ASUS P5W DH - Problems + Fixes Thread

[Xeon Zombie]

Hi Zombie,

BIOS 2504 seems to be the most stable BIOS at the mo' from posts I've seen. Personally I've run every BIOS from 2004 - 2602 and 2504 is definitely my fav

As for your upgrade, I'm thinking the exact same thing lately. I'm torn between an AMD 780G htpc or upgrade my mobo to a Rampage X48

Crossfire is bottleknecked on my Quad @ 3.0Ghz. As much as I like the P5W, even a small boost to 3.4Ghz would help my cf setup alot.

Roll on payday

Hey Lurker,

Thanks for the tip on the BIOS. I tried EZ-Flash, but it didn't want to downgrade the BIOS for me. Took a look at the manual, and a few sites and found out I need to launch Afudos 2.17 or older from DOS, and then run the "afudos /iP5WDH.rom" command. I don't have a floppy drive, so I used Nero 7 to create a bootable DOS CD, and burned both Afudos, and BIOS 2504 (renamed "P5WDH.rom) onto the CD. When I rebooted, Caldera DOS launched, but both the command above, and simply "afudos.exe" fail to launch. Do you know where I could find a decent step by step for downgrading the BIOS on this board w/o a floppy drive?

As far as the possible upgrade to a Rampage Formula goes, I think I'll need to do a lot more research before pulling the trigger on another high end board. I had some great OC success last evening that I think will keep the P5W my buddy for a while to come yet - I've had a few different sets of RAM on hand lately that I have been fooling with. I finally settled on a 2GB kit of Corsair XMS2. The P5W makes love to this stuff! I can run it at over 1000MHz at 5-5-5-15 2T timings while OC'd to 3.0GHz. Also - you mentioned 3.4GHz being a good # to hit. Last night, I clocked it at 3.4GHz, RAM @ 945MHz 5-5-5-15 2T timings (Prime stable approx. 6 hours - no errors.) This is a whole new level of OC'ing on this board for me. I attribute it all to the RAM I am now using, as that was really the only variable.

I had previously used a 4x1GB kit of OCZ Platinum XTC DDR2-800, and a 2x1GB kit of Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800. Neither ran above the stock 800, even though the tracers were EPP rated for 1000MHz @ 2.2v. Also, I couldn't even get stable at 3.2. 3.4 was a pipe-dream.

I still want to downgrade to the 2504 BIOS though, even with the above OC results thus far. This 2704 BIOS seems slow (the actual BIOS interface) and I am unable to change my CPU multi downward anymore.