[18th Anniversary] Asus Black Pearl - P5k-Premium Testing Report

[sdumper]

Well I switched out to the x38 Maximus SE and no longer have any Raid issues so im inclined to believe that something strange is going on with raid controller...

I still have my blackpearl and will likely fire it up again soon for benching on my cascade but its a pitty because this mobo was meant to be my primary rig. Hopefully you guys will have better luck...

[sesdave]

Well I switched out to the x38 Maximus SE and no longer have any Raid issues so im inclined to believe that something strange is going on with raid controller...

I still have my blackpearl and will likely fire it up again soon for benching on my cascade but its a pitty because this mobo was meant to be my primary rig. Hopefully you guys will have better luck...

lets us know how you get on with the maximus compared to the Premium re overclocking - controller issues apart that is-lol!.

[Funzy454]

Hi everyone, I recently bought the P5K Premium and I was quite exited about it. First I tried regular 2 x sata 320g seagate in normal mode and rock very solid very stable at any point (btw running on 0402). Ram ocz ddr2-1066 EPP was overclocked at 1333mhz 5-5-5-15 easily and FSB on QX6800 from 266 to 320 (air cooled). Now that I have my HDD's in RAID0.... BAD! loading hdd's failed like once twice and trice! Was able to run only on stock setting! was really dissapointed. Now this morning Tried to set FSB at 280 FAILED loading hdd's... Reboot IT WORKS!... Seems to be fine tuning maybe on bios or just overall settings... btw i'm using the INTEL Raid, did anyone tried the JMicron Raid? we have both controllers why? Thanks

------------------------------------Config------------------------------------

Intel Quad QX6800
Asus P5K Premium
4GB OCZ EPP SLI PC-8500 5-5-5-15 with OCZ XTC Fan! (this this is cool!)
XFX 8800GTX xxx Extreme 630M
Xinfinity 800w PSU

[sesdave]

Hi everyone, I recently bought the P5K Premium and I was quite exited about it. First I tried regular 2 x sata 320g seagate in normal mode and rock very solid very stable at any point (btw running on 0402). Ram ocz ddr2-1066 EPP was overclocked at 1333mhz 5-5-5-15 easily and FSB on QX6800 from 266 to 320 (air cooled). Now that I have my HDD's in RAID0.... BAD! loading hdd's failed like once twice and trice! Was able to run only on stock setting! was really dissapointed. Now this morning Tried to set FSB at 280 FAILED loading hdd's... Reboot IT WORKS!... Seems to be fine tuning maybe on bios or just overall settings... btw i'm using the INTEL Raid, did anyone tried the JMicron Raid? we have both controllers why? Thanks

------------------------------------Config------------------------------------

Intel Quad QX6800
Asus P5K Premium
4GB OCZ EPP SLI PC-8500 5-5-5-15 with OCZ XTC Fan! (this this is cool!)
XFX 8800GTX xxx Extreme 630M
Xinfinity 800w PSU

Whats all your BIOS settings. What driver did you load when installing windows in RAID. What extactly were the errors you are getting. e.g messages? Jmicrons just an additional controller to give 2 extra esata ports - the ICH9 is better and faster( when it works)-lol!.

[dingmel]

heres my settings 3.6 prime stable on air 24/7. Try them and see how you get on. http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...postcount=1479 what is you current setup and the BIOS settings u are using.?

Hi there, i used the settings you gave me with the tighter timings, running at 450x8 as well. looks good, but i pumped up the Vcore to 1.485 in bios and it shows 1.448 actual under load i believe. but its still not Prime large fft stable, it runs for about 5 minutes and then autoreboots. what could be the problem, any suggestions?

[sesdave]

Hi there, i used the settings you gave me with the tighter timings, running at 450x8 as well. looks good, but i pumped up the Vcore to 1.485 in bios and it shows 1.448 actual under load i believe. but its still not Prime large fft stable, it runs for about 5 minutes and then autoreboots. what could be the problem, any suggestions?

run looser timmings of 5,5,5,15 with auto subtimings until you can get prime stable.Whats your q6600 vid and batch - wouldnt have thought it would need any more than 1.45 in BIOS. What is your current setup - what cooling /psu ect. what temps are you getting on load? Have you enabled damper and disabled the speed throttling settings as per list. If still not stable try giving it CPU/NB ref volt of .61v to start then .63v and 67v if not stable.

[petercintn]

I've had none of the problems that some folks have, I had Maxtors and Seagates from the start tho...

I do have one wierd thing going on with this board. If I take out the video card, the motherboard will not see the card until I turn the monitor off and back on. Took a little while to figure out. Other than that I love this board, but I think the DFI I had in the AMD days was a better built board.

Here's the overclock page if you want to look.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...postcount=1484

[dingmel]

run looser timmings of 5,5,5,15 with auto subtimings until you can get prime stable.Whats your q6600 vid and batch - wouldnt have thought it would need any more than 1.45 in BIOS. What is your current setup - what cooling /psu ect. what temps are you getting on load? Have you enabled damper and disabled the speed throttling settings as per list. If still not stable try giving it CPU/NB ref volt of .61v to start then .63v and 67v if not stable.

Erm, i can't remember the batch no, as i don't have the boxes with me, probably will go look for the Intel id proggy later, but it's VID is 1.2500. never thought that VID would affect a chip's ocability that much - noob me lol. anyway, my PSU is a SS OP 750W, liquid cooled by an apogee GTX, the idling temps at 3.6 at the stated Vcore is around 39-44C, kinda high lol... i followed your settings, damper is enabled, is the vdroop that high? i'll try out the ref volt settings now. thanks will report back soon.

[sesdave]

Erm, i can't remember the batch no, as i don't have the boxes with me, probably will go look for the Intel id proggy later, but it's VID is 1.2500. never thought that VID would affect a chip's ocability that much - noob me lol. anyway, my PSU is a SS OP 750W, liquid cooled by an apogee GTX, the idling temps at 3.6 at the stated Vcore is around 39-44C, kinda high lol... i followed your settings, damper is enabled, is the vdroop that high? i'll try out the ref volt settings now. thanks will report back soon.

CPUs with lower vid range tend to overclock better. I would check the seating of the HS. what temps did it reach on prime before it bombed.I am idle 36c and prime 62c with an ultima-90 . I only have a .025v difference between BIOS and reported on my MB. I also have a higher vid 1.2625v on my cpu which run 3.6 okay on vcore 1.425 - 1.4 reported with the posted settings. Still they are all different otherwise it would be too easy. Still is compared to the days of opterons and DFI mB's-lol!

[dingmel]

CPUs with lower vid range tend to overclock better. I would check the seating of the HS. what temps did it reach on prime before it bombed.I am idle 36c and prime 62c with an ultima-90 .

well, i tried the Refs you suggested after loosening timings to default, and lowered the Vcore to bios 1.45 (actual 1.418) thats some droop there, is that normal? anyway, its largefft stable for 3 mins then reboots lol, even faster. weird... i'm getting 66-69 on load, probably due to my GC which is coupled in 1 loop.

EDIT : i see. lol so i guess its to each its own in this case? anyway, i pumped up the core to 1.5 bios, its 1.472 actual, so far its done 6 tests in Prime large FFTs, temps stabilizing at 62-71 lol... thats a crazy range diff.

anyway, how many programs out there actually stress your CPU the way PRIME does with large FFTs?

on a side note, what do the ref options actually do? Thanks

[sesdave]

well, i tried the Refs you suggested after loosening timings to default, and lowered the Vcore to bios 1.45 (actual 1.418) thats some droop there, is that normal? anyway, its largefft stable for 3 mins then reboots lol, even faster. weird... i'm getting 66-69 on load, probably due to my GC which is coupled in 1 loop.

EDIT : i see. lol so i guess its to each its own in this case? anyway, i pumped up the core to 1.5 bios, its 1.472 actual, so far its done 6 tests in Prime large FFTs, temps stabilizing at 62-71 lol... thats a crazy range diff.

anyway, how many programs out there actually stress your CPU the way PRIME does with large FFTs?

on a side note, what do the ref options actually do? Thanks

Pity - thought it would do it on lower vcore - still whatever it takes - lol! They are all different - not that much of a vdroop .028v. Heres a link to another thread to explain ref volts to save me the typing http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...152603&page=60.
read my post and the one from RLM. You could try the setting he suggests for fun-lol!
Would have thought you would get better temps with water - I take it you are using Prime 95 v25.5 . Do a razor check on IHS and HS and lap whatever isnt flat. A lot of q6600 are concave. I use MX-2 paste - doesnt need to cure like AS5 and is just as good.

[fanatf1]

Oh yeah not to mention that about 50% of the time my Creative X-Fi card is blowing static on 4 gigs and on 2 gigs no issue...but that is for another thread...

This issue (Vista 64 and 4gb RAM) is fixed in latest X-Fi drivers 2.15.0004 of 5 oct 2007

[scaramonga]

New BIOS 0404

http://rapidshare.com/files/68501414/P5KP0404.ROM 

Not tested as I have never had any problems with this board

[sesdave]

New BIOS 0404

http://rapidshare.com/files/68501414/P5KP0404.ROM 

Not tested as I have never had any problems with this board

Loaded it up - doesnt look or feel any different but I had no issues. . Theere is an option to configure USB mass storage device but I cant remeber if that was there in previous version. Loaded with EZflash okay and runs fine with my previous overclock settings - will see if I can get any higher or if it is same as before. I suspect this may be a release to address the SATA issues which would be good news for the ones with problems - if it work that is - lol!

[bobov]

BIOS 0404 appears on ASUS ftp now.

ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/so...m/P5KP0404.zip

[scaramonga]

I suspect this may be a release to address the SATA issues which would be good news for the ones with problems - if it work that is - lol!

According to ASUS Forums it fixes no SATA problems

[sesdave]

According to ASUS Forums it fixes no SATA problems

Pity - cos my initial impressions are that it doesn't seem to offer anything over 0402 if thats the case.

[richuwo11]

my wd drives wouldnt work at all even if i configured them as IDE so i bought 2 seagate barracudas and everything is running fine right now at stock settings so far in RAID 0.

[impar]

Greetings!

Dont take this wrong, but I would think the best solution would have been to return the defected motherboard.

[richuwo11]

it might have been... but this is my second mobo already. i purchased my system and all its parts mid september and ive had so many problems with parts dying or not working that i just wanted a functioning system. and now i can finally enjoy my system that i built.

[Emperor]

i am starting to hate this board.

i got hit by some strange overclocking problem. settings that will work are not causing massive problems. refusing to even post and reboot then resetting the overclocked settings.

even when i tried less aggressive timings it wouldnt work properly. 5mins ago it displayed some bugs with memtest and kept showing some weird symbols in the test percentage. i rebooted and it refused to post.

it did shutdown and reboot by itself several times but wouldnt post.

the only times it decided to boot properly was when it was on default settings.

damn this bloody board. bios support sucks.

edit. by sunday if the problems persist, it's going to the shooting range....the target end of it.

DFI FTW

[theonlybabyface]

Tried bios 0404 and cpu temp reading went up over 15C (read much higher than core temp) and could not get out of 1x for pci-x for the gpu. Back to 0402 and all good again.

[nicepun]

O.K., I know I'm beating a death horse but today I decided to finally experiment with RAID Controller on this mobo and yes, this controller is broke, sometimes the HDDs will appear and then just like that they disappear. But unfortunately I'm too lazy to get a new mobo and resinstall drivers and such. It sounds like they got a batch of bad NBs or something or they not coding the stuff right in the BIOS. Shame, shame.

[sesdave]

O.K., I know I'm beating a death horse but today I decided to finally experiment with RAID Controller on this mobo and yes, this controller is broke, sometimes the HDDs will appear and then just like that they disappear. But unfortunately I'm too lazy to get a new mobo and resinstall drivers and such. It sounds like they got a batch of bad NBs or something or they not coding the stuff right in the BIOS. Shame, shame.

This was posted on Asus forums which may be worth a try
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?...Language=en-us
Resolved his problems downloading latest matrix manager v 7.8 and chipset .

[nicepun]

This was posted on Asus forums which may be worth a try
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?...Language=en-us
Resolved his problems downloading latest matrix manager v 7.8 and chipset .

I don't even see the hdds during POST.