Anyone have an experience with the A7N8X motherboard?

[Mr.Guvernment]

Hey all

well my uncle is doing a switch from Intel - which he has used since his 386! over to AMD and is going to grab an AMD 3000+

This is the mobo he wants -

http://usa.asus.com/mb/socketa/a7n8x/overview.htm

anyone have any feedback?

He will be getting an ATI video card - 8x AGP for sure... been hearing alot of issues with 8xAGP - but is it mainly VIA chipsets? as this board uses the nforce2 chipset......


any feed back would be great

ALso - could any one recommend any good "dual" motherboards that could hold 2 3000+?

 

[ptitterington]

It is a really good board by all accounts, unfortunately a few folks have had problems, I am awaiting a code so I can return and replace mine

 

[StormBringer]

No problems here. I haven't been using it long, but I haven't encountered any problems. Though I'm not using it in conjunction with an ATI vid card, I have a GF4, so I can't say if there are any issues there or not.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

welkl, my uncle got it in, and installed, with pc3200 and a water cooling and an 2800+ - flawless install and no problems yet!

 

[Tarkus]

I'm still waiting for the replacement to come for my first A7N8X Deluxe which was a No POST problem. If you get one that works it's a great board but can die when you flash the BIOS. If you get a bad one right off the bat, like I did, then it can leave a sour taste in your mouth. I've always bought Abit before and never had a problem. I'm not happy with Asus right now.

 

[StormBringer]

Originally posted by Tarkus
If you get one that works it's a great board but can die when you flash the BIOS. I'm not happy with Asus right now.

Any time you flash any BIOS, you take a risk of this. Normally it is calculated and most of us are careful and don't do it during a thunderstorm or when there may be a power outage. If this was the cause of your board's death, you are to blame, not Asus.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

i don't think there is an issue with asus, t some degree maybe, what what about ALL of those people, like mmy uncle who get it, plug it in and it works?

i mean, that means that it must be more then the motherboard is wrong when it does not work, or they got one bad plant that pop's out bad boards and another one that is good, but most are made in the same plant.

oh well.

 

[acidosmosis]

Flashing a BIOS is a pretty dangerous thing. Your best bet is to have someone that knows what they are doing flash your bios for you and just watch them do it and learn from them. As experienced as I am at doing what I do (11+ years), I am still not comfortable with flashing a BIOS. I have wanted to do it many times but have never gotten up the guts to do it. I have seen at least one motherboard that I know of that has a backup BIOS just in case you try to flash the main BIOS and screw it up you have the backup. The owner where I work has a Albatron motherboard with this setup. I'm not sure how great it actually works but I thought that was a pretty awesome addition to a motherboard.

 

[StormBringer]

I will partially agree, flashing the BIOS should be done with caution, but it isn't as gloom and doom as you make out. I also take issue with your statement that you have been "diong this for 11+ yrs" That would put you at building and repairing computers since you were ~10yrs old?

 

[buffchief]

Have you tried replacing the CMOS battery? When I set one of these boards up I read on other forums that people were having the same problems and they replaced the battery and it worked. I on the other had little problems with it. And the person who has it now says it runs great.
:bounce:

 

[Tarkus]

Well like I said, if you get one that works you should be fine. I unfortunately didn't. Yes, I did try a new CMOS battery, I tried everything; two power supplies, two different types of RAM, two different CPUs, AGP and PCI video cards, and many other things.

Flashing a BIOS isn't, in my opinion, dangerous unless power goes out during the flash. From what I've been reading lately there may be a bug in the nForce2 chipset itself that is causing real problems with BIOS flashes. I think nForce2 motherboards would really benefit from a dual BIOS setup. I've built about 50 computers for friends and family (been doing this stuff since the days of the Altair and S-100 bus) and flashed over 100 BIOSes and never had a problem with getting a computer working right from the start, till I met this particular motherboard. Let's hope it was an isolated instance and the new A7N8X works fine.

A vast source of experiences, information and help with nForce motherboards can be found here...

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/

 

[Tarkus]

Well the new board works fine with the exception of the few excentricities that the board is known for. I had to give up on RAID because of data corruption problems associated with SATA/PATA adapters.

All-in-all I'd say this is a nice board. I really like the Dolby encoding feature of the sound chip. It sounds far better than my GTXP did.

 

[BuNgHoLe69]

I have a A7N8X and ATI Radeon 9500 Pro. So far, no problems. As for flashing BIOS, I never really had problems... As long as you know what you're doing... One thing on the ATI cards though... Make sure you have Fast Writes Enabled in the BIOS and in ATI Smartgart. My games performance(benchmarks) dropped when those settings were turned off. I guess Fast Writes makes a difference...

 

[Nic]

Tarkus, that serial ata raid data corruption issue has been solved, it was a driver issue and a link to a fixed driver was posted on techspot over here ...

Asus A7N8X Deluxe Silicon Image Serial ATA RAID driver version V1.0.0.281

Also, there is a new version of the A7N8X mainboard just been release (version 2.0) with support for 200MHz fsb (fully compatable with the new 200 fsb AMD processors that are shortly due out - some of the older boards aren't compatible and cannot run stable at 200 fsb) ...

Asus A7N8X Deluxe v2.0

Personally I have an Abit NF7-S v2.0, but only because it was significantly cheaper, near identical spec, and runs 200 fsb and beyond no problem at all (the A7N8X v2.0 wasn't released when I bought my board - a week ago).

PS: At the time of posting, the asus site is temporarily down.

 

[Tarkus]

Thanks Nic. I've been on top of it. As soon as I read about the new "workaround" with the .281 drivers I ordered two Raptor 10K RPM SATA drives. Should be here tomorrow, and it's my day off!. I think I'll just RAID them and do some speed and corruption testing before I migrate the OS and important stuff over to it.