Asus 680i, P5N32-E Sli Results.

[alexanderhuzar]

As for the Ram I have 4 sticks of 512. The first time it booted up I had all of them installed and the PC would just restart right after the Asus splash screen would go away. Then sometimes it wouldnt even show video.

It's rare to get a motherboard that with all 4 RAM banks occupied is going to be stable. Also make sure your northbridge isn't getting too hot. Also try updating your BIOS.

Another thing that it could be is the memory could be drawing too much current from the RAM controller (northbridge). Try bumping up the voltage a notch or two. There's actually a setting in the BIOS to bump up either the RAM controller voltage, the first and second RAM channel, and also the northbridge is there for you to play around with. The reason why I'm telling you to play with the voltage is that DDR3 is supposed to use up like 5 watts per DIMM so I'm thinking that DDR2 is not that far off so who knows? Maybe 4 DIMMs is too much?

Btw, is it possible to use the 2nd and 4th slot to test out dual channel memory with having nothing in the 1st and 3rd ram slots?

Yes. It doesen't matter which channel you use. If it does then there's something terribly wrong.

My CPU came chipped right out of the package. On the top of the processor towards one of the corners its chipped.. Its really small though so i didnt think this would be an issue. Could this end up degrading the processor over time because of this? Im not sure if I should rma this as well since it passed all the processor tests in quicktech and PC check.

I'm assuming you're new. There's always a notch on every LGA775-socket CPU. This is so that you can only put it in one way. It's a fool-resistant method of inserting the CPU into the socket.

As for the ATX12V 2.0 specs I noticed that some people use the 8 pin over the 4 pin. Isnt the 8pin specifically for Xeon/Opteron? So wouldnt it be bad for the processor and the motherboard if anyone is using the 8 pin for there dual core?

I have my Enermax Galaxy 1000W hooked up with a full 8 pins. I haven't experimented with only 4.

My lite on burner seems to have something loose inside I could hear it moving around.. Regardless I still installed it and Ive already sucessfully watched a DVD, burned a regular CD and burned a DVD.. So im not sure whether to keep it or RMA this as well.

If you shake things hard enough, I'm sure there will be a point that something will begin to rattle. LOL. Umm, but seriously if it sounds like there's something broken inside making it's way into different parts of the CD-ROM drive then that's not good, but it it just sounds like a loose part then don't worry. It's probably just the cap that holds the CD against the motor. Some companies still use this method to hold CD's in place and the cap that holds them is usually endowed with a certain degree of free movement and will sounds like a rattle if you shake the CD-ROM.

I installed PC Probe 2 and the only monitors in red are the DDR2 Term (currently at 1.09v) and 1.2VHT (currently at 1.52v), Am i suppose to set the values for those as well to 2.1 volts? Does that have anything to do with why it could have been crashing when I was running under dual channel memory mode? Also when I set the memory voltage to 2.1 its actually at 2.16 in PC probe and the BIOS should i set the voltage a bit lower in the bios so it rounds off to 2.1 volts in the monitoring software then?

The "06XX" BIOS versions gave some people problems with reading out the voltages and etc with windows applications. Try upgrading to the latest version. It might even solve your RAM issues.

When I go into hibernation mode the pc will sometimes turn on by itself. I checked the bios to see if there was any alarm causing this to happen but nothing there. When I do a regular shut down this doesnt happen though. Not sure what to think in this case...

"Hibernation" is not "suspend". Hibernation dumps your memory into the hyberfil.sys (or whatever the name is) file and turns off the computer so the next time you turn it on it will be in the exact same state as last time. Suspend powers down hardware and/or places them in a state of lower power usage. You can change the level of suspend in the BIOS, and the delay untill your computer enters suspend mode can be set in either the BIOS, or overriden with the control panel power settings.

Lastly out of all the Diagnostics tests that were performed everything passed under PC check, as for Quicktech pro the only thing that failed was the tests regarding the SMbus controller where it failed in "Sm Bus Host registers test and Sm Bus Host registers status" but it passed on detecting that there was an SM bus host. Im assuming that maybe it failed because the version of quicktech pro that i had is from 2005. But then again I could be completely wrong here.

Try installing the nForce drivers and do the test again.

This question has nothing to do with this motherboard but i was wondering What should AGP aperture size be set at ? Am i suppose to set it to the same size of the video card memory ? or half its size? and Why though ?

I'm not sure about this one. I had a 9800 PRO with my old Athlon and changing this setting had no noticeable impact on performance (in my experience).