P5K Premium issue

[sesdave]

yes - Iwouldnt bother with an x38 as the x48 is about to arrive http://www.tcmagazine.info/comments....=16497&catid=2. Just stick with the premium - get a card and then RMA it when the x48 hits the stores. Sell the x38 replacement and buy a nice fast x48 (unless you get offered a x48 as the RMA). Asus have to honour the RMA irrespective of a few more months as the board has a fault unless a cure comes up in the interim in which case you will have lost nothing anyway. I will probably sell my Premium with an e6850 and buy an x48 to run the quad if it gets good reports.

[thefiddler]

If you do end up buying the gigabyte make sure you still RMA the premium and sell the replacement on ebay as new- return of cash always eases the pain - lol!

Of course. Dunno if I'll sell it on eBay, but I'll find an arrangment to have a return of cash, for sure.

The problem is we really do not have much choices now.

Only Asus and Gigabyte came out with X38 boards so far and not even the whole lineup. For instance, I am thinking of Maximus Formula but the non-SE version did not come out yet. I do not plan to water-cool my PC and I am not sure if the SE version has adequate cooling in the North Bridge. The other good choice is Abit X38 QuadGT and this one has been delayed again and again.

Actually, I am really surprised of the lack of X38 boards from the other manufacturers. They should know that potential sales have been lost to Gigabyte and Asus because of the delay. Is it possible that all of them have production issues? Is it possible that they might skip X38 chipsets altogether and focus on X48? I read that the X48 chipsets is supposed to be available on Nov-4th from Intel (only the chipsets not the motherboard).

thefiddler: RMA your P5K-Premium when you still can. The fix may never come!

Well, according to news I read recently, it looks like the X48 chipset will be released in early 2008. Though, I also read on multiple computer related websites that for the moment, ASUS haven't got any motherboard based on chipset X48 being developped. Some manufacturers might not use X48 at all?

As for now, all we officially know is that compared to the X38 chipset, the X48 will support FSB 1600 and DDR3-1600, which most X38 motherboards are already supporting. If this is the only difference between X38 and X48, I guess most motherboard manufacturers won't use it at all, or will be using it in a few months without any advantages to it, but as an excuse to sell their boards at higher prices.

Yeah, I'd like to RMA my board as soon as possible, but I need to buy another one before, and I'm hesitating. Gigabyte doesn't speak of any new revision of the X38-DQ6 for now, but that doesn't mean they won't release one in a few weeks, or months... :/

yes - Iwouldnt bother with an x38 as the x48 is about to arrive http://www.tcmagazine.info/comments....=16497&catid=2. Just stick with the premium - get a card and then RMA it when the x48 hits the stores. Sell the x38 replacement and buy a nice fast x48 (unless you get offered a x48 as the RMA). Asus have to honour the RMA irrespective of a few more months as the board has a fault unless a cure comes up in the interim in which case you will have lost nothing anyway. I will probably sell my Premium with an e6850 and buy an x48 to run the quad if it gets good reports.

Ok, so the X48 might be coming sooner than I read during the last weeks.
Though, we still don't know if the X48 will really be better, or if it will only be more expensive :p

[sesdave]

Ok, so the X48 might be coming sooner than I read during the last weeks.
Though, we still don't know if the X48 will really be better, or if it will only be more expensive :p

It cant be any worse and I would have thought it will kill the x38 sales dead unless its initially priced out by the manufactures so the boards can co-exist for a period while they recoup their investment in the x38 and clear the stock from the shelves.
Intel X48 is essentially X38 chipset but cherry picked so overclockability can be further enhanced. X48 will also officially support FSB1600. The X48 is also to fix the EIST bug present in the X38 chipset that requires motherboard manufacturers to rework their X38 boards - so who will want to buy an x38 when these are available! As it is practically only a chip change on the existing x38 MB there shouldnt be that much price increase http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/chipset...016090317.html. $20 according to this - wonder how that will be refelected in the MB price.

[thefiddler]

Yeah, wonder when that will finally come out... if Intel releases its X48 in early november, I guess Gigabyte is capable of launching a X48 motherboard by the end of the same month, knowing their X48 board is ready yet...

[sesdave]

Yeah, wonder when that will finally come out... if Intel releases its X48 in early november, I guess Gigabyte is capable of launching a X48 motherboard by the end of the same month, knowing their X48 board is ready yet...

Buy the cheap card - run with the Premium until the move to x48. Or just run in IDE and save yourself the money. You wont notice that much difference. Its a great board for o/c the quad apart from the sata problems - better or equal to the x38's . From what I have read they are only of benefit if you want to run crossfire and they have a lower FSB ceiling. Bypass the ICH9 problem and its fun. You will still be able to try an RMA when the x48 is launched on the basis you have just tried AHCI/RAID and it wont work - it should have at least 1 years warranty. Gigabyte already have the board ready to launch as soon as intel announce the x48 by the look of these reports.

Just a last thought - if you have been running on auto have you tried upping the southbridge volts to 1.2?

[thefiddler]

Ok, I sent an email to the shop where I bought my P5K Premium to know if I could still get a replacement/refund in a few weeks, or if I should RMA it as soon as possible. Wait and see


As for your question sesdave, I didn't up the southbridge voltage to 1.2v, no.

[sesdave]

Ok, I sent an email to the shop where I bought my P5K Premium to know if I could still get a replacement/refund in a few weeks, or if I should RMA it as soon as possible. Wait and see


As for your question sesdave, I didn't up the southbridge voltage to 1.2v, no.

Try it - that is the ICH9 controller chip after all. You never know. I always ran it at 1.2 on my P5W with no disk problems at all..
I have been having my own problems with RAID 1 doing a verify recover at least once a day. running memtest discovered one of my sticks of ballistix has got errors. Running on 2GB and looking at the RMA process with crucial-lol!

[thefiddler]

Well, I heard Crucial has one of the best tech/sales support of all memory manufacturers, so I guess you'll have a replacement quickly and easily

I'll try upping the SB voltage to 1.2v, I'll see if it gets better.

[thefiddler]

Well, nah, doesn't change a thing.

I'm in contact with ASUS tech support, let's see where it leads...

[sesdave]

Well, nah, doesn't change a thing.

I'm in contact with ASUS tech support, let's see where it leads...

Up the garden path I suspect-Lol!

[dhmk]

thefiddler, At SATA1 worked? The second error you get at system log I was getting when my two WD 250GB RE disks were configured as SATA2. Now, at SATA1, I am not getting these errors any more. At SATA2 I was getting a lot of these and also disk errors with ID 11:

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D."

Never got this?

The later continues, at SATA1, to appear in system log but infriguently, about 1 to 5 a day, some days none. Appears that this is not a noticeable (at least) problem.

Also I never had BSOD running always my two disks in IDE mode. I think this is memory related because even running my system under SATA2, with errors every second in system log, very slow etc, never had BSOD. Disks worked slow but without data corruption.

I have a board of the same rev 2.00g. I wonder if our boards have something different. Can your board work as mine or yours is more faulty? Its a question and would be good to have an aswer. Another: Your Seagate drive has a different behavior than mine WD? That means we can expect a different behavior from different models or different brands?

I don't remember ever got

"The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period."

and I am sure I am not getting it now.

[thefiddler]

Up the garden path I suspect-Lol!

This is a miracle, they answered!

Here's what they said:
"Dear Sir, we installed the very same motherboard in a demo computer a few days ago, and we didn't notice any similar errors when running it.
The errors you noticed in your computer may be caused by a faulty chipset or by poor-quality components on the mother board itself.
Please get in touch with your local store, and ask them for a replacement or to send your board back to us for repair."

This is getting amusing

thefiddler, At SATA1 worked? The second error you get at system log I was getting when my two WD 250GB RE disks were configured as SATA2. Now, at SATA1, I am not getting these errors any more. At SATA2 I was getting a lot of these and also disk errors with ID 11:

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D."

Never got this?

The later continues, at SATA1, to appear in system log but infriguently, about 1 to 5 a day, some days none. Appears that this is not a noticeable (at least) problem.

Also I never had BSOD running always my two disks in IDE mode. I think this is memory related because even running my system under SATA2, with errors every second in system log, very slow etc, never had BSOD. Disks worked slow but without data corruption.

I have a board of the same rev 2.00g. I wander if our boards have something different. Can your board work as mine or yours is more faulty? Its a question and would be good to have an aswer. Another: Your Seagate drive has a different behavior than mine WD? That means we can expect a different behavior from different models or different brands?

I don't remember ever got

"The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period."

and I am sure I am not getting it now.

This last error only shows if you use iaStor by running AHCI or RAID. IaStor isn't used in standard IDE. Unfortunately, I want to run my harddisks as RAID in the near future.

I'm still having BSODs when these errors are showing up - not everytime though. I already tested my memory: I don't think it's defective since they passed a night-long memtest, and because I didn't have any errors/BSOD when running these very same memory modules in my computer before installing the new motherboard...

[dhmk]

Their answer it doesn't explain why the faulty chipsets and poor-quality components are so frequent to a specific model. But maybe explain why you don't have the famous Seagate compatibility.

Memory modules can have compatibility issues (again this) with this board and its memory controler. I have seen in ASUS updates, "this BIOS to enhance compatibility with some memory modules". The data that come from disks are checked and that's why we get the errors in the system log and because is recoverable the correct information (after retries). If it was not that the system will never work and had other kind of errors, non-recoverable.

Check to see if your drives revert their operation from ULTRA DMA 5 (or 6) to PIO.

Any way, if you replace the board let us know.

[thefiddler]

Well, my memory modules are two sticks of Corsair DDR2-8500C5D. Those are reported as tested and compatible by Corsair with the P5K Premium motherboard (Corsair lists compatible modules with a specific board on their website - at least when it's a known and enthousiast mobo).

I'll check to see if my drives are reverting their operation speed to PIO.

[dhmk]

Another thing to add. When I copied big files from a SATA2 drive to another at PATA controler (when trying to found what happened), the operation was fast and worked well. So the conlusion by this is that the writing to disks has problems and not just the reading. Maybe HD test programs can verify that.

Of course how this solves our problem. I don't know. As a software engineer I have an inclination to search for bugs!

[sesdave]

[QUOTE=thefiddler;2537407]
This is a miracle, they answered!
Here's what they said:
"Dear Sir, we installed the very same motherboard in a demo computer a few days ago, and we didn't notice any similar errors when running it.
The errors you noticed in your computer may be caused by a faulty chipset or by poor-quality components on the mother board itself.
Please get in touch with your local store, and ask them for a replacement or to send your board back to us for repair."
[QUOTE]
Reading between the lines it sounds like Asus know there is a spurious problem with the ICH9R controller on the Premium but dont want to openly state it . You have an RMA offer - just do it when the new boards are out.

[sesdave]

This is a miracle, they answered!

Here's what they said:
"Dear Sir, we installed the very same motherboard in a demo computer a few days ago, and we didn't notice any similar errors when running it.
The errors you noticed in your computer may be caused by a faulty chipset or by poor-quality components on the mother board itself.
Please get in touch with your local store, and ask them for a replacement or to send your board back to us for repair."

This is getting amusing

Reading between the lines it sounds like Asus know there is a spurious problem with the ICH9R controller on the Premium but dont want to openly state it . You have an RMA offer - just do it when the new boards are out or alternatively have a look at this new x38 beast which should now be available http://www2.abit.com.tw/page/uk/moth...&fMTYPE=LGA775. from what I gave read of x38 MBs whilst they do not offer much more if any in the o/c stakes they do seem to give stability to the maximum o/c .

[sesdave]

Looks like I wasnt problem free because nothing was really apparent. Having finally looked at the event log I noticed I got a host of event 51 error message on the SATA drive on the 20/10 then nothing. The only thing I can think off that I changed then was to move my sata DVD drive to another port from port 5 to port 3(black) - I was trying to resolve my slow copy and wondered if the DVD drive was conflicting with the sata drives. HArd drives are on port 1and 2.. Strangley enough iI now get get the paging file error messages when I burn on the DVD
'an error was detected on device\Device\CDrom0 during a paging operation'
but no further sata disk messages since the 20/10. I hadn't permenantly applied the LPM regedit fix as I didnt think I had a problem. Have moved the DVD drive around the ports still with errors - controller failure combined with the page file warning. Maybe it doesnt like being on the ICH9 with sata=RAID in the BIOS. Will try deleting the iastor to see what happens for fun - doesnt seem to be much of a problem as I can still burn DVD okay. I have googled and seeems this is not an unknown problem - may be just the DVD burner compatibility. Still it ewould be nice to know what I did that stopped the Disk errors. I may gave installed latest asus .ini file but I cant remember - something to do with age-lol!.

[thefiddler]

Hey!

Been a bit off these last days due to work...
I'm sorry to hear you finally experience problems with your board, sesdave.

By the way, also a big thanks for your mails concerning the new BIOS. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve anything to me, and according to Asus forums, it looks like it doesn't fix much for most people.

My local shop told me I may RMA the board at any time without any hurry, so I'll wait for X48 and then RMA the P5K Premium, probably.

What about your problem? Did you get it solved?

[sesdave]

Hey!

Been a bit off these last days due to work...
I'm sorry to hear you finally experience problems with your board, sesdave.

By the way, also a big thanks for your mails concerning the new BIOS. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve anything to me, and according to Asus forums, it looks like it doesn't fix much for most people.

My local shop told me I may RMA the board at any time without any hurry, so I'll wait for X48 and then RMA the P5K Premium, probably.

What about your problem? Did you get it solved?

Pity - hoped it might help more - still thats Asus for you. Look on the good side - you get a new latest board minus the costs of your Premium. Lets hope they perform better than the top x38s cos reading the reviews they seem to have their own BIOS /MB issues compared with the P5Ks.
I uninstalled nero 8 which seems to be causing a few problems - disckread had a compatability problem with an existing program under vistax64 which I think was causing one or some of the problem. It didnt stop me burning disks but I was getting the controller fail and d paging file message on the CDrom. Will try version 7 and report back.
Off thread - liked the website. As you are into photography can you advise me if the Olympus E-400 or E-410 is any good as a compact SLR. There are some good deals on it in the UK

[thefiddler]

Well, I really don't know a lot about Olympus SLR's.
Though, there's a website I always trusted when it comes to photography and reviews, that is dpreview.com.

They reviewed the Olympus E-410 a while ago:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympuse410/

[dingmel]

hi there. i'm having the exact same problems as stated above, regarding the ich9r and my drives causing BSODs. some people mentioned above that it was possible to RMA with Asus and get back another model (ie - x38)? wondering how is that possible, i thought RMAs were 1 to 1 exchanges with the same model. as i see, this problem is here to stay with all revisions of this board. has anyone undergone a mobo RMA process with ASUS before?