a7v8x-x wont post

[Jay_at_volted.com]

Hi all,

I am hoping someone can help me out here.

I have an asus a7v8x-x, infineon 512 (two of them) pc2100 memory amd athlon
xp2500 barton core. bought this all from tigerdirect and guarenteed to be
compatible with each other. my power supply unit is a Maxpower 400w. Ive
also tried a Antec 350w. Both are pushing 30a on the +5 lead where the board
asks for 5a.

Heres the problem:

I hit the power button, the green light on the board comes on, the cpu and
chassi fan kick on for about 1 second, a long beep emits and the board
powers down. Sometimes it emits one long beep and one short beep and shuts
down. Usually its just the solitary long beep.

I remove the processor and the cpu and chassis fans run endlessly, no beeps.
I leave the memory in for this exercise however the order of things are
cpu/mem/vga so it doesnt matter, its never even getting to the memory before
shutdown with the processor in.

I have the board mounted or unmounted sitting on a antistatic bag (have
tried both ways)

i have tried memory in slots 1+2, 1+3, 2+3 and each slot by itself with just
one stick. cleared the cmos after each hardware change. I have plugged in
multiple vga cards, som pci some agp. all known to work

For kicks and giggles, i took another working system, removed the processor
and hit the power switch. it beeped and died. i plugged the processor back
in and it works fine. The reason behind this test was to see if a board
should still power at all or beep and die with no processor.

What I am trying to find out, and asus tech support has been no more help
than my great great great grandfather (long passed away)

1) Should an asus a7v8x-x board beep with no processor or continue to run -
anyone have a working asus board they could remove the processor and check?

2) would a bad processor be my likely culprit or a bad board or something
else im missing?

3) What are the beep codes for this bios?

I will be checking this forum for updates but I invite any possible
suggestions, comments, questions to (e-mail address removed)

remove 'removeme' from the above address.

Also, not to toot my horn, so to speak, but I am a computer tech - ive never
used asus or athlon components, thus dont know what to expect from them. and
have never run into this problem before setting up computers for clients. I
am setting this one up for my personal use. I use intel for clients, and im
used to AMIBIOS and beep codes from that bios. The jumpers on the board
(minimal as they are) all seem perfect, per user manual (shoddy at best)
specifications.

Thanks in advance. I intend on RMA'ing this board next week. I will be
keeping my processor and memory and returning the board. If anyone has any
recommendations for a good socket A/478 board let me know too. ill check out
compatibility with memory - im leaning towards Abit if the asus doesnt work
out.

Jay
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Paul]

Answers are inline:

Hi all,

I am hoping someone can help me out here.

I have an asus a7v8x-x, infineon 512 (two of them) pc2100 memory amd athlon
xp2500 barton core. bought this all from tigerdirect and guarenteed to be
compatible with each other. my power supply unit is a Maxpower 400w. Ive
also tried a Antec 350w. Both are pushing 30a on the +5 lead where the board
asks for 5a.

Heres the problem:

I hit the power button, the green light on the board comes on, the cpu and
chassi fan kick on for about 1 second, a long beep emits and the board
powers down. Sometimes it emits one long beep and one short beep and shuts
down. Usually its just the solitary long beep.

I remove the processor and the cpu and chassis fans run endlessly, no beeps.
I leave the memory in for this exercise however the order of things are
cpu/mem/vga so it doesnt matter, its never even getting to the memory before
shutdown with the processor in.

I have the board mounted or unmounted sitting on a antistatic bag (have
tried both ways)

i have tried memory in slots 1+2, 1+3, 2+3 and each slot by itself with just
one stick. cleared the cmos after each hardware change. I have plugged in
multiple vga cards, som pci some agp. all known to work

For kicks and giggles, i took another working system, removed the processor
and hit the power switch. it beeped and died. i plugged the processor back
in and it works fine. The reason behind this test was to see if a board
should still power at all or beep and die with no processor.

What I am trying to find out, and asus tech support has been no more help
than my great great great grandfather (long passed away)

When you make 2 million motherboards a month, it is hard to hug each
customer personally Some customers have had exceptional service,
with a tech spending over an hour on the phone with them - others
got the cold shoulder, and no call-back when one was promised. With
some of the motherboard manufacturers, it is hard to figure out
if they even have any point of contact, period. Your experience is
"par for the course".

1) Should an asus a7v8x-x board beep with no processor or continue to run -
anyone have a working asus board they could remove the processor and check?

The PS_ON# logic goes through more than one IC. Inputs are the power
switch and register access used by ACPI/Windows for shutdown or alarm
clock based startup. I don't think that as a rule, that power_good will
kick a board to the off state. But, on an Athlon board, you've got
Asus COP (CPU overheat protection), and that circuit measures the diode
temperature, and kicks the board off if a problem is detected. Some boards
will also shut down, if no RPM signal comes from the CPU fan, or the
fan was plugged into a power source other than the fan header. I would
think that would take a few seconds for the BIOS to figure out. So, my
guess is Asus COP shut you down, either because you are overheating, or
COP is damaged, or the CPU temp diode is out of spec.

Many Asus boards have an AGP_Warn circuit, and it checks to see if
pin A2 (TYPEDET#) is grounded. If somehow, you manage to plug a
+3.3V I/O AGP card into the motherboard, TYPEDET is left open circuit,
and this condition actually gates off the power switch, preventing
the fans from even twitching. So, while that is part of the power
path, it doesn't match your symptoms, because a problem with
AGP_Warn leaves the board "dead as a doornail".

2) would a bad processor be my likely culprit or a bad board or something
else im missing?

Bad processor or bad COP chip. Some boards have an eight pin chip to
do the COP function (a Winbond chip). Others use some kind of discrete
circuit, because the function really isn't that complicated. (Amplify
CPU diode voltage, switch off at 85C junction or so.)

3) What are the beep codes for this bios?

Bioscentral.com is one source of info. You cannot count on Asus
to religiously implement and keep up to date this info. To
hard for them. They have enough trouble making release notes for
each BIOS release

http://bioscentral.com/beepcodes/awardbeep.htm

I will be checking this forum for updates but I invite any possible
suggestions, comments, questions to (e-mail address removed)

remove 'removeme' from the above address.

Also, not to toot my horn, so to speak, but I am a computer tech - ive never
used asus or athlon components, thus dont know what to expect from them. and
have never run into this problem before setting up computers for clients. I
am setting this one up for my personal use. I use intel for clients, and im
used to AMIBIOS and beep codes from that bios. The jumpers on the board
(minimal as they are) all seem perfect, per user manual (shoddy at best)
specifications.

As a tech, you should probably have a PCI POST card (2 digit display),
as sometimes that gives a bit more info as to whether any BIOS
code is executing or not. In this case, if COP is killing the power,
a POST card will stay at "FF".

Thanks in advance. I intend on RMA'ing this board next week. I will be
keeping my processor and memory and returning the board. If anyone has any
recommendations for a good socket A/478 board let me know too. ill check out
compatibility with memory - im leaning towards Abit if the asus doesnt work
out.

Jay
(e-mail address removed)

If you don't like Asus (and the A7N8X family), there is always the
NF7-S from Abit, which is highly regarded in some forums.

HTH,
Paul

 

[Jay_at_volted.com]

Answers are inline:


When you make 2 million motherboards a month, it is hard to hug each
customer personally Some customers have had exceptional service,
with a tech spending over an hour on the phone with them - others
got the cold shoulder, and no call-back when one was promised. With
some of the motherboard manufacturers, it is hard to figure out
if they even have any point of contact, period. Your experience is
"par for the course".


The PS_ON# logic goes through more than one IC. Inputs are the power
switch and register access used by ACPI/Windows for shutdown or alarm
clock based startup. I don't think that as a rule, that power_good will
kick a board to the off state. But, on an Athlon board, you've got
Asus COP (CPU overheat protection), and that circuit measures the diode
temperature, and kicks the board off if a problem is detected. Some boards
will also shut down, if no RPM signal comes from the CPU fan, or the
fan was plugged into a power source other than the fan header. I would
think that would take a few seconds for the BIOS to figure out. So, my
guess is Asus COP shut you down, either because you are overheating, or
COP is damaged, or the CPU temp diode is out of spec.

Many Asus boards have an AGP_Warn circuit, and it checks to see if
pin A2 (TYPEDET#) is grounded. If somehow, you manage to plug a
+3.3V I/O AGP card into the motherboard, TYPEDET is left open circuit,
and this condition actually gates off the power switch, preventing
the fans from even twitching. So, while that is part of the power
path, it doesn't match your symptoms, because a problem with
AGP_Warn leaves the board "dead as a doornail".


Bad processor or bad COP chip. Some boards have an eight pin chip to
do the COP function (a Winbond chip). Others use some kind of discrete
circuit, because the function really isn't that complicated. (Amplify
CPU diode voltage, switch off at 85C junction or so.)


Bioscentral.com is one source of info. You cannot count on Asus
to religiously implement and keep up to date this info. To
hard for them. They have enough trouble making release notes for
each BIOS release

http://bioscentral.com/beepcodes/awardbeep.htm


As a tech, you should probably have a PCI POST card (2 digit display),
as sometimes that gives a bit more info as to whether any BIOS
code is executing or not. In this case, if COP is killing the power,
a POST card will stay at "FF".


If you don't like Asus (and the A7N8X family), there is always the
NF7-S from Abit, which is highly regarded in some forums.

HTH,
Paul

Paul,

Thank you kindly for your response.

I just received the replacement processor today (amd athlon xp2200
thoroughbred core) and swapped it out. It now gets past the prior problem
and beeps once and then an endless amount of beeps.. according to the
website you've posted above, my experience and other sites ive visited, this
pertains to a memory problem. i bought memory that was guarenteed to work
with this board.. maybe not so much.

It seems the mystery problem was caused by the processor, now i just have to
fight this little memory battle. I have tried all configurations of my two
dimms in the 3 slots and continue to get the endless beeping.

I will make a phone call to the memory tech support and see what happens.

I look forward to the end of this struggle, whether it involves returning
the board or getting it to work. At this point, im not fussy either way

- Jay

 

[David L. Cottrell]

That board is VERY picky on memory, unless Asus has changed it
recently. I built a system several months ago with the same symptoms
and problems. I tried multiple processors, hard drives, video cards,
memory, etc. I even ordered a newer 8X video card thinking that might
be it. I finally found a RAM stick that made it happy, purely by
accident and experimentation. All of a sudden, with the original CPU,
HDD, video card etc., it was happy as a clam. I wish I could remmebr
what brand and type memory I ended up using. I built it for someone
else, so I really do not want to go to his house and start playing
inside his computer, especially since it has been working fine ever
since then.

By the way, I am still waiting on a reply from Asus tech support. And,
that was back around Christmas!