Veru Ugly X2 upgrade story.....M$ DUAL CORE DRIVERS BUGGY....read this NOW

[jimbak3]

Long story short.

I upgrade a 110% stable MSI Neo4 Plat w/ AMD 3000 single core to an
X2 3800.

Windows does its thing, updates the HAL to dual core and
recognizes the new chip.

Problem: Getting hard lockups ( no blue screen, just total freeze)
when browsing. Multiple load pages or certain sites only. Easy to
reproduce.

Did ALL the patches. I said ALL. Crash with AND without the dc
patches . Dont ask me about patches. They are worthless in this case.
Did not do a reinstall of windows, cause I have no intention of
reinstalling to upgrade to this.

NOW>>>>> This is the bitch of it. Whatever BUG is in the windows
dual core drivers, STAYS IN THE SYSTEM even when the single core is
returned to the motherboard. Read that twice, cause its a biggie.

Looks like XP does not update the HAL back to single core on its
own. So those drivers remain, and it recognizes that only one core is
installed.

But the crashing is exactly the same with the single core chip . I
have not seen this factor reported anywhere in hundreds or thousands
of posts. so how can we blame the X2 chip if its NOT EVEN IN THE
FREAKING MACHINE.


As soon as I revert Windoze back to the single core HAL, the system
is again 100% stable.


The dual core drivers, at least in my setup are FARKED. I doubt I
will be able install this chip. No way to trace the problem.

 

[Venom]

What motherboard are you using with the X2 CPU? You don't mention DDR2 ram
with the X2 either.

 

[David Simpson]

(e-mail address removed) wrote in @e1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com:

Long story short.
...snip...
The dual core drivers, at least in my setup are FARKED. I doubt I
will be able install this chip. No way to trace the problem.

I upgraded a 3800+ single core to a 4800+ dual core (socket 939) and had no
problems at all.

I can think of 3 or 4 things that would cause problems, and none are driver
related.



--
_______________________________________________
/ David Simpson \
| (e-mail address removed) |
| http://www.nyx.net/~dsimpson |
|We got to go to the crappy town where I'm a hero.|
\_______________________________________________/

 

[Cessna 310]

Long story short.

I upgrade a 110% stable MSI Neo4 Plat w/ AMD 3000 single core to an
X2 3800.

Windows does its thing, updates the HAL to dual core and
recognizes the new chip.

Problem: Getting hard lockups ( no blue screen, just total freeze)
when browsing. Multiple load pages or certain sites only. Easy to
reproduce.

Did ALL the patches. I said ALL. Crash with AND without the dc
patches . Dont ask me about patches. They are worthless in this case.
Did not do a reinstall of windows, cause I have no intention of
reinstalling to upgrade to this.

NOW>>>>> This is the bitch of it. Whatever BUG is in the windows
dual core drivers, STAYS IN THE SYSTEM even when the single core is
returned to the motherboard. Read that twice, cause its a biggie.

Looks like XP does not update the HAL back to single core on its
own. So those drivers remain, and it recognizes that only one core is
installed.

But the crashing is exactly the same with the single core chip . I
have not seen this factor reported anywhere in hundreds or thousands
of posts. so how can we blame the X2 chip if its NOT EVEN IN THE
FREAKING MACHINE.


As soon as I revert Windoze back to the single core HAL, the system
is again 100% stable.


The dual core drivers, at least in my setup are FARKED. I doubt I
will be able install this chip. No way to trace the problem.

I've swapped out several single core processors with dual core ones.
Upgraded from Venice and San Diego cores to Manchester, Toledeo and
Denmark cores. Never had a problem at all.

Lots can go wrong with hardware that would cause your problems.

 

[Don Burnette]

Long story short.

I upgrade a 110% stable MSI Neo4 Plat w/ AMD 3000 single core to an
X2 3800.

Windows does its thing, updates the HAL to dual core and
recognizes the new chip.

Problem: Getting hard lockups ( no blue screen, just total freeze)
when browsing. Multiple load pages or certain sites only. Easy to
reproduce.

Did ALL the patches. I said ALL. Crash with AND without the dc
patches . Dont ask me about patches. They are worthless in this case.
Did not do a reinstall of windows, cause I have no intention of
reinstalling to upgrade to this.

NOW>>>>> This is the bitch of it. Whatever BUG is in the windows
dual core drivers, STAYS IN THE SYSTEM even when the single core is
returned to the motherboard. Read that twice, cause its a biggie.

Looks like XP does not update the HAL back to single core on its
own. So those drivers remain, and it recognizes that only one core is
installed.

But the crashing is exactly the same with the single core chip . I
have not seen this factor reported anywhere in hundreds or thousands
of posts. so how can we blame the X2 chip if its NOT EVEN IN THE
FREAKING MACHINE.


As soon as I revert Windoze back to the single core HAL, the system
is again 100% stable.


The dual core drivers, at least in my setup are FARKED. I doubt I
will be able install this chip. No way to trace the problem.

Fwiw, a little over a year ago, I upgraded from a K8N Neo2 w/ single core
Athlon processor, that was very solid, to a K8N Neo4 Plat w. X2 4400+ dual
core processor. I tend to upgrade motherboard/cpu almost once a year,
occasionally going couple of years.
The K8N Neo4 Pat with the X2 processor, was the only combination I have had
that was unstable. I too, would get lockups while browsing the internet or
reading newsgroups, requiring a hard reboot. No erros in event viewer,
nothing to give me a clue. I had good quality hardware, including power
supply. This would happen almost on a weekly basis, about once a week or so.
I changed to a good quality power supply, just to be sure, and still had the
problem. I tried reinstalling Windows XP Pro, with no change.

3 weeks ago, I upgraded to an EVGA 680i socket 775 mb, Intel Core2 Duo
E6600, and 2gb Corsair Extreme DDR2 pc8500 ram.
First time I have had an Intel system in several years, I had read so much
good about these processors decided to take the plunge.
The system has been up and running strong, without a single glitch,
overclocked from the default 2.4 ghz , to 3.24 ghz, with the ram running at
1066 mhz.
I stil like AMD very much, and have been a supporter for some time, and no
doubt will switch back at some point.

But for whatever reason, that X2 processor on the K8N Neo4 Plat motherboard,
just caused me a lot of stability issues, that I never could get figured
out. Understand, it ran great, performance was very good, I just had that
occasionally lock up that I had to deal with. Never seemed to happen while
playing games, usually while browsing internet with Explorer or Firefox, or
reading newsgroups with OE.

 

[Hertz_Donut]

Long story short.

I upgrade a 110% stable MSI Neo4 Plat w/ AMD 3000 single core to an
X2 3800.

Windows does its thing, updates the HAL to dual core and
recognizes the new chip.

Problem: Getting hard lockups ( no blue screen, just total freeze)
when browsing. Multiple load pages or certain sites only. Easy to
reproduce.

Did ALL the patches. I said ALL. Crash with AND without the dc
patches . Dont ask me about patches. They are worthless in this case.
Did not do a reinstall of windows, cause I have no intention of
reinstalling to upgrade to this.

NOW>>>>> This is the bitch of it. Whatever BUG is in the windows
dual core drivers, STAYS IN THE SYSTEM even when the single core is
returned to the motherboard. Read that twice, cause its a biggie.

Looks like XP does not update the HAL back to single core on its
own. So those drivers remain, and it recognizes that only one core is
installed.

But the crashing is exactly the same with the single core chip . I
have not seen this factor reported anywhere in hundreds or thousands
of posts. so how can we blame the X2 chip if its NOT EVEN IN THE
FREAKING MACHINE.


As soon as I revert Windoze back to the single core HAL, the system
is again 100% stable.


The dual core drivers, at least in my setup are FARKED. I doubt I
will be able install this chip. No way to trace the problem.

I *own* 5 AMD X2 based computers, 3 desktops (self built) and 2 laptops. As
a conservative estimate, I have built at least 70 AMD X2 based computers in
the last 12 months, and I have never....never....*NEVER* had any problems
with the drivers supplied by either Microsoft or AMD.

I would suggest your issues lies somewhere else...my suspicion is a botched
HAL upgrade. In your situation, I would do a full reinstall.

Honu

 

[jimbak3]

I am sure that many do this upgrade without issue or having to
reinstall.

Don Burnette's experience seems to mirror mine, except my lockups
were more frequent and easy to reproduce. Seems to have something to
do with 'stress' on the networking component, because loading certain
web pages or multiple tabs at once guarantee a lockup.

All browsers too. Firefox, IE, Opera, all lockup.

Thing is I ran Prime95, Unreal, and graphics benchmarking , and no
lockup.

I did see a few driver errors from the nvidia dll, that went away on
their own after a few reboots. Not sure what that was about. I
tested the system with a safe mode VGA boot, and still got the lock
ups, so I doubt that was the issue. Even removed the Nvidia drivers
altogether.

I tired the install a few times from a baseline single core drive.
Problem the same.

As Don said, could be the Neo4 Plat is particular about something in
the M$ dual core drivers. It's not the chip itself, as the lockups
happen even with the single core back in. Maybe the dual core sitting
on the desk is enough to affect the mb, but I doubt it ;-).

Basically I gave up on it, Newegg was nice enough to not even charge
me a restocking fee (a little plug for them).

I did become one of the worlds great experts at pulling cpus in and
out over the weekend, so it wasnt a total loss.

 

[jimbak3]

I would suggest your issues lies somewhere else...my suspicion is a botched
HAL upgrade. In your situation, I would do a full reinstall.

Honu

you may be right, but my setup is fairly complex and took a lot of
time to get in place over the last year +. The effort of reinstalling
all my stuff, and relocating downloads, etc, would simply not be worth
the performance boost. It was in place upgrade or nothing for me.

 

[LostSoul12]

Did you update the bios ?
http://216.158.218.35/edoc/bios_uploads/7125v1B.zip