Asus P4PE mother board problem, Any ideas??

[paulw]

About 4 months ago I got a new PC built around this board. Intel P2.4, 512Meg RAM, Win2K SP3, Matrox Mystique video, 500Watt PSU, lots of fans and asorted hard disks. All the componants are good quality.. There are 3 partitions. C: Win98 SE for old analog video which blue screens at the drop of a hat. , D: Win2K SP3 for general stuff, E: Win2K SP3 for Digital video and DVDs etc. BIOS version 1005 It was purpose built with video in mind.

I bought the board bassed on the Matrox web site saying it was certified for their RTX range of capture card and has great PCI bus thruput..

The problems I've had.

1. Intermittent cold boot. About 1 every 3 weeks. Known problem.I can live with that..

2. Intermittent system freezes. Some times for no reason it slows down and just stops and has to be powered off. THis is about once every week or two as well and seems to happen within the first 30 minutes of starting from cold..

However I have started to do some digital video rendering and that's where my problems start. It will start the render to say Mpeg2 SVCD. After about a minute or two it freezes. I have tried this in both the Win2K partitions with the same result. The ASUS Probe shows the temp going to about 45c from about 40c. Unless this thing is lying the temperture of the CPU is normal.. This happens with Media Studio Pro and Cinema Craft encoder.

If I can't find a reason for this it will get replaced with something else non Asus.. My last PC has a MSI-6301 Mobo with a P550. Terrible PCI thruput but very stable..

[wkulecz]

Can't think of much that's specific, as intermittentent problems can be caused by most anything.

Have you ran memtest86 overnight? Bad RAM can cause all kinds of weird problems. Memtest is a free download, you create a floppy and boot it to run the tests.

There are lots of crap power supplies on the market now, might be the next thing I'd swap out. Even in "brand names" 2-3% defective seems to be a better than average problem rate :-(

Also windows does a really bad job of dealing with bad spots on a hard drive, try running scandisk with the scan disk for errors option. I've seen windows "lock up" when encountering bad spots on an IDE drive, if the bad sectors are in the swap file things can get really strange.

Reduce the system to the minimum to run and get it running reliably, then add things one at a time as see where it starts having problems.

Without the help of your builder you are in deep doodoo, if you're the builder, perservere and you'll likely learn more than you care to know.

good luck!
--wally.

[paulw]

Thanx wkulecz for the reply.

Can you point me to any good memory tester for me to try??

[wkulecz]

I did, memtest86

Do a Google search. There is a full windows version that creates the boot disk.

--wally.

[paulw]

Thanx. I ran the Microsoft memory tester all nite without any problems. I'll try this one tonite..

[THE_Editor]

My brother has this very board ..

Has had all sorts of grief with it too..

He's changing his MoBo again ... He said he's gonna try the Gigabyte .GA-8ik1100

[paulw]

I ran Memtest 86 all nite. No problems.

Ran the Cinemacraft render again today went fine. Loaded a 3 minute PAL DV clip into MSPRO 7 . Froze up as it loaded the audio into the time line. Went from normal to frozen in about 2 seconds.
Will persivier a little more,

The_Editor.

"Official Lover of Monaros"

Is that the Austrialian car that is sold in the US as the Pontiac GTO ??

[THE_Editor]

You mean, One of these ..




YUP

They have even made a song for the Monaro ...

( I just want one)

http://f4.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/4Fc9PwP-vta5mefpAoJQQLOQ5LtW73w0EBif43vk0TEXGApeH796NlAT_KxX3j3LvFgI4mY256vlRMY0/v8symphony16bit%5B1%5D.mp3

Edit ... Dont bother with the link ..cant get it to work ??

[paulw]

Yep. That's the one. I didn't think you folk in the UK went in for grunt machines like these.. Doc maybe..

[THE_Editor]

Well .... Its Probably cos I'm an... Outcast_Aussie !!

Actually, The General is releasing the Monaro here in England end 2003.

Although they are gonna rebadge it Vauxhall Monaro Which is bloody Sacrillage.

It costs £21K to import an aussie Monaro (brand new) .. Naturally Its been priced at £27K to buy the Vauxhall version ( Hey this is UK .. Gotta rip us off, Right !!)

[THE_Editor]

Ok ..

I still cant find the link for V8 symphony.mp3 on Holdens site (Where I got it from) so

Your'll have to make do with the "GAME OVER" video