B
bjoeboo
Lots of folks having issues with this board (myself included), but not
because its crappy, but rather because its so bleeding edge and people
aren't giving it the deference required. There are literally new
Intel cpus rolling of the assembly line every couple weeks and the
BIOS version shipped on a particular P4P800 board may not support
these new cpus, that was my prob was I got a board with BIOS ver. 1002
and needed at least 1014 for my new 1mb cache 2.80ghz cpu. Asus's
website will tell you what minumum BIOS ver you need for a particular
cpu. Problem is since you can't complete POST You can't boot far
enough to flash the BIOS so you need an older CPU temporarily just to
flash the BIOS, or your can pay $5.00 shipping to asus and ship them
your bios chip which they flash for no charge and ship back, or you
can just have them send you a new bios chip with proper flash for
$25.00. If you look inside the case you can see the bios chip with a
sticker telling the bios ver. in the corner of the board near the
battery (if you can't boot to read it) I called ASUS tech support and
he wanted to hear the beeps from my failing POST which is where the
tech support confirmed my suspicians I needed newer bios ver. for my
cpu; at time of this writing their upto 1016 and a new one every 2
weeks. Its a bit crappy the a list of POST beep codes can't be found
anywhere, just generic AMI bios codes which may or may not be
applicable. Further adding to this weirdness is some bios versions of
this board beep once for each attached USB device, while others don't
even have the usual single "all ok" POST beep (this last I gleaned
from forums on this topic)
Lastly, RAM selection is critical, this is an EXTREMELY finicky board
in regards to RAM. There is a list of approved vendor
models in the motherboard manual, but if you go with Kingston.com,
they have lifetime warranty and sell "kits" of RAM to work in dual
channel mode together. To be safe I used their "memory configurator
tool" to tell which model numbers of sets are recommended for this
board. Also I guess there's an issue with these boards won't work
with a CAS of 2. See http://techreport.com/ja.zz?comments=5264 for an
explanation of Corsair's trouble with CAS 2 and their new CAS 3,
2-3-2-6 timings by default. Hope this helps someone.
because its crappy, but rather because its so bleeding edge and people
aren't giving it the deference required. There are literally new
Intel cpus rolling of the assembly line every couple weeks and the
BIOS version shipped on a particular P4P800 board may not support
these new cpus, that was my prob was I got a board with BIOS ver. 1002
and needed at least 1014 for my new 1mb cache 2.80ghz cpu. Asus's
website will tell you what minumum BIOS ver you need for a particular
cpu. Problem is since you can't complete POST You can't boot far
enough to flash the BIOS so you need an older CPU temporarily just to
flash the BIOS, or your can pay $5.00 shipping to asus and ship them
your bios chip which they flash for no charge and ship back, or you
can just have them send you a new bios chip with proper flash for
$25.00. If you look inside the case you can see the bios chip with a
sticker telling the bios ver. in the corner of the board near the
battery (if you can't boot to read it) I called ASUS tech support and
he wanted to hear the beeps from my failing POST which is where the
tech support confirmed my suspicians I needed newer bios ver. for my
cpu; at time of this writing their upto 1016 and a new one every 2
weeks. Its a bit crappy the a list of POST beep codes can't be found
anywhere, just generic AMI bios codes which may or may not be
applicable. Further adding to this weirdness is some bios versions of
this board beep once for each attached USB device, while others don't
even have the usual single "all ok" POST beep (this last I gleaned
from forums on this topic)
Lastly, RAM selection is critical, this is an EXTREMELY finicky board
in regards to RAM. There is a list of approved vendor
models in the motherboard manual, but if you go with Kingston.com,
they have lifetime warranty and sell "kits" of RAM to work in dual
channel mode together. To be safe I used their "memory configurator
tool" to tell which model numbers of sets are recommended for this
board. Also I guess there's an issue with these boards won't work
with a CAS of 2. See http://techreport.com/ja.zz?comments=5264 for an
explanation of Corsair's trouble with CAS 2 and their new CAS 3,
2-3-2-6 timings by default. Hope this helps someone.