Re: Suggestions for a good AM2+ mobo?

Somewhere on teh intarweb "John" typed:
"~misfit~" <misfit61nz@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:485b033c$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hey all,

I'm Intel all the way at the moment. However, a friend bought a
built-up 'gaming machine' (I've mentioned it before here, it's been
nothing but trouble) using an Asus M3A motherboard, a Phenom 9500
CPU, 1x2GB DDR2 module
and a 9600GT.

The machine's been a nightmare. Firstly it was supplied with a PSU
that was
barely capable of 300W (Tt 420W). I replaced it with a reasonable
510W PSU,
reinstalled Windows (don't ask!), updated the BIOS and it seemed
alright for
a while. I showed him how to raise vcore if it kept crashing.

Well, yesterday he rang me and asked about a replacement mobo. He's
raised vcore all the way (!) in BIOS, 1.550V and it's still
crashing. I expressed concern at the high voltage but he assured me
that the two hardware monitoring apps I'd given him, HWMonitor and
CPU-Z both say that the vcore is only 1.2xxV when in Windows. I also
got him to raise VDIMM to (at the moment) 2.05V. He doesn't have
another stick of DDR2 to try and I only have
what's in this machine and I'm loathe to mess with it. My luck
hasn't been great of late. :-/

I've been sick so I advised him to get a single 1GB stick of DDR2 -
800 and
try that alone. However, if that doesn't work he wants me to advise
on a good mobo. (and fit it, reinstall Windows...) I like Asus
personally (followed by Gigabyte) but the vanilla M3A model that he
has, going by Googling, seems to have been a lemon. As I mentioned,
I'm not au fait with current AMD boards or chipsets so a suggestion
or two would be nice. :-) He'll pay between NZ$200 and $300. (US$150
- $200 by the time it gets here?)
Also, he's said that this is the last time he ever buys a PC on
impulse. I've built the last two machines for him and they've been
trouble-free. He's
rather surprised that a PC can be this much trouble, LOL.

Another thing, I've heard that the first Phenoms, the 9x00 range,
were 'flaky', that the 9x50 are much better. However, surely they're
not *that* bad that he needs to replace his CPU?

All input appreciated. He's desperate and is going to be calling me
soon. I'll look around but anyone with a positive experience with an
AM2+ mobo that they want to share would be great. Also, any comments
on the above; RAM? CPU?

The clowns that threw this machine together were, IMO, getting rid of
troublesome or slow-moving stock. The PSU was a lemon, the mobo
won't work with LAN drivers off the supplied CD, nobody's buying the
9x00 Phenoms now the 9x50 ones are around... These guys are that
incompetent that they didn't
remove the jumper from the Seagate 500Gb 7200.11 HDD that limits it
to SATA
I speed.

Anyway, I digress. Suggestions appreciated. Oh, I'm in New Zealand
so mobo availablility could be limited.

TIA.

I bought the Asus M3N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition Mobo (AM2) nearly a
year ago and ran through four mobos before getting one to POST. But
since I did all that, it works fine.

Asus did not like the 500W PSU. As I recall, they wanted more than
30A per rail. Fortunately, the 500W died and they sent me a 650W to
replace it. Somehow I had to replace it with an 850W, which had a low
5V rail, so they replaced it--with a 1000W! It was during this time
when I was replacing mobos; I don't think the PSUs had anything at
all to do with my mobo problems.

The main culprit was the BIOS. Fortunately, they pop in and out
easily, however I had to pay shipping ($5US), no big deal. After two
suspicious BIOSs, I got it to POST, so further BIOS upgrades were
flashable. For some reason, the Asus utility for the BIOS doesn't
like to look for it on NTFS disks. The USB disk wasn't working, so
fortunately I had an old FAT32 that it could reside on, so all that
was another issue.
I had to continually upgrade through the end of the year. nVidia had
several goofy things that weren't right. Of course, guessing what was
causing problems led me to BIOS, OS, nVidia, Asus, until I finally
got it working good.

The only problem right now are BSOD crashes, new since I added a 500GB
backup disk. Reformatting didn't help. I'm checking now to see if
Asus' PC Probe software is the culprit. I'll take it off and see. I
also recently found on the Error log that it was due to a "Driver
Power State Failure," which said to run sigverif.exe and it found
errors with nVidia components. I am up to date with nVidia, so that
isn't going to be an easy one.
The rest of my system is: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6hz 2X
1MB L2 Cache; 4 1GB sticks of Kingston DDR2 DIMMs; and an EVGA
GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB SLI video card.

Thanks John, saved for ruture reference. :-)
--
Shaun.

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