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Asus P4C800 Deluxe crash problems


nurbs_x

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A few months ago I upgraded my system to a P4 3.0C, Asus P4C800 with two 512 mb PC3200LL TwinX modules. Despite a warning that the PC3200LL was incompatible with the board from the place I bought it from, it ran great for about three months. Now I get random crashes all the time for no reason whatsoever. Seg faults, the whole system shutting itself off all of the sudden, every error under the sun. There is no discernable pattern, nor a certain amount of time passes before they occur. I have tried many different BIOS settings that I have read as recommended in this forum (with the latest BIOS as well: 1010) I tried another memory module: 1 Corsair 512 PC3200 CAS-2 CMX. With both types of modules I get a hefty error count in memtest. It cannot be as a result of the OS (I have reloaded & reformatted windows XP pro several times and Linux 2.4.20 only has slighter problems due to better memory management :) ). It cannot be another piece of hardware, I have tested the memory and tried running my system with basically nothing but a graphics card and a hard drive (different working hard drives, as well). So, to sum all of this up, I am really fairly certain that this has nothing to do with my RAM. However, the warning from my retailer that the RAM modules I had purchased were not compatible with my motherboard still linger in my memory. My question is: Does anyone have any other ideas before I scrap this motherboard?
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  • Corsair Employee
I am sorry that you are having trouble, But can you tell me a few more details about your other hardware like the Make and model of PSU you have and the CPU speed you have installed and the Video card you have? Ram Guy
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CPU: Pentium 4 3.0 GHz C 800 mHz FSB PSU: Channel Well Technology 300W Model CWT-300ATX-12V GFX Card: Leadtek Winfast A250 GeForce 4 Ti4600 128mb AGP 4x The 12V connector is connected on my motherboard if you are wondering (saw that in another post)
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I have had *exactly* the same issue with the ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe, except I started having problems after about two weeks. Using the TWINX3200LL as well. Initially, everything was perfect. Good os install, perfect app running, everything seemed smooth (and sooooo fast!), but then the bsods started (winxp pro). I tried every possible combination of memory timing, to no avail. So, I rma'd the board and got an Intel D875PBZ. Upgraded the bios to p09, so it would see the ram as actual DDR400, and set the latencies at 2-3-3-6. Couldn't installed windows without crashing. memtestx86 showed numerous errors after running for quite some time. I then clocked the memory bus at 333mhz, and was able to install XP, however I *still* get oddities and memtestx86 issues. Even setting the latency at 2.5-4-4-8; doesn't help. Tried dropping the memory bus to 266, and still no joy. Tomorrow I try testing each module one-at-a-time to see if I can identify where the problem is. The very interesting point is that with the ASUS P4C800 I had NO problems for two weeks. I'm wondering if the higher-than-spec memory voltage on the asus could be responsible for the damage? Now, I never *set* the voltage high on the board, but I've read in a couple places that the p4c800 bios misrepresents what true voltage is being used. Regardless, I plan to rma the corsair modules, but I need to wait until I can purchase replacement memory (can't be without a box). I think I'll go with the "vendor approved" kingston modules for the Intel board, as I have just read about too many horror stories with corsair and i875p chipsets.
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  • Corsair Employee
nurbs_x You really need at least a 400 watt PSU with this combo of hardware. I would suggest testing the memory one module at a time on another MB if possible with [url]www.memtest86.com.[/url] Ram Guy
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I think I may be in the same boat. Here's the system I'm running: Power: Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480Watts Motherboard: Asus P4C800-E Deluxe CPU: P4 3GHz, 800MHz FSB RAM: TWINX1024-3200LLPT 1GB DDR400 XMS3200 OTHER Stuff: Video: ATI Radeon 9600 Audio: SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Other PCI: old TV tuner card Hard Drives: 4 IDE disk drives Optical Drives: 1 CD-R/RW, 1 DVD Fans: 7 case fans My problem: For the first couple days I had my new system put together, it ran perfectly with Windows XP Professional. Then, yesterday it started freezing. At first I thought it might have something to do with Windows power management or problems coming out of standby. So, I disabled all of that. Moreover, it freezes at random. Additionally, on some of the boot ups the motherboard beeps twice, signaling a parity error. But, it doesn't always do this. I'm running Memtest86 as we speak, and we'll see if it reports any errors. Does it seem to be the case that this RAM and Motherboard simply don't work together? Any advice on what I should do? Should I tweak the settings in the BIOS? Upgrade the BIOS? Move the RAM from the blue channels to the black (though I plan to add another GB when I can afford it)? Thanks in advance for the helP!
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  • Corsair Employee
andrew82, Please test the memory with [url]www.memtest86.com,[/url] But I think you may find the issue is with your Creative card and or the TV Tuner card. for this MB the PCI card should be PCI 2.1 Spec. If you get errors I would remove all of the cards and then please try setting the timings to BY SPD and set the Dram Voltage to 2.75 Volts and I would Disable USB legacy support as well. Ram Guy
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Ram Guy, I checked and the Creative Audigy 2 sound card is PCI 2.1 compliant. It could be my TV tuner card, which is a piece of junk. The Memtest86 has been running for over 11 hours now. How long is the thing supposed to take? Could you elaborate on what you mean by "setting the timings to BY SPD"? Once the Memtest is completed, I'll take out the TV tuner card and make the "BY SPD" and voltage changes. Hopefully that's all I need to do!
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  • Corsair Employee
Well [url]www.memtest86.com[/url] will not stop untill you stop it. Its made to do nothing else but test/stress the memroy. If there are no errors listed on the bottom of the screen then I would think the memory is fine especailly after 11 hours. I would try the system with out the PCI crads installed and make sure there are no drivers loaded for the on board sound and see if the system is stable with out the cards in the slots. Ram Guy
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:) My board is a Asus P4C800 Deluxe and i use two pairs of 256mb Twinx 3200LL The board runs with no problem settings are 2-3-3-5-8 and i set the voltage to 2,75volt as Ram Guy says. PAM is enabled and Performance mode is set to Standard. I noticed that the ram sticks are rev 1.2.Have the Twinx 3200LL sticks been upgraded Ram Guy? Im not a mad OC so i'm happy with my rig.But i have only had it for a week.Lets hope it keeps up the good work.
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OK, so I took out the TV tuner card and was still having problems. I found it highly unlikely that the top of the line sound card was causing my problems. So, I decided to go ahead and wipe the hard drive and start all over. That has seemed to solve the problem of system freezes. I decided not to put back in the TV tuner card and not to install my parallel port zip drive in case either of those were causing the problem. However, after intalling Office XP (and this may very well be a coincidence, since I can think of no logical reason for this) my motherboard began reporting a parity error upon boot up. I thought, "ah ha...now I'll catch the RAM error" and went and ran another memory test with Memtest86. But, after 8+ passes it didn't find anything. So, what could be causing my motherboard (see above posts for specs on my system) to report a parity error? Should I worry about it? Surely it's not linked to Office XP.
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  • Corsair Employee
What it's telling you is that you have a parity error? Are you just getting 2 or 3 beeps? If so the USB controller will give a beep for each device connected and sound like a parity error that the manual describes. Please try disconnecting any USB devices to test. Ram Guy
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That was it! My motherboard manual says that two beeps indicate a parity error. I never would have guessed that it beeps for each USB device attached! I unplugged both of them and booted up and got no beeps. Then I plugged them back in and the two beeps were back. Perfect! So my assumption that it was a RAM problem was just off to start with and it was just lousy old Windows that was messed up. Thanks for all your help. Even if Corsair didn't make awesome RAM, the support sure is great!
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Ok, so first of all, I tried upgrading my PSU from the 300 watt to a 550. No change, unfourtunately. However, a while ago I disconnected most of my non essential fans and devices to hopefully free up some more power, and my system seemed to be a lot more stable like that. Now with the new PSU, I have the same stability that I had before, but with all my fans and devices. Yet, still the random reset problem. So the next thing I try is a brand new motherboard (P4C800 Deluxe, same as before). When I took the old one out, I noticed some small scorch marks on two chips that sit right below the memory banks. Hoping that the marks had something to do with my problems, I installed the new motherboard. The result: Little has seemed to change. I am using Corsair's recommended BIOS settings with a brand new motherboard, with brand new RAM and I am still getting random resets in windows. I set memtest to run over night and what I found 7 hours later was 52 passes and 258 errors. These results are a lot more encouraging than with the old motherboard which racked up errors during the entire test until you got sick of watching the error count steadily increase. Is this an error count to be worried about? Or are a few errors normal? One thing that occurs to me, is that I have not upgraded the bios on the new board yet. Otherwise, any suggestions? My current setup again: Pentium 4 3.0 GHz C 800 mHz FSB Asus P4C800 Deluxe (2) 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LL (running dual channel) Enermax EG651P-VE (FMA) 550 Watt PSU Leadtek Winfast A250 GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB AGP 4x SBLive Hollywood MPEG Decoder Ethernet Modem Hard drives.. etc..
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Update: I tried running memtest again with a Corsair 512 mb PC3200 C2PT and after the first pass I had 200 errors. Then I tried a 256 mb PC2100 chip (out of a Dell) and after the first pass I had 2,302 errors. So, the PC3200LL has the least amount of errors, but I still wonder what could be causing the errors in the first place, and if it is linked to my random reboots.
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Nurbs Terrible to hear you have sutch problems,i feel with you. I have got a Asus P4C800 Dx and a 2,6C P4. I have got 2 sticks of 250mb Twinx 3200LL Rev.1.2 in the blue ram slotts. Powersupply is Enermax 365W and my pc works perfekt. Tried memtest for one hour and no faults. Have even tried OC a bit aswell.Wish i could help you.Have you checked that nothing is shorting your board?The mount screws are not to big? By the way my board came with the 1004 bios and i recomend you to uppgrade.I'm using bios 1011 now.
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This is weird, I'm getting the same problems. Here is my specs. ASUS P4C800 Deluxe P4 3.0 Ghz Corsair CMX512-3200C2 Audigy 2 Radeon 9800 400 Watt PSU that's all the hardware I have inside plus a bunch of fans. When I first put everything together, the system was very unstable. So I thought that I should probably "burn-in" the system with Sandra and 3DMark 2003. Afterwards, things were better. However, I still get random reboots and shutdowns. Sometimes IE, AIM, Explorer would just crash upon first booting causing me to reboot again until it worked. I ran memtest86 and had some interesting results. It seems that I can never run more than 2 passes before the program hangs. Once i had 800 some errors, but I ran again and it had none. I know that memtest is suppose to run nonstop but mine just freezes after a while. Could this be a problem with the memory? By the way, I used SPD for memtest and I chose to ran all tests. My parents are getting pissed at these random shutdowns/crashes/reboots. So far I can't find a solution. Going down to local hardware store to buy new RAM and see if it'll solve the problem. Anyhow, this is a major issue for Corsair to look into. Thx all!
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I thought I had the problem fixed, but such was not the case. (See my previous posts in this thread for the details.) Basically, my system (running Windows XP Pro SP1 with all patches) freezes at random, forcing me to do a hardware reset. My system specs: Power: Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480Watts Motherboard: Asus P4C800-E Deluxe CPU: P4 3GHz, 800MHz FSB RAM: TWINX1024-3200LLPT 1GB DDR400 XMS3200 OTHER Stuff: Video: ATI Radeon 9600 Audio: SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Hard Drives: 4 IDE disk drives Optical Drives: 1 CD-R/RW, 1 DVD Fans: 7 case fans USB: Canon i550 printer USB: Canon CanoScan N 650U Memtest doesn't find any errors with my memory, even when running for 11+ hours. I though that maybe the problem was the CPU, so I ran a 6 hour test using Hot CPU Tester 3.4.2 (see: [url]http://www.7byte.com[/url]). It didn't find any errors. (I didn't pay to upgrade to the Pro version, which tests the chipset and the peripherals. So, I may pay the money to upgrade and run a more complete test.) Does anybody have any ideas as to what could be causing the problem? I'm quite tired of re-installing everything. What could cause the system to freeze (seemingly) at random? Does it sound more like a hardware or a software issue? Another thought I had was that maybe it had something to do with the video card and/or with DirectX hanging. Does anybody know a place where I could get software to test that theory? I'll try disabling legacy USB support and/or unplugging my two USB devices. But, are these likely causes of my problems? Thanks for the help.
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  • Corsair Employee
I have no problem to swap the modules for any of you. I think 3 are here with the same issue. But I think I would try a few things first so maybe you can nail it down. First I would remove every thing that’s not needed and just use [url]www.memtest86.com[/url] to test the modules one at a time and I would test them one at a time and please use these settings. For XMS3200C2 Cass 2-3-3-6 at 2.75 Volts & USB Legacy Disabled. For XMS3200LL Cass 2-3-2-6 at 2.75 Volts & USB Legacy Disabled. That's with the Rass to Cass set to "3" For the RMA if needed, Please send us a email with a copy of the [URL=http://www.corsairmemory.com/main/rma_request.xls]form[/URL] or all of your info name address and phone# and the Module part# and copy the link to this post and email it to [email]warranty@corsairmicro.com[/email]. If after 1 day or 24 hours excluding weekends you do not get the rma please email the same to [email]warranty@corsairmicro.com[/email] and we will help to resolve it. Ram Guy
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At a glance, you all need to update your bios to the most recent final but do it in this order. 1. Flash to bios 1008 Final, it updates a portion of the boot block which is not normally required. 2. Then, flash to the most recent final, I think it is 1010 Final. I will reread the thread and then see if I can help. Good luck, Mike.
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