:: theMediaman journal ::

The Last Asus Board I'll Ever Buy :: Thursday, October 06, 2005 ::

After the last overheat-and-crash of my computer one week ago, I picked up the A7S8X-MX Asus motherboard. Under $60, onboard audio, NIC and video. That's when the problems started.

I've spent the better part of three evenings and two hours on the weekend trying to get the damned thing to work. Everytime I solve a problem, I'm stopped by another road block. Here's what's happened so far.

Please note, this isn't a usual blog entry. This is mainly documenting a process, in case someone with similar problems comes to this page. If you're expecting something witty, you'll have a better chance, just reading some of my older entries.

After installing the motherboard and putting in an Athlon XP 1900+ (Palomino core), I couldn't get the damned thing to even POST. After a long while, I figured out that this is the first new motherboard I've encountered in YEARS that doesn't seem to have a jumper-free configuration. You have to set the Front Side Bus speed manually. Out of the box, it's set to 100 MHz. Check the manual on how to set it to 133 or 166 (depending on your CPU).

After the first POST, I swear I saw something that unnerved me. "BIOS checksum failed". However, the system rebooted and seemed to work fine after that... I'll come back to this later.

It would finally POST! But it wouldn't accept my AGP video card as a primary display device. There's a setting in the BIOS that lets you choose the PCI, Onboard or AGP as the primary VGA, but whenever I chose AGP, it would give a half-assed "AGP Failure" beep sequence and fail. For the time being I had to boot from the onboard video which, unlike onboard audio, network, SATA, etc., did NOT have the option to disable it.

Booting into Windows with a new motherboard is always a crapshoot. Sometimes it'll work, updating the drivers, and sometimes you need to reinstall Windows. However, I've always been lucky in the past, and hoped the same would happen now, but it was not to be.

BSOD.

Blue Screen Of Death.

Preparing myself for a clean copy of Windows XP, I put the install disc in the drive and booted from it. BSOD.

I tried just booting from the CD with the IDE cable for the hard drives disconnected. BSOD.

I tried disconnecting everything but the CPU, RAM and the DVD-ROM drive. BSOD.

I tried my older, Athlon XP 1700+ CPU (Palomino core). Boots into the install process without a problem.

I reconnected the hard drives tried to boot into Windows. BSOD.

I might add here that the error messages would change with every BSOD, so clearly the problem is more severe than any one thing that can be nailed down.

I dug out an old, 20 GB drive and installed Windows XP Home Edition to it. No problem. Installed the video driver from the Asus CD. Worked like a beaut. Installed the custom IDE drivers from the CD. BSOD. I had to reinstall XP again.

Forty minutes later, I'm sitting at functional desktop, and remember the "BIOS checksum failed" screen. I go to the Asus web site, download the newest BIOS (released about a month or two ago) and wrote the new firmware to my motherboard's brains. I rebooted.

After some testing, I still couldn't boot from my original hard drive (BSOD), but I could suddenly install an AGP card and have it as my primary VGA.

Tonight I plan to connect all three hard drives (20 GB new OS, 40 GB old OS, 120 GB data drive) and back up all important data. Then do a clean install on the 40 GB drive and see if it's possible to get that BSOD screen again. After all that, if I still get a BSOD, I'm taking back the motherboard.
 

:: Stephen 12:59 PM [+] ::

Comments: Post a Comment

...