"Jay Reinhart" said:
I also have the same problem.
Quality is not Job #1 obviously.
Please give as many details as you can.
A search on Abxzone doesn't show any real USB problems. What
they do have ongoing right now, is the "video artifact"
problem on P4P800, which occurs at high overclock in 1:1
FSB:MEM ratio mode. Also, there are a few people struggling
with random reboots, which could be caused by a batch of
bad Intel processors. It is hard to tell whether there is a
common thread to those problems - no one has investigated
voltage stability for onboard supplies, so it is hard to say
whether the random reboots are "big chip" issues or voltage
regulator type issues.
When I searched on P4P800 and USB, I didn't find any unique
threads on the problem. You guys could have bad silicon, for
example, as there are the odd problem on Abxzone that
responded to an RMA. (I remember one - a RAID controller problem
where the author couldn't get the RAID bios to show up. The
RAID bios only loads if two drives are found, and when the board
was RMA'd, the RAID bios showed up on the new board, implying
a bad RAID hardware interface.)
There are several threads that will always show up on the search
engine, and they have thousands of posts in a thread. I'm not
about to scan any of those right now.
As for the quality comment, Asus can do stuff like boundary scan
on the big chips, but total device functionality is the
responsibility of the manufacturer of the chip. Only "at speed"
testing on a big chip tester works to keep the quality of the
chips at six sigma. No board manufacturer has the equipment to
do incoming inspection as thorough as the equipment at the
chip fab. For your USB problem, this would be the Southbridge
made by Intel. Board manufacturers don't typically spend hours
doing ad hoc testing and rely on structural testing. To manufacture
two million motherboards a month, imagine how short the test time
has to be for each one. And no, they don't sit around booting up
motherboards
Paul
