ASUS P5W DH - Problems + Fixes Thread

[d4d4cH]

hello
i got this board and i am trying to set it up
the rest of the hardware is 2x4770 ati for crossfire, E5800 dual core pentium, 2x2gb ddr2 800 ballistix, 2x1gb ddr2 800 gskill
so far the problems i ran in were. hanging in bios while entering ez flash or that overclocking program, i reflashed a couple of times 2901 bios and now had to go back to 3001 for vcore to be selectable for wolfdale
what kind of FSB speeds should i expect?
sometimes when i RESTART from windows, the board just shuts off after displaying processor speed, right before showing the available memory
is that normal, i.e. one of the bugs or?
i just know that there are some real experts on this

thanks for the help

PS does anyone have a backplate that he doesnt need anymore?

[Rider Eh!]

Hello All,

I’ve been having issues with both startup and restarting my computer lately. When I restart this computer, it rarely posts. I have to do a cold boot (push the power button for 3 seconds and boot again). Sometimes on cold boot it also will not post. I have also had the issue where it hangs during boot, and there is a bar blinking on the top left of the monitor (TV in this case, it’s a HTPC). I also had a bootmgr img corrupt error once. Sometimes it will also boot up fine. Note that I have not overclocked this board, nor changed any hardware/drivers on this board for several months. I did replace the CMOS battery several months ago when I had a similar issue, and that seemed to fix it then.

This time around I’ve tried running the Windows 7 startup repair tool from the Win 7 disc, and it did not detect any errors. I’ve also run a chkdsk from within windows, again no errors.

I’m running Windows 7, the latest Bios, a Core 2 Duo E8400, ATI 5400 GPU, the HDD is on SATA.

I wonder if either the power supply, hard drive, or just motherboard has gone bad due to old age? I’ve had this system for 5 years. I've borrowed a PSU and will try it either tonight or Friday when I have time. I have replaced the PSU once before as one failed on me (it was known to be a bad model).

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[ChronoDog]

I've had this board since summer 2006, and it still works with a trusty Q9550 @ 3.4GHz
and 8GB of RAM doing some 1080p encoding for a studio
My board started exhibiting the kind of issues you're mentioning last year, but it turned out
to have been caused by a few swollen capacitors around the board - solved by replacing all
of the old electrolyte caps on the board with solid-state ones off of a new board that died irreparably.

Even the best electrolyte caps aren't meant to last for over 3-5 years under average usage
conditions AFAIK, so it's really surprising to see it working so stably for nearly 6 years straight...

[Rider Eh!]

Did you replace every cap on the board? I have experience with soldering, but I wonder whether it's worth the work. How much time did this job take you??

[WallyZ]

Still alive and kicking.

In case any of you are left I thought I let you know that there is at least 1 P5W DH Deluxe kicking along strong out there.

P5W DH Deluxe (acquired 2007)
Q9650 Core 2 Quad 3.0GHZ (Q9400 and many other CPUs available)
G.Skill PC2-8500 4x2GB (8GB) (5-5-5-13) (and lots of other memory available)
1 x nVidia ENG 450 GTS
1 x Samsung EVO 240 GB SSD
1 x WD Cavier Black 1TB
1 x PCI Xreative X-Fi Platinum
1 x Thermaltake 430W PSU

Windows 8.1 PRO 64.

All settings are auto and SPD. Even a 5% overclock makes the system unstable but it is 7 years old. But I'm not an over clocker. Tried the memory at 4-4-4-12 (much faster) but the system would black screen of death (reboot) once or twice a day. This was on all standard auto frequencies and with hyper 3 disabled.

I found this thread while investigating my Windows 8.1 instabilities. I have read up to page 205.

Windows 8 64 is much faster then XP on this system. In the last days of XP it would take 10-15 seconds to open an explorer window. I can snap open 4 or 5 explorer windows quicker than i can blink now!

If the hardware survives I will be using this system for a few more years to come.

[MINIz guy]

I've been using my P5W DH since I was in 7th or 8th grade. I forget when I exactly built it. I am now a rising junior in college and out the the PC scene. I mainly use my desktop for racing simulations. It is slow at this point, and I have 50/50 on upgrading a little (to a Q6600) or a lot (mobo/CPU/RAM). Any advice?

P5W DH Deluxe
E6300 (Conroe?)
Corsair 4gb (2x2GB)
ATI 5870
Seagate 160GB 7200RPM
Corsair TX750

Win7 Home Premium 64-bit

[WallyZ]

You can add more memory (to 8GB), put in an SSD, a Q9300 QUAD core or better, a fast graphics card and update to Win 8.1 and you will get a reasonable machine.

But for two things:

1) The cost will not be worth it.
2) You will have to work through some setup and driver issues (good if your are technically minded).

I think it's time you retire this board and buy some new hardware. A lot of good cheap and much faster hardware out there at the moment.

However if you can get all that stuff free and you like messing around with boards and software than go for it!

WallyZ

I've been using my P5W DH since I was in 7th or 8th grade. I forget when I exactly built it. I am now a rising junior in college and out the the PC scene. I mainly use my desktop for racing simulations. It is slow at this point, and I have 50/50 on upgrading a little (to a Q6600) or a lot (mobo/CPU/RAM). Any advice?

P5W DH Deluxe
E6300 (Conroe?)
Corsair 4gb (2x2GB)
ATI 5870
Seagate 160GB 7200RPM
Corsair TX750

Win7 Home Premium 64-bit

[WallyZ]

Read all 340 pages.

If anyone would like a good home (P5W DH home that is) for an unused QX9650, keep me in mind

WallyZ

[chron]

Still using this board. Q6600 at 333 mhz FSB (3 ghz) 8gb of ram, and just very recently, a new SSD which btw makes a WORLD of difference.

This board with a SSD makes it seem like I just upgraded my entire PC. It's honestly that drastic.

I'll be retiring this PC to the bedroom soon to simply be a gaming PC using a ps3 bluetooth controller, and also as a HTPC for playing blurays. My experiences with this thing so far have been extremely mixed, but it's hanging in there lol

[jaatavaresf]

Guys, I am quitting with this MOBO ... (P5W-DH Deluxe)...

I've been using it as my main system at home for 11 years !!! 24x7, always on.

It has ..
- 3 IDE disks attached to it
- 2 optical drives (1x CD IDE, 1x DVD SATA)
- 4 SATA disks attached to an Addonics port-multiplier attached to sata2 port (JMicron) that accepts port-multipliers.

The 4 SATA disks are 2TB each in a software RAID5 array.

I have been using Linux (Debian) in this machine since the beginning.

This board gave me headaches since I bought it! It was a nightmare to configure and build a linux kernel for it 11 years ago. The mix of 3 disk controllers, the mix of raid options between them..., the unknown/random disk detection order, ....

Also, I remember that I bought ballistix RAM to use with it. I remember I quit trying because I wasn't able to make the overclocked ballistix ram to work stable with this machine even when configured with a lower frequency. So, I bought other 8G stock kingston that works still stable at 667mhz.

Not to forget to mention that the CPU is core2quad Q6600 with its original cooler until now. I just cleaned it.

This machine used something like more than 5-7 PSU during its life until now. They simply stopped working. Melted?

But telling you the truth about this MOBO that I bought 11 years ago.... I remember I was looking for an Intel MOBO at that time, but Intel MOBOs didn't have USB and Audio ports in the front. They were designed for servers, not workstations. Also, at that time I had a mix of IDE drives and I was planning to have SATA drives just in the future. Intel MOBOs didn't support both at that time as far as I remember.

This board is a LAME thing! Designed for gamers ... It has all that mixed port sh*t raids that will make you lose your data at some point! That is why I always kept with software raids with this MOBO. It has that sh*t wireless router thing that I never used too!

Asus boards are still the same beautiful sh*t designed for gamers. And it sells!

I also found now some references in ahci.c source in Linux that shows lots of exceptions due to the exotic hardware implementation of this specific board. Another big crap.

I never did any overclock with it. I was looking for just an stable system... and it is difficult with this MOBO. It used to be stable in the beginning, with few drives. Once you do a reboot, you will have to boot lots of times until drives get recognized, etc ...

I am using a nvidia graphics card, fanless entrylevel.

And I bought in the last months a Seasonic fanless 550W PSU to use with this system. Clean, no noise.. and also 2 Intel SSDs to use in software RAID1 with the root filesystem.

Seasonic is already installed replacing a broken Master Cooler PSU. SSDs are already installed replacing an old IDE drive ....

And now the machine became unstable. Everytime I boot it detects randomly the drives.
Sometimes it doesn't get any drive.
Sometimes it complains with "CMOS Date/Time not set". But the Date/Time is there, ok, set.

BIOS is v3001. Latest non-beta.

I cleared the CMOS something like 7 times...... and reconfigured everything again.... and sometimes the message "CMOS Date/Time not set" appears and the boot hangs.

I am thinking that this message is coming from JMicron BIOS (not the main BIOS) because it appears when JMicron drives are not detected.

I am thinking that something in BIOS is not stable.

PSU is new, one of the best brands, not showing drive resets or any problem regarding power.

Also, with all drives disconnected I can still see this "CMOS Date/Time not set" problem appearing from time to time.

I looked for a replacement CPU/MOBO/RAM for this system but it would be too expensive, something like a Core i7 with 64GB RAM and Intel MOBO would cost 1200 usd.

So, doing a better research, I am planning to buy an old Intel S3210SHLC MOBO that a guy is selling and that is like new, never used. It seems compatible with my CPU, RAM, video card and the rest ... It isn't compatible with the port-multiplier, but it has 6 SATA ports, enough. It doesn't support IDE drives, I will have to migrate my data from it.

At least, I think in the end I will have an stable system.

And this crap-lame-gamer MOBO will be able to RIP in hell ...

[BenchZowner]

You are overreacting a lot, and it also seems that you clearly have a lot of misunderstandings on the things you are mentioning ( for example RAID... like all Intel chipset motherboards, this one came with a 4 port Intel ICH7R "Soft" RAID controller, which is the same on every single Socket 775 motherboard of its time ).

This was a pretty good motherboard, unless you have no clue how to set things up in BIOS.
I had 2 of them and everything was running butter smooth for years, even with extreme overclocking.

Anyway, this is a very aged system for anything but light office and web usage for today ( and maybe some LOL & Dota 2 )...

As far as condemning Asus ROG motherboards in general, you are once again overreacting and spreading BS, because there are plenty of f&*@#$*ing awesome motherboards in that lineup.

[WallyZ]

Read all 340 pages.

If anyone would like a good home (P5W DH home that is) for an unused QX9650, keep me in mind

WallyZ

My MOBO is still running after 15 years non stop.

Still good for browsing, email, youtube and lite gaming (COD 3).

It's a lot better than my 2012 HP i5 gen 2 but not as fast single threaded performance as a Surface pro 2 i5 gen 3. But it is still better on multi threaded.

I thought I died the other day but it turned out to be the power supply. Changed that and it's still going.

It gets used every day.

Can't believe it!!!