ASUS P5N-E SLI 650i Thread

[dpawl31]

What luck have you guys had with RMA?

I was thinking after I get an upgraded board, I want my P5N-E working for the D820 to have a PC to rebuild and sell to a friend.
I have had the board over 2 years now, and can probably get a copy of the invoice from ZipZoomFly.

[Ravin]

Dunno.....never had to RMA an ASUS before.

[Aardobard]

Originally Posted by dpawl31

What luck have you guys had with RMA?

I was thinking after I get an upgraded board, I want my P5N-E working for the D820 to have a PC to rebuild and sell to a friend.
I have had the board over 2 years now, and can probably get a copy of the invoice from ZipZoomFly.

I've had a decent experience. The first time I sent the board in, it came back repaired in two weeks from the ship date. The second time I RMA'd, it was returned in less time, but was not repaired. I have (just yesterday) received a replacement tech-tested board via cross-ship for the second/third RMA for a total of about 5 weeks downtime.

[BIGWORM]

Hi folks.

New to the P5N-e club. I guess I have a pretty suitable processor and memory, both being a lapped e6750 and Tracers DDR2-800, but I've recently run into a big problem, with a proceeding big post ahead:

K, I had a sound card installed in the system, a SB Audigy Platinum. I had recently removed it because I wanted to put an 80mm fan directly below my 8800GT for better airflow, so I decided to yank it and run onboard sound, and learn to deal with it. Well, I couldn't deal with it, the crappy sound in comparison. This was AC97 (Case doesn't have an HDA panel). At the point of putting the audigy back in, I decided to upgrade to beta graphics card drivers, the 182.05s from nVidia.

Anyway, I put the Audigy back into my system, and that's seemingly where the problem starts. After about 3 or so minutes of gaming, my system would hard lock completely, and ALWAYS with a high-pitched sound, so my first thought was to remove the sound drivers (not the card itself) at this point, driver sweep the system of anything Creative, and reinstall again. NOTHING! Next, I tried going back to nvidia's 181.22s, drivers which I've had absolutely no problems in the past with...NOTHING! I was thinking maybe for some reason or another it was the 80mm that I had sat under the GPU was messing with it for whatever reason...NOPE!

I've yet to take out the sound card, because I honestly don't think that's the problem. I had noticed when I put in the sound card, for whatever reason, I had lost my BIOS settings (refused to POST), and I had to pull the CMOS battery and re-apply my settings. Before I post my BIOS settings, I would also like to point out that whenever I set something different in my BIOS, the motherboard completely shuts down and restarts--that had never happened before until right now. Now for the BIOS:
=========================================
CPU:

UNLINKED
Clock: 3.5GHz
FSB: 438/1752 (QDR)
Mutli: 8x

Voltages:

vCore: 1.4 (with auto voltage = 1.5
NB: 1.56
Memory: ~2.19

RAM:

4-4-4-12-2T
Misc. settings all auto

MISC/CPU Config:

LDT: 3x
All CPU settings except for XD Bit are disabled
PCI-E FSB: 100MHz (NEVER touching that)
IDE options are all disabled (running SATA optical and HDD)
==========================================

Now, I had noticed my CPU was sluggish loading games like Mirror's Edge even on the default BIOS. Only when the BIOS was completely default would it actually behave, though sluggish on the loading, it would behave. Just ran OCCT Large Data for the past 4 hours, and it passed with no errors. The games that were crashing on me were high-end games like GRID, Mirror's Edge, Burnout Paradise--never tested anything else. Little, minor (but obvious) annoyances like explorer.exe crashing intermittently were starting to pop up. I was typing this up before while backing up data to Nero 8 and BOTH Firefox and Nero SIMULTANEOUSLY! WHAT!!?

I'm now on Windows 7 public beta (was on XP Pro SP3 previously). This is the OS that passed OCCT for 4 hours, but with a weird CPU usage spike that I had never seen before. OCCT Large Data failed within 1 minutes back on XP. =( Could this honestly be something as simple as the CMOS battery needing to be replaced? Corrupted BIOS for whatever reason? I've been pulling my hair trying to figure out what the problem is, and since virtually everyone in this thread have quite the experience with this board (my experience is < 2 weeks), I call on you guys for help!!

I've attached my OCCT Large results. Thanks for any help. No tl;dr version LOL!

[dpawl31]

Your sig rig is a P5N32-E... or is that not the setup you are talking about?

[BIGWORM]

Sorry, that IS a P5N-E SLi I have right now.

Typo. ^^;

[BIGWORM]

Can I get ANY help on this?

[Aardobard]

Ok Bigworm, go ahead and pull everything non-essential off your board and run it at stock speeds and benchmark it. That will give us a baseline to work from. If you lose your bios settings again, you may need to replace the battery.

If your box is stable at stock/essential, then you can start adding components in one at a time. Once they are all in, start your OC back up.

Hopefully this will give you some info as to whether you have a simple driver issue or a hardware issue.

[BIGWORM]

Update:

I've replaced the battery. One thing I noticed right off the bat is the tower stopped powering down whenever I changed BIOS settings. Ran GRID Demo v1.1 for 45 minutes, and it played fine. On the other hand, played TF2 for about half an hour and it hard-locked my system again...

[dpawl31]

Sounds like temp issues or memory to me.

What are your temps like?

Have you run memtest @ full stock speeds on everything?