Asus A8N32-SLI initial impression....WOW!

I have an Adaptec ACS-300 external usb/esata single 3.5" drive enclosure that I have connected to the A8N32-SLI esata port. I don't keep it connected all the time, as I use this enclosure for a lot of different things. It always worked perfectly when connecting it to this board's esata (or usb) port. I have not attempted to boot it from that port, but I will experiment with it soon.

While searching Adaptec's site for the model number of this enclosure, I found that they have it listed under their "discontinued" products. I doubt that it was on their active product list for even 2 years. Not much to support on their part; it either works or it doesn't. I found that this particular product worked better than some other companies' similar offerings. Figured Adaptec would be manufacturing it for a while longer.

Update:

With the enclosure connected to the esata port, the SiI bios sees the seagate drive, and I can choose the drive in A8N32 bios to boot. Didn't boot to Windows on that drive, but it boots to DOS and runs Symantec Ghost from there perfectly. I'm sure it would boot to Windows if I had that installed on the external drive.

The Adaptec external enclosure is transparent when running; the system sees the drive as if it were connected directly to the controller port. I've never seen it perform differently when connected to any controller port. Have even connected it to normal controller ports via cable with normal "L" sata connector to esata, such as the cable Veedo described.

weird, i dont know whats going on then...ive tried 2 different drives, im going to try another tomorrow and see if it works. maybe the esata just wont work connected to a bare drive, has anyone else tried that? no need for an external enclosure that way, i thought it would be a popular thing to do, but i guess not many people have tried it?

This might be a completely stupid thing to say, but make sure the drive has proper power going to it. The esata cable only supplies data signals.

Sorry, not trying to insult you or anything.

I wouldn't think that not having the drive attached to the drive chassis would make any difference in the grounding, but I suppose that's worth looking into also.

I know those esata-to-sata cables aren't easy to find, but maybe try another cable. Perhaps you got a bad one.

I have read that normal internal sata cables are sensitive to a small bending radius, but I've done a pretty sharp right angle on them before with no damage. Some of them may be more fragile than others.

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Originally Posted by tarantul

m8, i am not NAAB. i knew it. i have now 225x12=2700. it's all is ok. i am waiting for new RAM atm. maybe RAM problem. compatible problems maybe..

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Your problem is most likely cooling. The A8N32 runs hotter than the A8NSLI. You might wanna check around your mobo and see if there are any hot spots. Especially the mosfets. You might wanna take off the crap tim that they give you and put some AS5 on it. Also check the north bridge cuz it gets really damn hot too. I used 2 have this mobo and the heat pipes would always feel hot. I used 2 have the same cooler as you too. The TTBT is probably better 4 this board since it can blow onto the heatpipes.

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Originally Posted by Veedo

I've tried 2 different drives

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2 different drives, but were they the same brand? When I connect my Seagate 7200.8 to the Sil controller I cannot even get to the initial Asus BIOS screen, not even trying to boot from it, but all my WD and Plextor drives work flawlessly. Go figure....

holy shmoly that t.t. is a pretty big hsf set up.

i have the ac64 pro.

i have had my 3700 and x24400 to 2.7 max oc but that is with
the original bios.

i currently have the x24400 oc,ed to 2.6 but with the
stock bios.

hell i didnt know the mosfet heatsink didnt even have any t.i.m.
i never even looked on mine.

hi, just got this board to replace mine asrock dual sata2.

I have a problem though. After all the casual boot info like cpu, mem, hdds and all that i came to a message that says: checking nvram... And then the boot freezes, some times it manages to show: checking nvram... ok, and then it freezes. The second problem i have is that my 3200 e6 chip is shown as a 5200+ in bios, so the bios need to be updatet but i cant get throug the boot so to speak. Have i missed a setting in bios and what does check nvram mean. Cant be the memsticks or can it, they work great in other systems and the board boots up just fine wiht them. 2x512 mb pc 3200 samsung tccc.

It appears like the board dosent want to start any of the drives at all. when i press f8 and the boot menu comes up it just dosent do a thing and i hafta hit ctrl-alt-del. when i boot without any drives it still says cheking nvram... ok.. and nothing.
help would be nice.

hi ya all,

What Bios ver. is every using for stabilty and for over clocking. seem to remember ( and posted earier in this thread ) that some of the Asus Bios release were pretty shabby.

I'm still on the factory release. 1101 ( i think .)

I have found that with my 3000+ winchester the board boots up ant into windows without a hich. I updated to the newest bios ver that i could find on asus homepage 1303 i supposed it was called. but still when i switch to my new 3200+ the board still says that its a 5200+ and i cant pass the cheking nvram... thingy. it the board or my cpu then? maybe there is a newer bios somewhere. gonna check.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by blade148

hi ya all,

What Bios ver. is every using for stabilty and for over clocking. seem to remember ( and posted earier in this thread ) that some of the Asus Bios release were pretty shabby.

I'm still on the factory release. 1101 ( i think .)

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try to update to 1303. it's a final version atm. and i think final at all
it's a good one.

thanks I'll try that.

hot damn....after a year this thread is still alive! aren't y'all suppose to be all over the intel conroe? :lol2:

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Originally Posted by ben805

hot damn....after a year this thread is still alive! aren't y'all suppose to be all over the intel conroe? :lol2:

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939 needs to hold me over another year! :toast:

Some of us are still wringing as much out of these as we can :stick:

i know what you mean, i'm waiting for the quad core and will stick with the good ol' opteron for a little longer :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ben805

i know what you mean, i'm waiting for the quad core and will stick with the good ol' opteron for a little longer :D

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m8. s939 is still alive :D and this topic is alive too :)
i am waiting for intel penryn..

honestly, i just got this rig to work half way decent, and now 939 is dated lol. i just dont feel like another upgrade with new bugs and quirks. all is good on this board, except i still havent gotton the esata to work,

well said, i agree with you 100 percent, its just insane how fast new platforms get pushed out. why amd even bothered with the am2 thing is beyond me, i never understood why people were switching from 939 to am2.

I agree for the most part (with Mike that is). I only bothered to switch to Conroe since I was upgrading from a socket 754 chipset (from which I saw a big performance jump). The conroe is nice for those who are doing a lot of media encoding or for playing HD video (HD video is very demanding with the better codecs), as well as when I was doing some serious data crunching/folding. You are however right, the move to AM2 hasn't held up in value to this point. It really was more of a move to a new platform/socket for use on future processors. Barcelona (? =K8L) will be the first real improvement for the AM2 socket. The memory controllers on K8 simply don't function as well as those in the Intel chipsets, hence the increased performance of DDR2 for Intel over AMD. The Memory controller for Barcelona will likely make a vast difference in DDR2 performance.

Looking back, I should have probably upgraded to 939 over conroe, as it would have been somewhat cheaper, but then my conroe comp died anyway, so I dunno what will be available when I have the money to re-buy next month. Barcelona will likely be the start of a better AM2 platform, so it may be a good time to buy back into AMD. Course then I have to pick my way through the veritable minefield of AM2 Motherboards...

I just flashed to the newest bios on the asus webpage and now i got some serious troubles.

I started by wanting to get into my bios and tinker around tonight, i was still using the old school 0805 bios so i got th 1303 from the asus webpage and flashed it. I couldnt get into th ebios with my usb keyboard and was hoping th new bios would be "smarter" than th old one

Well i restarted like it asked me to but it just sat there and did nothing, i tried to restart it like 10 times and no dice, then i finally got it to start (no idea why it started though this time) and it took a few minutes to get into windows. No the usual 10-15 seconds, it took like 3 minutes.

Now when i got in to windows i can look around but my net doesnt work at all, its doesnt even recognize that there is a second harddrive which i had no troubles with at all before.

Anyone seen an issue like this? I restarted it again and it said ntldr was missing... wasnt last time... wtf is going on?

I reflashed the bios, no difference at all. I cant get into th bios at all, does anyone know how to get in with a usb keybaord?

I rebooted again and its been at the windows loading screen for 10 mins befor echanging... i dont think this is normal lol

I rebooted again last night after i got into t bios (finally) and was able to change my clock speed and such back to 2.5 ghz, i thought this might be haveen th problem. It was not. On my raptor it takes almost 10 minutes to load now... is this a windows problem or a bios set up problem?

It also seems to stay at the asus logo screen when i first boot up too for a long time not just a second or two. ANy ideas? I really need som help here, im sure its something simple i just cant figure out what.

Super Stokey......did you reset the cmos after flashing ??

Suer did, nothing i did would fix it. I had to go to the toe 1205 bios to get anything to work and it slowly started to. I almost said to hell with it and upgraded to a intel system yesturday.... I took me over 5 hours to get this thing all straightend out

Took a few screenies of my BIOS settings.

Anything that sticks out that could give me that little bit extra juice? :D

Images

I'm just wondering if this still is among the best motherboards out there for socket 939? My DFI Expert is starting to fail, so I'm wondering if this motherboard will do me any good with my x2 3800+?