AOpen AX59 Pro problems

Discussion relating to Socket 7 hardware.
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Super7Dude
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AOpen AX59 Pro problems

Post by Super7Dude »

Hey guys,
I have an AX59 Pro rev 1.32 board here which seems to lock up at random. I've tried different RAM, a different PSU, several CPUs and graphics cards - all to no avail. It gets to just before the scrolling XP logo appears and crashes. I know I fixed this once before with a BIOS setting change, but it doesn't seem to work now... can anyone help?
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Stedman5040
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Post by Stedman5040 »

Do you have memory interleaving enabled in the bios? I would leave it disabled as this made my Ax59pro unstable.

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Post by Super7Dude »

Thanks for the reply Stedman. Unfortunately I can't find any such setting in the BIOS of my board. The closest I saw was "Memory Parity/ECC Check" which is currently disabled. I also tried disabling "DRAM Read Pipeline" and changing SDRAM CAS Latency to 3, all to no avail. I have the latest BIOS dated August 7, 2002 (R2.36). I'm really stumped as the board was working fine not two weeks ago.
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Stedman5040
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Post by Stedman5040 »

Sorry,

I probably tried using the George Breese program which enables interleaving on boards that do not have the option in the bios. I probably also tried enabling it through wpcredit. All I know is that I could not use memory interleaving and get a stable system.

Are all of the capacitors on the board OK? (Swelling/bad) caps can cause all sorts of oddball problems.

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KachiWachi
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Post by KachiWachi »

The interleave should be automatic...if the BIOS supports that function.

It also depends if your RAM can be interleaved.

Can you boot to Safe Mode OK?
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AX59 Pro problem... fixed :)

Post by Super7Dude »

It was the hard drive! sheesh! the 40GB seagate had become corrupted requiring a full windows reinstall. Thanks again for your time guys :)
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RE: AX59 Pro problem... fixed :)

Post by Jim »

You wouldn't by any chance have been running "OSMark" on that machine recently when the machine was clocked near its limits, would you? I had very similar problems on two of my machines caused by running "OSMark" on a highly stressed machine. It tends to trash the OS install in those circumstances.
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Super7Dude
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Post by Super7Dude »

Nope, never ran OSMark on that board (have been running it on my GA-5SMM though). I suspect that the 112MHz FSB corrupted my hard drive. I've heard Seagates are very sensitive to PCI bus speed.
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Post by DonPedro »

no jim,
it is not osmark that "tends" to trash the os install when run under tightly squeezed and tweaked circumstances, it is that circumstances that have the tendency to produce a lot of mess that can even turn an os install into garbage.
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KachiWachi
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Post by KachiWachi »

Exactly!

Timing is everything. :wink:
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PC #2 - Amptron PM-7900 (M520), i200 non-MMX, 128 MB EDO
PC #3 - HP8766C, PIII-667, 768 MB SDRAM
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Post by Jim »

Beg to differ. Running a machine near its crash limits is one thing; when you are just running normal operations. You may get a few errors, which can be rectified usually through scandisk, (which will report some files are cross linked), by just copying down the names of the files and deleteing and replacing them as necessary. OSMark, on the other hand stresses the machine so highly, that the error frequency becomes so massive that the machine won't even boot in some cases; and in other cases the damage is irreparable anyway. I know!! Been there. Have run machines stressed to the max under normal operation, and been able to repair whatever damage crops up; but not once OSMark has been run on the machine w/ the same settings.
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Post by DonPedro »

jim,
if one wants to know whether a system is stable then it is commonly agreed upon that you can not tell by just getting into windows, reaching desktop, getting mouse/kbd control and successfully opening an explorer window.

you can choose from a wide variety of programs to determine whether you have a stable system or not. people start different kind of programs for example demo-loops of 3d-games and let them run for an hour. or they start simultaneously more than just one program to put heavy load on the system and let them run for a long time. or you start some bench-program like osmark, winbench or whatever.

whatever program you choose if the system fails to sustain the load and freezes, reboots, gets a bsod then would you call the program of having the tendency to kill the system? pas du tout! it is the weak system that has the tendency to die because it can not bear the load.

if you now use a program like osmark that does ABSOLUTELY nothing that can be called critical to the system (except that it does engage the cpu, the cache, the ram, the bus, the addon-cards and uses these components to do what they were built for) because it does not write to any system directory, does not write to the registry, why do you think it is the culprit when the system dies?

would you call a tool like prime95 of having the tendency to trash os installs just because it brought YOUR system down? if the system does not start again after a system failure and the tool did nothing to the file system, nothing to the registry, because it does not mess with these things at all (just running some calculations that need cpu and ram) what do you think might have caused the trouble? prime95? how come?
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Post by Jim »

Peter, Not EVERYBODY plays GAMES, or even gives a sh-t about them. Some people use their machines for other purposes, video editing, photo editing, word processing etc. K? Now if you setup your machine to perform these functions as quickly as possible, it is TRUE that you may be stepping into an area that would quickly crash your machine if you DID play games with it; but I DON'T. I can accept the fact that once in a while, maybe every three months or so, I may have some minor problem that has to be rectified. Fine, so be it. The software I run does not usually engage 100% of the processor's capacity, and if it did, I would JUNK it as being a "Resource Hog". The odd time I may briefly hit 100% usage; but that is the exception not the rule. IF YOU want your machine to be absolutely bulletproof, fine, test it to death w/ OSMark, or some other similar software; but be prepared to accept the fact, that in order to achieve the level of stability required to survive running software that runs the machine at 100% capacity for upwards of an hour, testing every component and system to its utmost capacity, without generating a flock of errors, YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO ACCEPT RELATIVELY SNAIL LIKE PERFORMANCE. Or as someone else once said, if its that stable you don't have it overclocked enough; -- Capish?

Incidentally, I was able to run OSMark successfully without any problems on SP3 @ 6x103MHz w/ my WPCredit tweaks enabled. It was only when I tried to run it at 5.5x112 using fast ram timings that major problems surfaced. As for SP2 which is an ALi chipset machine, you said :

Quote : "simply fantastic numbers! jim, could you run osmark-bench on that super superpuppy2 machine to see a) if the system is stable enough to run those tasks ..." End Quote

Then AFTER the fact, (of it being unable to run the "Official Run"despite a heck of a lot of trying), you came out and said for some reason I forget, that the "Official Run" would not complete on ALi machines.

Quote : "since I recently began benching on boards with sis-chipset or via-chipset after I only had used this bench-program on ali-5 boards I would like to share some experiences.

first I thought that some "problems" I encountered while running it on ali-5 boards were due to this chipset or to the respective hole system-setup (cards plugged in, driver version used, os) but now I know that these problems also occur on other platforms.

sometimes the program would immediately abort after starting it, complaining about some "mci"-device related problem. I was able to solve this by dis-/enable some hw via the device manager, start osmark, went back into device manager to reverse what I had done before and then rän the bench.

also I encountered on all platforms (ali, sis, via) that sometimes the "official run" was not able to complete because one of its sub-benches finished with some error message. in most cases it was the I(dentical)-thread test. after it completed, successfully giving a score, a message comes up saying something about a "parameter" error. and the whole bench-suite comes to a hold .... this is very unconvenient because normally I leave the machine alone while the benches run. when you come back 2 hours later and realize that the bench is broken somewhere in the middle it kind of sucks. I "solved" this by not choosing the official run, but instead set the run counter to 3, unticked the IThread test (and also unticked the 3 tests a little bit "offset" in the bottom left area of the test-box; they are not part of the official test). then I started the bench via the run-button. when the bench-suite finished, I unticked all (there is a button for this), ticked just the IThread test and let it run 3 times. if errors occurred here, it does not mess up the whole thing." End Quote

Well, I got that problem on my ASUS ALi board machine, but not on my DFI VIA board machine. SP3 completed several, (Over 20) "Official Runs" with ALL the tests enabled.

The fact remains however, that if a machine is tweaked to the max, OSMark WILL trash the OS install. That is because machines which are tweaked to the max, are not all that stable; stable enough for most purposes, but not for that. Your machines, are apparently not even stable enough to consistently complete the "Official Run", or else you would not have to disable some of the tests.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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KachiWachi
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Post by KachiWachi »

RAM/CPU errors are one thing...disk access (read/write) errors are another altogether.

Are you finding that the same files get cross-linked, or random ones?

A CPU running at 100% does not mean that it will generate errors at 101%. All it means is that all available CPU horsepower is being utilized.

A program being a "resource hog" has nothing to do with this either.

If your system is "stable", you should absolutely be able to run it at 100% for hours on end with no errors whatsoever...no matter what task it is performing.
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PC #1 - DFI 586IPVG, K6-2/+ 450 (Cyrix MII 433), 128 MB EDO. BIOS patched by Jan Steunebrink.
PC #2 - Amptron PM-7900 (M520), i200 non-MMX, 128 MB EDO
PC #3 - HP8766C, PIII-667, 768 MB SDRAM
PC #4 - ASUS P3V4X, PIII-733, 256 MB SDRAM
PC #5 - Gateway 700X, P4-2.0 GHz, 768 MB PC800 RDRAM
PC #6 - COMPAQ Evo N1020v laptop, P4-2.4 GHz, 1 GB PC2700 DDR
PC #7 - Dell Dimension 4600i, P4-2.8 GHz, 512 MB PC2700 DDR
PC #8 - Acer EeePC netbook, Atom N270 @ 1.60 GHz, 1 GB RAM
PC #9 - ??? ;)
DonPedro
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Post by DonPedro »

Jim,

you should rethink your strategie. otherwise you are going to make yourself a fool in the public. repeating over and over again an assumption that has no technical foundation at all does not make it become true or an argument that is worth to be discussed. why you think quoting parts of two of my posts I gave at another place (thread) at another time with different purposes in mind helps to support your idea in any imaginable way I don't know. if you read them carefully you also will find out they are in opposition to your fantastic claim you keep without giving any reasonable argument for it. also I don't know why you start insinuating that my position is related to gaming. or that I use or want anybody to use osmark as a means to "test the system to death".

back to the basics: osmark is a benchtool and you proclaim it to have the "tendency" to trash os installs. thats what it is and where it started. I have given you a lot of arguments (not only here in this thread) why this is not true. you completely fail to address any of these arguments. no, worse, at the end you even say that osmark "WILL trash" the os install. as if you have given any additional compelling argument (as if you ever had given any before) after you labelled osmark only as "tending" to ruin the system .

I give up. sorry super7dude for having incinerated this off-topic discussion.

I am ending this unproductive discussion with saying thank you kachiwachi for your clear and precise statements. I underscribe every word of it. so please jim, if you still feel for talking around please keep your intriguing thoughts on how osmark works and how it functions in a multi-tasking environment addressed to kachiwachi. maybe he has stronger nerves than me.
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