ASUS P5W DH - Problems + Fixes Thread

[Yolanda]

No, you can use 3 SATA hard drives with ICH7R without any issues, also you can use SATA DVD on JMicron. Simply native channels from ICH7R better supported by different OSs such as Linux, MacOS X, old and beta Windows versions, different live bootup CD/DVDs, bootup floppy disks and any standalone backup, partitioning and other programs working without OS. In this cases you have more chanches to access your DVD and 2 SATA hard drives. However really it is not a big chache not to access your DVD from JMicron, this controller is also widelly supported.

The only suggestion to stay away from EZ-backup while you have free other SATAs on board, EZ-backup connected through Silicon Image SATA controller to SATA4 port of ICH7R, resulting some reduced performance (not recommended for a system drive) and some problems with software I wrote above, but specially with diagnostic software.

[tomcug]

Yolanda, looks like a real boost in noticeable with timings at 4-4-4-12 compared to 5-6-6-18, Everest memory benchmark score increases to 9700 MB/s compared to 9300 MB/s. Super PI also likes tight timings very much, score is much better, but I don't remember exact numbers now. However, overclocking memories to 1000MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings doesn't give much higher performance, difference is really small. With P5W DH we really need very good memories to be able to use manual timings with high FSB speeds. My memories managed to pass MemTest even at 425MHz and with manual timings (2,2V). I didn't try more because my E7200 held me back. However I'm pretty sure that with good amount of volts, maybe 2,4V, it would work at 450MHz too but I'm not sure at all. It's good to see that your GTX 295 works good, and with my HD 4770 CCC shows PCI-E 2.0 too .

[marwin99]

No, you can use 3 SATA hard drives with ICH7R without any issues, also you can use SATA DVD on JMicron. Simply native channels from ICH7R better supported by different OSs such as Linux, MacOS X, old and beta Windows versions, different live bootup CD/DVDs, bootup floppy disks and any standalone backup, partitioning and other programs working without OS. In this cases you have more chanches to access your DVD and 2 SATA hard drives. However really it is not a big chache not to access your DVD from JMicron, this controller is also widelly supported.

The only suggestion to stay away from EZ-backup while you have free other SATAs on board, EZ-backup connected through Silicon Image SATA controller to SATA4 port of ICH7R, resulting some reduced performance (not recommended for a system drive) and some problems with software I wrote above, but specially with diagnostic software.

Thanks for the inputs! Will try the JMicron then and maybe check some preformance data compared to ICH7R.

[WeldZilla]

Hey tomcug, I found that the P5W DH likes to run mem at 1:1 and gets better performance doing so. At 425 fsb 1:1 with your mem you might be able to run at 3-3-3-5.
If you can you will get some nice results from your system. I have noticed on every other board that 1:1 is slower but not that board. Try it and see how it works for you.
Hey it don't count without proof..




My Daily clock was 425 fsb @ 3825mhz and my mem was run 1:1 @ 425 timings 3-3-3-5.

So experiment even if you have to run @ say 3-4-3-5 or 3-3-4-4 or 3-4-4-4 or 5

WZ

[tomcug]

Looks like this is a good idea . I'll try this tomorrow and write what happens.

[micmachack]

Ok, I know this issue has been raised MANY many times but I'm still having an issue adjusting the vcore on my mobo. Its a revision 1.02G and my CPU is an E4500 (65nm). On the stock vcore and overclocked a little this baby is still running really cool, so I would like to pump some more vcore in, and even buy a better cooler if I can get this CPU any higher

So far I have tried:

- flashing the BIOS all the way back to the first one that supports my CPU: 2206

- flashing the BIOS from freeDOS using afudos and the /pbnc /n tags. Cleared CMOS as motherboard described then booted the computer. Disabled C1E, SpeedStep, Fan control crap then rebooted, again and again and again. Went into JumperFree and Vcore still says AUTO!!!! YARGH

- I was on BIOS 2801 but it had exact same issues as 2901

I have never been able to adjust vcore

[tomcug]

Looks like you're another user with this error . The bad news is that so far we haven't been able to find out how to fix it . Sorry, no good news for now, let's see what the other users will write .

[IvanAndreevich]

I am having a retarded issue with this mobo. Something that I've never seen before. I tried: a different PSU, a different graphics card, different RAM. I even RMA'd the mobo because I thought that must be it, and the one I got back is behaving EXACTLY the same.

I start Prime and it runs OK for a while. Then, at some point the system hard restarts (as if reset has been pressed) and freezes during post. The exact operation it freezes on is "Initializing USB controllers". It doesn't matter if there are no USB devices attached at all, it just freezes there during post. Even resetting CMOS doesn't help reliably.

Sometimes it will post again (not easy), and then repeat until next time. This is the most annoying problem I have ever encountered.

[tomcug]

I've just started experimenting with timings, so far I've managed to boot with 3-4-4-12 timings, will try more later. Good news is that with this settings I've got 10000 MB/s in Everest . So another huge boost over SPD timings.

EDIT

I've just tried 3-3-4-12 timings, seems to be stable and performance is much higher again .

[WeldZilla]

Alright!! See there is hidden power in there for you all to find and dig out!! Nice job tomcug, you may yet finsd a little more and if not at least you passed the 10000 barrier in Everest.

WZ

[Chrysalis]

guys will 2004 bios with windows 7?

I am thinking of rolling back my bios since it seems every other bios version has some sort of bug like the current intel speedstep not working bug in latest bios.

I have to agree with other posters I have never had such a buggy board, one thing I dont understand is that with every other bios flasher I have used there is an option to clear the cmos when you flash so after flash it is all reset. With this board you flash and are expected to manually clear the cmos after, a very unusual flash procedure.

[Chrysalis]

No, you can use 3 SATA hard drives with ICH7R without any issues, also you can use SATA DVD on JMicron. Simply native channels from ICH7R better supported by different OSs such as Linux, MacOS X, old and beta Windows versions, different live bootup CD/DVDs, bootup floppy disks and any standalone backup, partitioning and other programs working without OS. In this cases you have more chanches to access your DVD and 2 SATA hard drives. However really it is not a big chache not to access your DVD from JMicron, this controller is also widelly supported.

The only suggestion to stay away from EZ-backup while you have free other SATAs on board, EZ-backup connected through Silicon Image SATA controller to SATA4 port of ICH7R, resulting some reduced performance (not recommended for a system drive) and some problems with software I wrote above, but specially with diagnostic software.

I did the trick (which I got earlier in this thread) which disabled the silicon image and makes the 4th port effectively act as a normal 4th port for ICH7, does this still suffer the performance hit?

to do this I removed a jumper on the board somewhere.

[Chrysalis]

I am 3-4 mobos past my P5W which was relegated as a standby mobo for over a year. But I got around to sending in my 1.02G board today to the local service centre cos it was getting errratic just trying to get it to POST. Hope Asus Taiwan gets their hands on it in the near future, somehow.

Got a brand new P5B Premium V.E set as replacement and I promptly installed Win 7RC for a spin, posting with it now. Guess it's game over for my P5W DH Dlx experience, wishing you guys still hanging on to their P5W all the best.

3-4 boards wow, how often do you buy new boards then?

I am still on mine (I brought when ich8 was already out tho I didnt buy it in in 2006) and using my 6420 dual core.

I am guessing since I have no real need to upgrade my cpu as it is rarely stressed and all games run fine on my pc that I play I cannot justify a new board, to me buying a new board for the sake of fixing annoyances and the work involved in moving the cpu, cleaning the old thermal, reapplying new thermal etc. is too much for my lazy self. I also have noticed barely any software takes advantage of dual core and I expect even less would take advantage of quad core, multi core seems most beneficial for server type usage. I am still using windows xp on this pc tho, and I do know vista (and I guess win7) is way snappier on a dual core system so the XP code base is probably not optimised with multi core in mind.

My friend got a smaller core 8400cpu chip which is rated very highly by people, I did consider it but the 45nm issues on this board and the fact I could barely justify it by the fact I am not even stressing out my current chip I didnt go ahead with it, I certianly couldnt justify spending on new board and cpu. These core2duos were so overpowered on launch they still do the job today.

[mikepaul]

With me, upgrading at the motherboard level takes time. The way things are going in The Economy, I'll have to skip getting a new i7 PC for a year or two, making the purchase of a new motherboard that can use a Q9450 my next 'big' upgrade.

Anyone know of a 775 MB that has like 9 non-RAID SATA ports and is ACTUALLY 45nm-compatible?...

[IvanAndreevich]

I am having a retarded issue with this mobo. Something that I've never seen before. I tried: a different PSU, a different graphics card, different RAM. I even RMA'd the mobo because I thought that must be it, and the one I got back is behaving EXACTLY the same.

I start Prime and it runs OK for a while. Then, at some point the system hard restarts (as if reset has been pressed) and freezes during post. The exact operation it freezes on is "Initializing USB controllers". It doesn't matter if there are no USB devices attached at all, it just freezes there during post. Even resetting CMOS doesn't help reliably.

Sometimes it will post again (not easy), and then repeat until next time. This is the most annoying problem I have ever encountered.

Oh well it turns out the techs at ASUS just reset the bios of my screwed up board and shipped it back to me when I RMA'd it after having the same damn problem. Talked to level 2 support today on the phone and the board is going back for a non-ignorant service. So the above is almost certainly a hardware fault of some sort.

[slaman]

I'm hoping the gurus on this forum will be able to help me:

I have two drives installed in a RAID1 array on the EZ-Backup ports...

- How do I find S.M.A.R.T. information for these drives? All utilities, including the Western Digital Diagnostic Tool, which is required for RMA, does not read this data.

- How do I determine which drive has failed in the RAID1 array?

Essentially, how will I know if one drive is on its last legs, how will I know when the RAID fails, and how will I know which of the two drives actually failed?

I posted my question a while back on the Asus website and didn't get any good responses:

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?...age=1&count=17

[pc1x1]

Oh well it turns out the techs at ASUS just reset the bios of my screwed up board and shipped it back to me when I RMA'd it after having the same damn problem. Talked to level 2 support today on the phone and the board is going back for a non-ignorant service. So the above is almost certainly a hardware fault of some sort.

I haven't booted the board yet, mine is 1.02g, wish me luck , going to boot it tomorrow or the day after. Have a 9550 45nm, so just waiting for the problems, if I hit 2.8 ghz and no problems, Ill be a happy camper, thats 350 fsb.

[slaman]

I'm hoping the gurus on this forum will be able to help me:

I have two drives installed in a RAID1 array on the EZ-Backup ports...

- How do I find S.M.A.R.T. information for these drives? All utilities, including the Western Digital Diagnostic Tool, which is required for RMA, does not read this data.

- How do I determine which drive has failed in the RAID1 array?

Essentially, how will I know if one drive is on its last legs, how will I know when the RAID fails, and how will I know which of the two drives actually failed?

I posted my question a while back on the Asus website and didn't get any good responses:

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?...age=1&count=17

Found the response myself. Installed Silicon Image's SteelVine Manager application... nothing in any documentation that I've read indicates that this is an essential application to monitor the RAID array's status...

See the above thread for the response.

[dabl]

I haven't booted the board yet, mine is 1.02g, wish me luck , going to boot it tomorrow or the day after. Have a 9550 45nm, so just waiting for the problems, if I hit 2.8 ghz and no problems, Ill be a happy camper, thats 350 fsb.

I'm very interested to hear how you do with this chip on the p5w dh and the 2901 bios, particularly with any 64 bit windows installs.

I have the same cpu related questions that you asked in this previous post

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...postcount=8233

Thanks for the link in that post to the related thread at social.technet.microsoft.com, very interesting and eye opening. I had gotten the impression from the below Asus blurb that other than the limitations a
Q9550 would work fine. I sure haven't seen many success stories in these threads so far, but from what I can tell one guy with a Q9650 and one guy with a Q8600 report success with Win 7 RC 64 on a p5w dh.

Support information for 45nm CPU (from FAQ)
http://support.asus.com/faq/faq.aspx?SLanguage=en-us
...
I’ve recently bought a Intel 45nm Yorkfield CPU Q9650. When I put it onto my P5W DH deluxe, everything is perfect, but L2 cache size shows 0 KB in BIOS. When I check it in CPU-Z, the problem persists. How do I re-solve it?

Due to chipset limitation, i975X chipset is not able to support all the features of 45nm CPU. The following is a list of the limitations:
1. VT function does not work.
2. The maximum FSB is capped at 1066MHz.
3. 0.5 CPU multiplier is not supported.
4. L2 cache size is not recognized correctly. However L2 cache is still functioning.
...

I'm currently running an E6600 at stock speed with bios 2801, Win 7 RC 32 bit and Vista 32 bit.

I'm interested in a quad core chip like the Q9550 or Q8400 for eventual use with 64 bit Win 7 (will start with Win 7 32 bit) but it sounds like I might be better off buying a new motherboard?

[Yolanda]

At stock clock you willn't get any errors, flash latest bios 2901, board will be as the fastest boards with S775 socket, and even can overclock it by 5-10%.
However do you really need a quad core cpu? if you haven't such programs better to stay with your E6600 and overclock it to ~3.3GHz.

[Supa Chiney]

Hello, recently i've started having trouble with booting my mobo, the thing is when I first turn it on it doesn't POST what i've found out to work is turn it on and then on back again and usually it POST but sometimes it doesn't, when it doesn't I switch off the PSU and make it rest for like 10 mins or so and the turn it on again and it will boot.... :S any ideas??

My specs

CPU: Intel Core 2 QUAD Q6600 @ 3 GHz, 333x9, 1.25V
MOBO: Asus P5W DH Deluxe, BIOS 2801
RAM: 4x2GB DDR2 800MHz 5-5-5-18 @ 667 MHz, 1.8V
GPU: XFX Geforce 9800 GT
PSU: OCZ GameXStream OCZ600GXSSLI ATX12V 600W Power Supply 10

[Falkentyne]

L2 cache is detected on my QX9650 on bioses 2506 and newer (2406 and 2302, the earliest that supported QX, showed 0k, BUT Sandra, CPU-Z and Everest showed the proper cache (and the cache/memory speed test functioned as it should).

If you're getting 0k in 2801 with the Q9550, you should still at least get the proper size in CPU-Z. If you're getting 0k in cpu-z too, can you run an everest memory benchmark and look at the speeds of the L1 and L2 cache?

[Falkentyne]

Hello, recently i've started having trouble with booting my mobo, the thing is when I first turn it on it doesn't POST what i've found out to work is turn it on and then on back again and usually it POST but sometimes it doesn't, when it doesn't I switch off the PSU and make it rest for like 10 mins or so and the turn it on again and it will boot.... :S any ideas??

My specs

CPU: Intel Core 2 QUAD Q6600 @ 3 GHz, 333x9, 1.25V
MOBO: Asus P5W DH Deluxe, BIOS 2801
RAM: 4x2GB DDR2 800MHz 5-5-5-18 @ 667 MHz, 1.8V
GPU: XFX Geforce 9800 GT
PSU: OCZ GameXStream OCZ600GXSSLI ATX12V 600W Power Supply 10

Remove one stick of memory and see if the problem goes away. Or switch the remaining stick. Memory that is dying (like micron D9's) will cause this to happen.

Raise the memory voltage to 2.1v .....does the problem go away then?

[Supa Chiney]

Remove one stick of memory and see if the problem goes away. Or switch the remaining stick. Memory that is dying (like micron D9's) will cause this to happen.

Raise the memory voltage to 2.1v .....does the problem go away then?

this sticks are brand new, i did that when i first installed them, i forgot to mention that this problem started when i added a pair of the same type i had before (on my sig) but those were different version, so i though that was the problem, that's why i bought the new ram.

I cold booted twice this morning without issues will, report back in a couple days or later if problem stops/continues

is it safe to run them at 2.1v even if they are rated to run at 1.8v ?

[Yolanda]

2.1V is save even for 24/7, but you only want to test it.