The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Sam,
Rob and Shaff seem more upset by it than I am. True I have every right to be annoyed at Ati, but I'm not. First off that isn't going to solve a single thing. Second Ati is working on a solution to the problem. Third, not all the Southbridge chips are bad. Look at all the nVidia chipsets for socket 939 that were giving all sorts of problems about 3-4 years ago. Asus bore the brunt of that one, while other manufacturers had no problems at all. I guess it's just GigaByte's turn. New technologies can and do bring new problems. Sometime the solution is nothing more than a bios flash, other times it may take a physical change at the chip level to cure the problem. I'm also 100% sure that it's the Southbridge chip itself, because if you add any voltage to it at all, it will post, but just goes into an endless reboot cycle. Put the voltage back to normal and it boots into Windows fine, but the sound goes all wonky after it's been on a couple of hours. Cold, it seems to work fine. I just can't see that as a Failure by GigaByte. Just the fact that it ran real good for 3 days, tells me that. After all, they can't burn-in every motherboard they build for a week, before shipping it out. They will get it right, of that I'm sure!

Russ

 

now its not a gigabyte problem????hmmm gigabyte is the one that choose to put that SB on ITS board. sounds like gigabytes problem to me.its not like they did anything to fix it other than put a new SB on THEIR board, the same SB that keeps failing. you would think after time you would learn and go a different route. hey im just say if it was a ASUS board that had this same issue it would be a different story.i just keep hearing the same problem from this same mobo just like the P5N-E but it is ok because its gigabyte and i can talk to rep faster.. thats not the fix the fix is the company taking the problem from the shelfs and not selling that board until the problem is dealt with correctly. like ive said beforeall these millions of people that have bought other boards and not have any issues they all cant be wrong, just cant be.everyone has a lemon no matter what the product is. doesn't mean everything they do is wrong.there is a little quote at the top of this thread that seems to get over looked.

when ever someone mentions the Dreaded ASUS name the flaming of them begins.lmao.
dont get me wrong i dont own a ASUS mobo,other than the little one that is in my HP system that has not had 1 issue in 5 years(hmm theres a ASUS mobo that has lasted longer than a year)the 5 boards i have had have all been gigabyte boards and 1 of them i wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy. once again i will apologize for saying anything against the almighty gigabyte name. i had a brain fart and forgot where i was at....

peace,love and axel grease.

 

Russ: Not really upset, while it'd be inappropriate and untrue to say I don't give a rat's rear how your PC goes, you're one of many people who I speak to at afterdawn.
The Asus 939 boards were mostly bad, and while the nforce 4 was not a very good chipset, it was certainly nowhere near as bad as the appalling chipsets that followed. Asus tended to have most of the failures for them because this was the watershed for Asus migrating from the high-end manufacturer to the cut-price affair they are now. At that point, the cheap boards (such as the A8N-SLI SE) became the garbage Asus produce throughout their range, but the high-end boards, and indeed the oldest boards (A8N-SLI Premium and A8N-E are good examples) tended to last OK.
You can see how low quality the A8N-SLI SE is just by looking at it. Something Asus are (unfortunately) good at disguising now.
I wouldn't really say it's Gigabyte's turn to take the fall for another manufacturer's bad. I still hear just as much bad press from Asus over the newer AMD chipsets, and fair's fair, also from MSI. Haven't really checked Biostar.
It's AMD's bad for this and not Gigabyte. As a manufacturer you are obliged to sell as many combinations of boards as possible, so the borderline-lemons go in too for extra sales.
However, while most manufacturers will happily sell everything they can get their hands on, Gigabyte are a cut above here, because they reject bad chipsets.
They sold ONE 650i board, and actually refused to produce ANY 680i or 780i boards. What does that tell you?
Seemingly the fault with AMD Southbridges wasn't immediately obvious from the outset.

I lol'ed, that's actually what you think? Even with the desperately poor P5N-E and Striker boards I only lay half the blame on Asus, half of it goes to nvidia for those chipsets being ridiculously bad.
Is no different here.

Agreed though, if the board is really bad, they should recall it.
I don't see any flaming going on here, if I'm honest. When it comes to Asus, people are buying them on the premise they're still as good as the oldskool Asus stuff that actually was Rock solid. (Though I'm still not sure about heart touching!)
That's a false sales premise, and it's my goal to make as many people aware of it as possible until it stops.
I draw the comparisons often, but Sony and Mercedes-Benz are exactly the same. People buy them on their old reputation, having no clue the product quality has massively slumped since the old days.

There's no anti-free speech movement here, you don't need to apologise or cower after slating the Gigabyte name. Just personally, I don't really see what the big deal is. If you're telling people to avoid motherboards simply because they turned out not to overclock as well as you were hoping, that's quite dramatically different to the reason I'm steering people away from Asus/
Your point about the HP system only helps prove my argument. Asus stuff used to be good, but has not been for a very long time.

 

the mobo i sent back 3 times(ga-ep35-ds3r) was for 3 different reasons. and not one had to do with over clocking abilities as tat board could OC very well. 1.cpu would not fit in the socket properly. 2. SB issues the same as Russ has been having. 3. the mem controller was flaky in it. each time gigabyte just gave me a new board with a different problem on it.the last time i got it back it seem's to work fine. actually Bigwill has it i traded it to him.i dont think he has had any problems with it. as i said there are bad boards from every manufacture. that does not mean all their boards are bad. before i got my ga-p45-ud4p i was going to get a the P5Q deluxe. i actually had it in my hands but when it was shipped to me UPS had damaged it, the corner of the board was actually broke. from their mishandling of it. i never got a chance to use it. and i would have gotten another but they was on back order so i got this one i have now. from all the reviews ive read about the P5Q boards there has been nothing wrong with them. other than some operator errors. i know a few people who have had them and love them nothing has gone wrong in 2 years with the board. its not the entire inventory of board that are bad, a model yes but not everything made. i cant believe someone would even think that?

 

Not all Asus boards are an absolute disaster, but they are all badly made, and that only leads to the inevitable premature demise of most of their models.

 

quick question. well first the issue,

saturday i was at work. the wife called and said the computer went to a blue screen then shut down and rebooted. it has been up since. i didnt think about looking into it until now. i looked into my event viewer to see whats going on. it showed where it had the system error(bsod) but at the same time. well a few mins before and after i had a cdrom error. so i got to looking at the logs a little more. there are about 20 different events of the cdrom error all around the time of the bsod. this is the error it showed "the device,\device\cdrom3. has a bad block" each time it was cdrom3.which im thinking it is one of my ihas324's any ideas on this.? would this cause the BSOD? iahvent had any issues with anyhting at all. and i have just recently(2 weeks ago) ran every stress test on the system again and passed everything???

edit:
i was just doing a burn and then scan. i was useing the first IHAS324S that i got. it burnt fine and when i was scanning it was going ok. even had a damn good scan going then about 90% into it it stopped scanning. acted like it was done with the scan but it wasnt. here is a look at it. link to scan thread.
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_jump.cfm/540688/5270781

 

We don't need to name our shippers by name you know. E.g. Fed ex, USPS, UPS, etc. They all handle packages generally the same way. TRUST ME! They all higher children out of school. Children who are only there for the pay check. Who have little or no empathy about the packages they are handling. UPS is merely one fish in an ocean of other species. Granted they're a big fish It's not UPS's fault that SOME of their people don't give a rats ass! Fed ex is the same way. You just haven't been wronged yet. It's only a matter of time...

The optical drive could be anything. Dodgy firmware, Dodgy cable, Southbridge, power connection, windows, etc, etc. More likely a quitting drive. Haven't had any burning trouble on windows 7. Windows xp had some problems a few times, but they were fairly easily fixed. DMA modes

I got a good old asus Hope one day they come back to us

So when are we gonna start seeing 10Gb + Lan speeds introduced into motherboards or network cards? USB 3.0, Sata 6Gb/s. Isn't it Ethernets turn LOL! I'd sure love to see quicker transfer speeds

 

OM7 i threw that in there just for you...lol. thought you might get a kick(no pun intended) out of it.im gonna try and update the FW tonight. i did go and actually touch push on each sata cable just to nake sure they are good and snug. all is ok that route.

 

10Gbps LAN incurs several problems. It needs a lot of bandwidth to operate, even with the PCIe 3.0 spec you'd need a 2x slot to run it properly, not a 1x. Next there's the question of cables, 10Gig can't really be done over copper, it relies on fibre connectors.

 

I read that current Cat 6 is ok, but only in short length

10GBASE-T

10GBASE-T, or IEEE 802.3an-2006, is a standard released in 2006 to provide 10 gigabit/second connections over unshielded or shielded twisted pair cables, over distances up to 100 metres (330 ft).[14] 10GBASE-T cable infrastructure can also be used for 1000BASE-T allowing a gradual upgrade from 1000BASE-T using autonegotiation to select which speed to use. 10GBASE-T has higher latency and consumes more power than other 10 gigabit Ethernet physical layers. In 2008 10GBASE-T silicon is now available from several manufacturers [15][16][17][18] with claimed power dissipation of 6 W and a latency approaching 1 microsecond [19].
[edit] Connectors

10GBASE-T uses the IEC 60603-7 8P8C (commonly known as RJ45) connectors already widely used with Ethernet. Transmission characteristics are now specified to 500 MHz.
[edit] Cables

Category 6A or better balanced twisted pair cables specified in ISO 11801 amendment 2 or ANSI/TIA-568-C.2 are needed to support 10GBASE-T up to distances of 100 m. Category 6 cables can support 10GBASE-T for shorter distances when qualified according to the guidelines in ISO TR 24750 or TIA-155-A.

 

Sam,
My bad there. I wrote that poorly! I've amended my post so it reads right. It was supposed to be a comment to you, not about you. Sorry!

Rob,
It's not quite the same thing. There's also more involved with this situation with my motherboard. Manufacturers have contracts with third party companies like Ati, nVidia, Intel, Realtek, and so on for support chips, and while it hasn't been a huge problem, I seem to have a knack for finding the bad ones. LOL!! The issue with the P5N-E was created by asus. They are the ones who decided to switch to cheaper, board level components to build that particular board. In other words they made the conscious decision to cut the cost of manufacturing the board, to the point that the quality of the board suffered drastically. Most people don't normally think about those type of failures, because who ever considers the quality of all the surface mount diodes, resistors, transistors and so on. I may have even jumped the gun, in blaming the Southbridge. The problem could even be a defective Realteck sound chip! You also implied that Gigabyte sould do something to fix the SB problems. How can they do that? It's not like they can "pop the hood" and get inside the chips and make changes in it! LOL!!

Yes I can talk to a rep faster at GigaByte, not wait on the phone longer, and get someone knowledgeable when I do talk to them.

BTW, the SB in your ga-ep35-ds3r is from Intel, not AMD, so what does that have to do with anything?

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Well if that don't beat all! All of a sudden, I booted up the computer and went to go get a cup of coffee. When I came back it had booted into Win 7! Until just now, it had bypassed Win 7 every time since it crapped out, last week. The auto-repair had said that it couldn't fix it, so I just assumed that it was broke for good. The sound is still wonky in Win 7, but not as bad as with XP. Then again it doesn't have near the power in Win 7 that it has in XP. I can't ship the motherboard until payday, so I'm still using my UD4P. Rent comes first! LOL!!

Question for all you Win 7 users. If I have to re-install XP, in a Dual Boot with Win 7, will I have to re-install Win 7 again? I'm of the understanding that XP has to be installed first!

Russ

 

Creaky,
I've been thinking it over all night and I think I will do a complete re-install of everything. I figure that if something was wrong enough to kill Win 7 in less than a week, it would probably be the smart thing to do. I'm not completely sold on Win 7 yet, and there is things about it that I don't like. The right way, the wrong way and the Micro$oft way, is very evident with Win 7. I am also very leery of Win 7's Auto Repair. I get the distinct feeling that all is not as it seems there. I keep asking myself why it now works after it failed the Auto Repair. That raises the question of what it's been doing over the last week, to suddenly repair itself, especially since I haven't been able to access it all week. A better question is "Why should it be doing anything?" Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid, but it never once even tried to access Win 7 from the boot menu after the first day, as all it would do is repeat the boot cycle without the boot menu until I hit the reset button, so why after a week does it suddenly as if by magic, work again? The fact that Win 7 obviously wasn't completely dormant, is bothersome too! Not just because of this, but for other reasons as well, that I won't go into here, it's been a very strange day!

Russ

 

That Stuxnet is interesting stuff, a virus coded not to shut down a PC but factory hardware such as specific brands of plc's.

 

I personally still say you should go with a separate drive for each OS. It avoids all this sort of OS conflict crap.

 

it doesnt matter if the SB is intel or amd. im just saying it is gigabyte option to choose who and what company/parts go on their boards.hence being their problem if something on THEIR board is bad? do we or dont we send it back to the board manufacture and not the individual company that has its parts on the board.???

 

So what, Gigabyte were meant to boycott all Intel P35 boards were they? I hardly think so...

 

thats not what i ment. if gigabyte is gonna use a third party part under their name and the board has issues its gigaybte problem not the third party. see its on the other hand when its gigabytes name on the board were talking about. if it was ASUS it would be a all out ban on them like it has been. thats all im saying its gigabytes name on a board that has issues just like it was the ASUS name on the other board. seeing its gigabytes name and not asus it is over looked and pushed off as being acceptable that gigabyte is useing shoddy parts on their boards???