Just put together a new Athlon 64 3200+ with an Asus K8VSE and it works
perfectly - except for reporting the CPU voltage out of range. The CPU
voltage in the bios and with any program is 0.0 volts! Does anyone know if
this is a known issue and is there a fix! Bios is from february and I saw
some reference to a "Cool and Quiet" patch in a newer one. Any help
appreciated
The datasheet for the sensor chip is here. PDF page 21 lists the pin
numbers of the voltage monitor pins, and Vcore is nominally listed
as being pin 107. The figure on PDF page 25 is wrong, as it lists
the pins for another chip in the series, but it shows the concept
of Vcore being connected directly to the chip. You might try looking
right next to pin 107 on the board, to see if a resistor is supposed
to be there and is missing or is cracked (that happens sometimes, as
the resistors have a glass body, and while cooling they can
become cracked). Another reason for a voltage like this to be missing,
is if pin 107 is shorted to ground somewhere - the massive current of
Vcore would blow the small sensor track if the sensor track is
grounded somewhere. The Winbond chip has the pins numbered via tiny
numbers printed in white lettering, in the four corners of the chip.
That will make it easier to find the sixth pin down from the corner
that is labelled "102" (the side with "102" on one corner and "1"
on the other corner).
http://winbond-usa.com/products/winbond_products/pdfs/PCIC/w83697hf.pdf
Your board isn't listed on the MBM5 webpage, only the K8V deluxe and
K8V are listed. It is quite likely your board has the same sensor
connections, so you could try MBM5 and see what it says. Since
development of MBM5 has stopped, it won't be updated. Use either
Asus Probe or MBM5, but don't leave both installed on the computer
at the same time, as they don't share the monitor chip nicely.
http://mbm.livewiredev.com/mobolist.html
I checked the BIOS notes for all three K8V boards, and the mention
of a patch for "cool and quiet", probably won't have too much to do
with the measurement of Vcore. Cool and quiet can drive FID and VID
pins, and while the BIOS could have an interest in reading Vcore
after adjusting VID, I doubt Asus would trust the monitor chip to
perform this function or use the results in a closed loop way. In
other words, Cool and quiet is a table lookup, followed by blindly
writing FID and VID bit patterns, to match processor performance
to the processing load.
So, I suspect the path to that pin is broken somehow. If you feel the
ability to monitor the board and raise an alarm if Vcore is out of
spec is important, then RMA the board and get one that works.
You could try flashing the BIOS to the latest beta, but with all the
good experiences people have been having the last couple of days
with BIOS flashing, I don't think I can stand to read another post
where "flash goes wrong". If you do flash the BIOS, use a floppy
based method, and don't use AsusUpdate. In any case, try the latest
utility on the download page, as sometimes the utilities have been
updated since the motherboard CD was produced. Or, you could treat
a "flash gone wrong" as an even more excellent reason to RMA
If this was my board, I would get it fixed, one way or another.
An early warning of Vcore problems is a handy feature to have.
HTH,
Paul
