My horrible experiences with MSI Neo2 Plat

[PnoT]

Well i'm not even sure where to begin. The board worked fine with my Thermailright 948u and 939 3200+ winchester up to 2.5ghz prime stable on air.
I figured i could get more out of the cpu than i could but i'm one of the unlucky ones i guess. It ran stable with 1.36b bios except for the fact the board barely will do anything over 200mhz with any type of bh-5 sticks in it without a booster so i ordered one and was running great at 2.5ghz and 250fsb 2-2-2-5 on the ram. Everything seemed to be working good until i finally got around to setting up my mod'd mach I promy with 507 in it. Once i had the cpu chilled the board would not boot reliably anymore if the cpu was very cold so i had to rig it up so where i could manually startup my promy AFTER the mb was booted. If the chip was super cold it refused to boot. I had to start up the cpu and let it get around 40C to get the thing to even work properly. Once up and booted id'd plug in the promy and let it do it's job and the board seemed fine for a while. Once i had to restart my computer once the thing refused to boot again and made a long beep with a tiny beep and after switching out tons of parts i finally found out that even when very cold it would not boot once again even with the manual way i was doing it. Turned out it was my g4 ti4200 that was having issue so i put in a pos pci card and it booted. Needless to say the board has more than a few issues being cold. I eventually got it to boot again with the ti4200 after only sticking the card 3/4 of the way into the slot because anything more than that it wouldn't. I'm not sure what's up with that but the card has to be at an exact spot in order to boot. I finally thought i had worked out all the snag and then for no reason my OCZ DDR Booster blows out and is reporting 2.5 volts no matter how far i turn the dial and this is only 3 days of having it. I put it in another board just to rule out my setup and same thing is happening. Now i'm forced to rma the damn thing and run my ram at 176mhz with a 166 divider since my cpu is doing 260 fsb.. what a piece of sh t. I'm finally back up posting this but even now the DC ram is having issues and i'm still having a ton of cold boot issues and i've tried everything on the boards that has been posted to try and fix the issue. MSI really needs to fix this! I'd say the board ran good when i had the booster in it aside from the cold boot issues but this is ridiculous. Now i have to wait god knows how many days for another booster and i'm still trying to fix this cold boot issue. Needless to say i'm not very pleased with this board. Anyway i thought i would vent and share some experiences with you guys. Weird thing is the board will boot with the pci video card in it 100% of the time but any agp card and it goes south and refused to display the video even thou you can hear the computer booting up normally. What a pain.

EDIT:

Well after calming down some there are a few key things i didn't include in the post which would be:

I can boot normally with temp above 0 but the minute i plug in the prommy and it really kicks in the cold it just dies either by locking up in windows immediately or locking up in the bios. I don't even wanna comment on how whacked out the temp probe is on this board.. omg you could have just left it off and had less complaints. The strange thing is i had it into windows for an entire day running prime95 flawlessly. 1 / 120 times to get it working right.. i give up.

[jinu117]

It isn't just MSI... it includes Giga & Asus.. I was hoping you wouldn't have problem.. That makes it again most of us having cold boot issues with winnie.

[Scout255]

Has anyone been able to take a winchester s939 chip to low temperatures at all? Seems like there are quite a few problems if your not using an FX chip.

[Occidere]

most of us having cold boot issues with winnie.

Life must be rough Ahh the day I can complain about my comp being too cold will be a fine day, a fine day indeed

[Geforce4ti4200]

dude, its not the mobo, winchesters do not like low temps(keep em above zero), its public knowlege by now. youll have no choice but get a fx53/55 but at least those perform great and you could get like 3.2GHz with the 55 and your prom

[Scout255]

http://xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=44530
Seems like Psilonaught1 is able to run the 3200 winchester at negative temperatures with his asus motherboard. Perhapse the asus motherboard is the exception to the rule?

[charlie]

onepagebook was running a Vapo LS/Winchester combo and had great results...

C

[Psilonaught1]

see my new A8V/Winchester thread

[PnoT]

I can tell you with 100% accuracy that when i could boot up my computer at around 40C it would boot flawlessly and run that way no doubt but the split second i manually turn on my prommy and the cold kicked in the board would literally lockup. I'm talking 2-3 seconds of me turning on the prommy, granted it was already running for a while so the head got cold quickly. I wish i knew for sure if it was the chip or the board. I have yet to see someone report back on another board, like the gigabyte, and a 3000/3200+ that was being super chilled. I've seen ONE, yes ONE, person get this combo running good sub 0's. This just blows. I've tried all the bios's out there as well as 2 other different power supplys. I have had the combo running in win2k for 1 full day under prime95 load and it ran like a champ then i rebooted to up my memory to 260fsb (was currently at like 170'ish due to me testing limits on cpu) and poof .. never got back into windows again without it locking up soon after or not booting period. I find it odd that with my pci card the damn thing boots fine.

[mikem]

Damn... I wonder why mine works....
I am going to be putting in a new 3200 on thursday....It will be interesting to see if that chip works or if I just got a lucky 3000.....

[LilGator]

Fan plugged into your CPU fan header? I'd also turn off all temp related warnings/thresholds and auto-ness if you can get into the BIOS (maybe on air) - you probably have already, but just a thought.

[ojdr2001]

jason has had the same problem now with 2 fx55's and 2 msi neo2's so its not just the winchesters, If he puts an fx53 in all is good

[misteroadster]

I've tested a 3500+ 0,09 with my waterchiller and gigabyte K8NSNXP-939, liquid @-40°, i' ve not encountered this problem.

[jinu117]

Well Asus did a little better (this was about 5 days ago now), it handled evap temp of my MachII R404'd -45c... problem is, I never usually get that kind of temp even fan running slowly under full load. It is usually @ -51 to -46c loaded on (right now newcastle 3500 & 3ghz with 1.67-1.7 actual v-coreish). Once my evap goes past that, toast to that board. I would assume unmodded mach's with fan running slow most of time won't have this issue with A8V at least.
I sincerely believe it is more of bios temp issue of not having enough table for low temperature or logics to calculate it out. When new core comes out it is common to see misreporting of temp and this seems to be the case. From me and few other's investigation on behaviors, these boards goes to lowest temp it can display and than lock up thinking you reached 200c or 120c or something rediculous like that.
As for chip not liking sub zero temp...ti4200.. if you haven't tried it and want to talk, at least read the threads throughly. In any boards with this non-boot lockup issue, if you clear cmos, you will get one time boot no matter what the temp on evap is. It is not hardware physically rejecting something, it is the bios+new core's sensor most likely.

To Pnot, just grab new newcastle 3500+. the ones after week 34 seems to have rev 0.6 instead of 0.5.. and it clocks quite nicely from my adventure so far after failed winnie. 3.05ghz is what I topped out @ around 1.75-1.77 vcore. Once I get that speed with dual channel (currently FSB limited some how, so stuck with 2.94ghz with dual channel.. probably vdd mod is in line), I might venture a little more on v-core, etc. BTW, speed I have been indicating is fully stable (prime 95, super pi 32m, 3dmarks, what ever you can think of :P) Benchable speed usually are at least 100-200mhz north of this type of configuration

[Geforce4ti4200]

maybe youll need the nf4, those mobos are new enough that hopefully they wont have the issue?

[PnoT]

I also think it's a bios/mb issue due to what you were saying about you can ALWAYS get 1 boot after cmos reset no matter the temp then after bios save the thing refuses to boot back up.

I was going to rma the board and get the gigabyte but a friend of mine is ordering the same system here in town and i'm building his computer for him. He's not into overclocking at all so i'm going to test out his cpu / mobo for the same issues and if it works i'll just swap parts with him since he's such a nice friend If all goes south i'm not sure what i'll do. This is by far the most frustrating upgrade ever. bah what a bummer. I might slap my mach I on my amd 1.4 tbred just for kicks

Oh, and if all the boot problems is not enough my 3 day old DDR Booster took a crap and is now being RMA'd What next?

[mikem]

Mine locks up sometimes like you guys are saying, and it wont reboot...I just turn the powersupply off in the back, count to 5 and then flip it back on, then when I hit the power button it usually will boot.....

[Kobalt]

dude, its not the mobo, winchesters do not like low temps(keep em above zero), its public knowlege by now.

public knowledge...just like how ur ti4800 or whatever owns a 5900?

its most likely a motherboard/bios issue i guess...we'll have to wait till some newer boards/bios's are released.

[esoteradactyl]

i wish i knew somebody who lived close by that has had problems with this cold boot crap. i could put my cpu in their setup. ive got a 3500+ .09 that works fine under phase change. i want to solve this mystery!

[PnoT]

I live in Las Vegas if you wanna make a trip

I'd do just about anything to get my system working again i have no idea what to do at this point i've just about given up. MSI seems to be of no help so far atleast in their forums. I might try a few things tomorrow night to see if something comes to life and in another thread they were talking about shorting out the temp sensor on the mb to always to read above 40C which is the lowest it goes in the bios mayber there's an issue there.

[sai]

Any final conclusions by now ? I need to buy a sys and I need to be sure that ir works with my Mach1. And a FX is far too expensive for me. What to do now ?

[jinu117]

Any final conclusions by now ? I need to buy a sys and I need to be sure that ir works with my Mach1. And a FX is far too expensive for me. What to do now ?

Just get a newcastle 3500 with version .6. I am going over 3ghz now :P (prime 95 stable)

[sai]

I wanna have a Winni *cry*

[Ratax]

Well, I put the MSI (K8N Neo2 54g Plat) on my Vapo LS today...

First run, and all seems good except keyboard and mouse (PS2). Take them to USB and all seems to work fine.
Evaporator reaches -52ºC and system runs fine...
A couple of windows reboots (ordered by me), and then Vapo LS software install. I must say that the Vapo was programed to boot at -10º (earlier configuration with other rig), and after install software, I programed it to boot at -30º. I can see that this was a problem...
After this, the system hangs in boot screen after DDR post and before HDD detection...

With stock cooler, all was right.
Like I've said, the first runs with sub-zero were also more or less fine (one reboot while in windows...).

I hope someone can reach a solution to this...

EDIT:
I have an Winchester 3500+
I put a fan in the CPU fan header, just in case

[PnoT]

Any final conclusions by now ? I need to buy a sys and I need to be sure that ir works with my Mach1. And a FX is far too expensive for me. What to do now ?

I have this same question on many forums and no one has an answer for it. I'm going to mess with my board again after work and try a few things. I seen that someone had issue with no booting and sata drives not working and he disabled the quick boot option which i have yet to try myself. I think i'm going to try and get all the information that everyone has contributed and slap it in one thread so we can all be on the same page working to try and resolve this issue.

Edit:

On air i have Zero issues with the board other than the already public qwirks which are easy to get around. My bh-5 runs great on it as well.