed, but Memtest86 failed. Memtest86 displayed 10 errors when at approximately 1 hour and a half.

Memtest86 ver 1.4, failed mine at 196Mhz . To compensate, I increased the multi, but it crashed. A friend of mine said that if I loaded a modded BIOS that it could assist OCing and improve the stability, is this true?

 

[punker_4_Real]

Right now, I'm running at 13.5*168/34 1.75v (2.267 GHz). 13.0*173 1.7v (2249 GHz) also works. Which is better, the higher fsb or the higher overall speed?

ha my T-Bred-B can do 2.2GHz 1.65v 400FSB

2.47GHz @ 1.8v

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Memtest86 ver 1.4, failed mine at 196Mhz . To compensate, I increased the multi, but it crashed. A friend of mine said that if I loaded a modded BIOS that it could assist OCing and improve the stability, is this true?

For me, the same thing, too. Anything higher than 195 mhz, then Memtest86 would give me at least 1 error, probably a couple errors or some more.