790 corruption issues?

[Desarts]

OK. typing again.

I have a XFX 790i Ultra board rev. 1.1 with Bios P03. but running it with a HIS Radeon 3870X2, , OCZ 4GB DDR3 PC3-10666C6 1333MHz ReaperX (2x2GB) Dual Channel DDR3 (OCZ3RPX1333EB4GK), E8500 and Coolermaster 850W PSU.

The problems I have on a stock setting system except the memory voltage and unlinked mem settings are as follows:
Raid Problems:
Occassionally at boot the sata controller can't find the stripe
the Nvidia 9.64 sata raid service claims there are errors. However using the seagate dos check tool for 2 hrs per drive finds no problem
Black screen / reboot
Very occassionally in BIOS, but frequent when Vista X64 has booted I get a the strangest of the times the effect that the Graphics card fan speeds up, and gives a black screen / drops the signal to the monitor. Initially I had the problem that although the PC remained on, the rest of the system was dead. E.g. hitting the numlock did not do anything. However, y'day I noticed when i got the problem again when loading Hellgate that actually the keyboard still reacted, the sound card produced sound and i saw the hdd still being active.

Please note that i have already rma'ed the board once here in the uk with the above problem. the retailer is now suggesting to rma the board and the cpu.. but based on all what i am reading here, not sure if that solves the problem.

my question to you guys is as follows:
do the raid problems described by me others are experiencing as well? based on the 17 pages it seems to be so. although after 15-30 black screens i am still able to restart vista, but never tried the scan / ... thing will do that later today.
should I move away from the graphics card / motherboard and is that the rootcause of all evil or am i overlooking something else. e.g certain bios settings / voltages etc?

if I move away I can either decide to move to 9800X2 or for example move to a X48 Asus P5E3 .... would want to stay on a DD3 board..

Any suggestions? any additional info needed?

[saaya]

try everything at default speeds to make sure its not a configuration problem. if it works there, you gotta find out what to tweak to get it stable at higher speeds. if you have the same problems there, then swap hardware if possible to troubleshoot what causes the problems... but it sounds like its the mainboard to me...

either instability/configuration problems, or its the mobo...

[Desarts]

Thanks,

at present I am not even trying to get at higher speeds. or are you saying that since the 790i tends to have the default bios to DDR 3 at 1066mhz rather than factory default at 1333, I should try it at 1066?

I just checked the XFX force website, but they don't have the P04 bios yet. Ati has released a new catalyst driver y'day so will use that one as well.

But since the sun is now shining in this country called UK, yes I know hard to believe. Gonna take a stroll outside first

[pinto]

you can use evga P04 bios on xfx mobo.

[Anubis_386]

When I tried to flash my XFX board with Evga's P04 BIOS it wouldn't because the part numbers didn't match .. This was done through the AWD Flash utility with the file burnt to a CD as an ISO .. Is there a way around this? Not through windows tho (i've lost boards before that way)

[gmcg]

When I tried to flash my XFX board with Evga's P04 BIOS it wouldn't because the part numbers didn't match .. This was done through the AWD Flash utility with the file burnt to a CD as an ISO .. Is there a way around this? Not through windows tho (i've lost boards before that way)

Make a bootable CD (or a floppy if you use FDD), write on it your BIOS file and awdflash files, type awdflash /f NF79_P04.bin manually, it will be done.

[gmcg]

OK. typing again.
My question to you guys is as follows:
do the raid problems described by me others are experiencing as well? based on the 17 pages it seems to be so. although after 15-30 black screens i am still able to restart vista, but never tried the scan / ... thing will do that later today.

No raid problems with any BIOS I have used, I am running 2xRaptor 150Gb under Vista 64. Your problem looks like a hardware problem / bad connection.
I had 780i and the same raid partitions work fine with 790i.

Take a look at your SATA connectors/cables, are they all fine?

should I move away from the graphics card / motherboard and is that the rootcause of all evil or am i overlooking something else. e.g certain bios settings / voltages etc?

Try to run memtest86 for several hours - will let you know if CPU/memory work fine
Try to run HDD tests. Good utilities can be found on Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) and on Hiren's Boot CD.

if I move away I can either decide to move to 9800X2 or for example move to a X48 Asus P5E3 .... would want to stay on a DD3 board..
Any suggestions? any additional info needed?

Your need to troubleshoot your system, start with the default settings (load defaults in BIOS) and make all tests.
Also flash 04 BIOS, it looks quite good comparing to 03.

[slim142]

did they? i thought they said they had a c0 and it was awful?
did they also mention they had a c1 and it worked well?

My fault, I really meant C0 instead of C1
But yeah, they mentioned an Engineering Sample (C0 I believe) and they said it was working really good. Cant recall what they really said but I know it was something positive.

That scared me for a second but since it hasnt been mentioned again, I really dont know if there is going to be another stepping or not.

[DaMulta]

I played with the Striker II Extreme with the latest BIOS ( 0601 ) and after trying some settings that I wanted to check if their working ( as they should ), I tried to corrupt my installation using the settings that caused major OS corruption when I was using the previously released BIOSes ( 0402/0507/0508/0511/0512 ).
None of them ended up corrupting my OS making it unbootable like they did before.
Can't say if there's file corruption not enough to prevent windows from booting and running, but I will do some serious testing tomorrow.
I'm currently working at tweaking the system for stock settings for the review.

Can't wait to see what happens with the SII E.

[BenchZowner]

I've finished the "stock" measurements for the review, at FSB 335MHz and the mem linked & sync mode at tight timings ( 5-5-4-15-1T-1-1-1-36-1 ) with no obvious signs of data corruption.

Now I'm tweaking stuff for the overclocked measurements, but to go fair for a clock per clock comparison with P35 I'll use 400MHz FSB & Linked/Sync mem again.

I'll have the measurements done in 6 hours or so, after that I'll start torturing the S2E with extreme clocking, etc to see what can be done about the corruption issue.

I'll try to find the source of the problem ( what's causing it ) and see what I can map/do about it.

[slim142]

Im really glad to hear that BenchZ.

Show us some 500mhz FSB benchies with BIOS 0601 (with no corruption of course)

[MateoTTR]

I am afraid corruption is still there.
I made a fresh install of XP 32bit since I flashed 0601.
I run at fsb 1800 linked and synched. I had memtest for over 2 hours and 8+ hours of CPU Stress MT, everything stable.

1 hour ago, out of nowhere, I got a BSOD "bad pool caller".
I rebooted and got the message that the registry was restored from an older version. Since then, I was unable to install games because windows installer service could not be found.
I had to restore XP to some point prior to my BSOD to get everything right again :-(

[MateoTTR]

Now I installed vista 64 to investigate further about corruption issues.
I did the install with my oc at fsb 450 to increase the chance of corruption to occur.
Right after the install was over, I tried "sfc /scannow". No corruption.
The sfc program is so much better than in XP since it actually tells you if corrupted system files were found or not.

NOTE: "sfc /scannow" doesn't say anything about corruption in XP apart from asking you about the CD. And that doesn't mean that you have corruption IMO.
I tried to run sfc on my old rig (also on XP SP2), and it also asked straight for the CD when I know I have no corruption there.
Also I tried to run sfc with XP SP2 CD in the drive so that it would supposedly repair everything. Right after it was done, I ran sfc again (I removed the CD just before that), and before even scanning the first file it asked again for the CD!
What the hell?! I don't think sfc is the way to assess corruption in XP 32bit.

[canislupy]

OS is now corrupted. Was running so well there for a while, but Vista got borked when i made the mistake of suspending instead of shutting down, on resume the system hung, bypassing resume lost all my user acct settings/data. Ran SFC and got lots of corrupted files.

[GAR]

any other way to run a system check for corruption instead of sfc? a program or something?

[GAR]

This is where im at so far, no corruptions that i know of, rock solid.

[gmcg]

I am afraid corruption is still there.
I made a fresh install of XP 32bit since I flashed 0601.
I run at fsb 1800 linked and synched. I had memtest for over 2 hours and 8+ hours of CPU Stress MT, everything stable.

1 hour ago, out of nowhere, I got a BSOD "bad pool caller".
I rebooted and got the message that the registry was restored from an older version. Since then, I was unable to install games because windows installer service could not be found.
I had to restore XP to some point prior to my BSOD to get everything right again :-(

It looks like a hole at 450MHz bus (1800), I had some instability issues and moved a bit up to 452MHz (1810MHz), now everything works fine and stable, no BSOD, nothing.

[canislupy]

Well, that's the thing, I am very worried about this board now. I had zero issues for weeks, rock solid. And now, one day, all of a sudden, I got corruption. This is not a good sign, and I really hope the same doesn't happen to you guys who have been running solid so far, as I was.

[5010]

Happy to report that I defragged 1.4TB of mostly 8GB+ size files yesterday across 3 drives simotaneously without issue

G0 Q6600 @ 3555MHz
444x8 / 1777FSB Linked n Synced
7-7-7-21-1T

[lutjens]

The fact that many people are having issues with this chipset is very disturbing and indeed not the first time this has happened with an NVidia chipset.

It'll be a frosty day in you-know-where before I use one of these boards in my system, as my data's integrity is the most important thing, indeed the only thing that truly matters to me. With the amount of data in my computer, data corruption would be an absolute catastrophe. If NVidia can't produce a reliable chipset, they should avoid the server or workstation environment entirely...such issues just aren't tolerated.

[Desarts]

Hello,

following the suggestion to do component testing and upgrading to P04
upgrade my xfx 790i to PO4
All is default except:
put floppy present to no
enabled raid config
disabled HD Audio
Put Vmem voltage to 1.85V
Put FSB to Mem as linked and synch to get my memory to the right 1333 stockspeed.
Timings are set to Optimal by Bios itself, resulting values are putting it at 8 7 7 25 1T (offically the memory OCZ repear is 6-5-5 18 1 T)
yesterday and ran memtest for 2-4hrs. This passed without any errors.

Using now the UBCD v4.1.1 and ran the following tests so far:
2+hrs of memtest - pass
StressCPU :with default settings (12.25MPFLOPS) results in a black screen after 375000 iterations, the system gives then actually a post boot code of 98 --> checked the manual, but it does not have any postcode like that.

Key question here is: is the number of iterations of 375000 a normal result, or far too low? If the test fails at the end of the day, does it not normally result in a black screen or? Any one knows this post boot error code?

Update: Actually whilst the StressCPU runs, the mainboard is actually alreaydy giving the alternate flashing of 96-98 as a post boot code... So the result actually is that the system at X iterations just gives a black screen, but the monitor signal is not dropped as is my original overall problem.

[jugeen]

i have just had my first issue with my xfx mobo. i was browsing internet when it suddenly shut down. i couldnt power it up again. tried clr cms, battery remove but nothing helped. after a while, trying power it up, i could power it up. the diag said FF constantly. i didnt give up when finally it posted. i didnt do anything special for it, but now it works. its a x-file for me

my config:
XFX 790i Ultra P04
QX9770 @ 4.0G
2GB G.Skill DDR3 1600 @ 1600
Asus 9800GX2
Ultra x3 1kW
150GB WD Raptor
320GB Seagate 7200.11

settings:
fsb = 1600
mem = 1600 sync mode 7-7-7-18-1t 1.80V
cpuv = 1.42v in bios
fsb = 1.30v
spp = 1.40v
mcp = 1.55v

[tekjunkie]

Something to ponder.I replaced my OCZ 2X2 GB sticks with Gskill 2X1 GB sticks. After a system freeze of SPI32M run @ 1800/1800 QDR/RAM, I reboot and this is what I get.



After I went to 0601, my OS never was corrupted with my OCZ 4 GB sticks.
But as soon as I put in my Gskill 2 GB sticks, it happens.I know it does not make any sense, coincidence .

[5010]

Something to ponder.I replaced my OCZ 2X2 GB sticks with Gskill 2X1 GB sticks. After a system freeze of SPI32M run @ 1800/1800 QDR/RAM, I reboot and this is what I get.



After I went to 0601, my OS never was corrupted with my OCZ 4 GB sticks.
But as soon as I put in my Gskill 2 GB sticks, it happens.I know it does not make any sense, coincidence .

Describe the freeze please?

[tekjunkie]

Describe the freeze please?

System was hanging. No response to mouse or keyboard.