Rocket & Asus A7v users

[bloom25]

The A7v board is giving me fits.  Once I get into windows it's just great ... awesome performance and stability.  It's the booting up part that's causing troubles.  I'm wondering if you are fighting the problems yourself.  (I sure hope they release a new bios quickly, or else my poor computer will no longer work.)

A couple times a day when I boot up my computer I will see the message "Update ESCD Successfully."  After that IF windows finishes booting I will have no listing for a sound card ANYWHERE.  Just like it never existed.  Restart the computer and it's back.  Every once in a while though after I get the ESCD message the computer will automatically restart itself just as my mouse cursor appears.  After scandisk runs the computer will work perfectly.

So far I've: Set all IRQs manually in the bios, moved cards around to different PCI slots, reserved a legacy IRQ for the soundcard, disabled the promise ATA 100 controller (not using it) in the bios and in windows, and updated to the newest drivers possible for everything.  I'm using bios 1.04a.  AFter getting everything set up I disabled "plug and play OS", which theoretically will keep Windows from being able to access the ESCD.  Since it keeps occuring this means that there is a problem with either the bios or the VIA chipset itself.

After reading the ASUS MB newsgroups at Deja.com and ASUS' site I found out the literally hundreds of people are having problems similar to mine.  Most of them though are having problems with SB live! cards.

My only hope is ASUS releases a newer bios soon.  (There is a 1.04c up on asus' dutch website, but so far no one has claimed that it fixed ANY of their problems.  At least it didn't cause any new problems.)

My advise to anyone looking at this board for an upgrade, avoid it unless you love having a blazingly fast but unreliable booting system.  At least until a newer bios comes out.  (Win ME won't hardly work at all and Win 2k requires the 1.04a bios to see the secondary IDE channel.)  My only consolation is that Tom's Hardware shows that this board outperforms ALL other Socket A board by a wide margin in nearly every benchmark.  It also seems that nearly all socket A boards are having problems as well, I guess that's what you get for buying a new design board without a stable bios available.

Good Luck with your board!  (I'd check out www.deja.com/group/alt.comp.periphs.mainboards.asus  for some interesting reading.)



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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS

[Rocket]

Bloom
  Wow.  Did I get a good one outta the batch?  Other than my 3d pro not being picked up correctly mine is working like a charm.  I do get boot up pause but if I hook up my 2nd hard drive (will do so when I finally have time to finish moving the last couple of things from the old system over and linux fdisk it) the boot lag on the ATA100 is gone.  I do need to get another ATA100 controller cable so I can move my CD-RW and DVD to the promise controller.  My old HDD is an old 16gb UDMA33 but you would not believe the difference in access speed running through the ATA100 side of the controller.
  I have a SBLive Xgamer on here and haven't had a bit of problems.  I did have a problem on bios 1.03 of CD-RW not picking up correctly. But I think I had it jumpered wrong. It seems to be working great now.  I had heard of some problems with the VIA chipset and AMD when the mobo first came out but was supposed to have been fixed.  Could your board and those on the ubbs be old stock??  Have you emailed ASUS support about it yet? The P2B I had before this A7V I had questions about and emailed tech support and got prompt answers.

  I hope ya find out something positive bro.  I will look around also and see what I can come up with.

S!

Rocket