Asus P5AD2 Premium and 5400s

[Wired]

Kewlness! If you need any help gathering info from the forums here, please don't hesitate to ask!

Guys, yes, he's from Thermaltake (I checked out his sign up email address). Hey, what can I say, it's good to be an admin!

[CandyKid]

Well, it's good to know that he's out there. I've always liked Thermaltake and was a bit worried with some of the things I've been seeing. Hopefully they'll get everything taken care of, especially since I'll be getting an ATX 12v 2.0 PSU here in a little bit!

PLUR
CK

P.S. Admin Powah Abuse!

[Wired]

No, abuse would be changing your user title and sig... :)

[gloomis]

i have same except processer 3.6 i reckon i dont have any problems at all the only thing i can think of is conflict between 925x chipset and video card

[[Excalibur]]

Hi all,
it seems that some issues observed in the previous pages of this thread regard the critical tuning of the North Bridge I925X (4x200MHz) or I925XE (4x266MHz).
It's known that North Bridge chip is responsible of the connection between most important heart-part of your system: CPU (via FSB), RAM (via RAMbus), PCI-express bus, South Bridge (for peripherals).

Well, it's true that all of you have talked about CPU and RAM settings, but NOBODY about PCI-express frequency.
There's a little trick from ASUS: in these mobos, "PCI express frequency" set to AUTO sucks. Why?
Designed for overclocking applications, the default setting AUTO seems to be NOT the regular value FSB / 2 (at defaults PCI-e frequency should be generated from the same PLL that drives the FSB quad-pumped, the so-called TO CPU synchro in BIOS: so, if PLL freq is 200MHz, we obtain 800 MHz for FSB and 100MHz for PCI-express), but seems to be, instead, slightly LESS.
Of course, some PCI-e video cards suffers about under-clocked buses (ATI Radeon in particular. Note that it's not an ATI issue, it's an ASUS trick!), and can generate black screen, BSOD (blue screen of death), restart of the system 'cause instability between data on PCI-e and North Bridge.

So, if you have strange instability issues on P5AD2 and P5AD2-E, try to disregard AUTO setting on PCI-express frequency. Set it to a manual value between 102-105 MHz for non-overclocked systems, and PEG Link Mode to SLOW (i.e. simply not try to boost communications between PCI-e bus and North Bridge, but only use freq. specified).

It's also true that if you overclock the system, you MUST increase manually this PCI-express frequency, too. Or North Bridge will suffer of some kind of arbitration loss of data. Values between 105 and 110 MHz for overclocked systems should run well.

Greetings from Italy

[Wired]

Thanks for the info!

[Yellowbeard]

Yes, thank you Northstar. I have been trying to tune a 925x/PCI-e MOBO recently and this is very good information.

Mike.

[Wired]

HUH? NORTHSTAR? His name is [Excalibur] man...

[Yellowbeard]

Originally Posted by specmike

Yes, thank you Northstar. I have been trying to tune a 925x/PCI-e MOBO recently and this is very good information.

Mike.

It's the drugs, I meant Excalibur.

[Wired]

Man, April will be interesting lol!

[Laurens-O]

After a very long time of problems, testing and changing parts just like you guys here, i found out that the source of all my problems is the ASUS "peg link" function (not the PCI-E bus speed). This actually is a PCI-E VGA card overclock function. (There is another topic here which i started: http://www.houseofhelp.com/v3/showthread.php?t=35767 )

There is a known problem with the ATI radeon X-- series cards in combination with the "peg link" function (I have a X850XT): http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4745.html


The tricky part of the story is that even if you load the bios setup defaults, the function is still active (it´s set to auto which means that overclocking is active). The VGA card will run at it´s normal speed only when you set it to "slow". I realy find this a little bit sneaky of ASUS.
Setting it to slow solved all my problems immediately. Just to be sure, i reinstalled Windows (i never was able to login normally before without freezing).

Now everything went smooth, i was sooo happy that everything suddenly worked after all those freezes and BSOD´s, everything runs as smooth as possible now.
There is still another (less dramatic) problem: If you connect an externally powered USB hub to the P5AD2, you´ll get weird problems and behaviour, try to avoid this, or when possible, let the hub(s) get their power from the PC.
By the way, my 4x 512Mb XMS2 5400 modules are manually set to 4-4-4-12 with a bus speed of 600Mhz. Magnificent performance!

Happy Happy Joy Joy! :)

[[Excalibur]]

Right, Lauren's-O:

"...By default the feature is set to Auto, which is the same as "Normal". However, the Normal setting still slightly overclocks the video card by almost 8%..."

I specified that PEG Link mode must be set to SLOW in my first post for this reason.
Good work!

[eran_wolf]

I just wanted to post this as a thank you and some general info for others out there. I just got a P5AD2-E Premium mobo, the new 3.6G P4 Processor with 2MB of cache, 2 GB of Corsair mem and a X800 PCIe vid card.

After getting my PC built to only have it freeze in Windows setup time and again, made my stomach drop. Then reading these posts made it worse. However, reading these post lead me to my answer. The mobo in question has a feature called AI NOS. By default this is set to auto. This causes the Windows setup to lock up. I had to disable this setting or set it to standard in the BIOS.

For thos who don't know, this is an overclocking feature on the mobo that auto detects performance and boosts accordingly.

I cant tell you how many parts I replaced before coming here and figuring it all out. I just hope this helps someone else.

[Yellowbeard]

For thos who don't know, this is an overclocking feature on the mobo that auto detects performance and boosts accordingly.

Thanks for the info. FWIW, an automated OCing utility seems like a STUPID idea to me. MSI and Gigabyte have tried it with miserable results. I was shocked that ASUS jumped on the wagon too.

Mike .

[eran_wolf]

I was playing World of Warcraft and BLAM my whole system just locks up. No crash just locks up. The USB ports power out and the viseo freezes on the image. I guess I have to fork over the dough on a new PSU, damn!!! I have an Aspire 500W and its only 20 Pin, so I suppose I was asking for this. Oh well.

I will check before I order but I would like suggestions from people who have had this issue and have had it resolved with a new PSU. What kind should I get?