Hello Bulldog91,
I have experienced the same NIC problems you've described and more. I too bought P4C800 Deluxe based on the number of good reviews, and for those considering this motherboard I would heed all the advice/experience that these techforums have to provide... From all my wanderings I've understood that there are two critical components to get this motherboard working.
1. Power supply
2. Memory.
I would love to see a thread going in this forum that gathered current owners of successfully operating boards and their specs.
ON THE POWER SUPPLY:
For instance I've seen many say that the Antec Tru480 is a good fit. I didn't find it locally, but it looks like the Antec Tru430 I got isn't cutting it. The ASUS probe utility shows constant oscillation in the 3.3 v rail between 3.28 and 3.23. The other rails show no such oscillation and are steadily set at some value slightly higher than their rating. I've also come away with the notion that the 3.3 v rail is very important for all these built in features. None of my earlier P.S. handle this motherboard for they were connected to motherboards with few built-in resources.
Empirical observation seems to corroborate this idea because the network connectivity icon in the task bar changes every minute between connected and not connected.
This is the second board I get from the online vendor showing such behavior.
I too intend to update to the very latest drivers and bios before reaching a final conclusion, but my gut feeling is that this is not a driver problem.
ON THE MEMORY:
I have the Corsair XMS 512 pair of PC3200 2 CAS memory. I have followed others advices on setting the parameters manually to
2-2-2-5-8 going down the BIOS options. But yours, Bulldog91, is the first post I see that talks about changing the voltage on the DDR as well. I would appreciate whatever references you may have on the subject, including the setting you used for your own memory.
MY BARE BONES SETUP:
Asus p4c800 Deluxe, 2.4 Ghz 800 FSB CPU, Corsair XMS 512 pair of PC3200 2 CAS, NVIDIA GeForce DDR (just for starters), Windows 2K, Antec True430 PS, one boot hd and cd rom off of the primary ide.
Things I've done:
1. Manually set memory parameters
2. Disable hyper threading
3. Update the BIOS to ver 1007
4. Upgrade power supply to Antec 430 (not enough?!)
5. Not overclock.
6. Boost CPU voltage to 1.65
7. Enable PAT
Things improved:
Stability of the overall system (probably a power supply thing).
It used to hang a lot. Videos played through the firewire port would cause Window Player to freeze. In other words firewire connectivity was unstable.
Things still wrong:
1. NIC not stable
2. Audio device not coming on. BIOS set to AUTO. I wish there was a way to say just turn it on! Bottom line, can't install device drivers to a device that the OS doesn't see.
Things still to do:
1. Complete driver updates from ASUS site. Side question: Are people having trouble with the ASUS ftp site? At times I get downloads of incomplete or corrupted files...
2. Try a complete OS reinstall to see if Audio comes back.
3. Replace power supply a second time
4. Get new memory? Hurts me a lot because the Corsair stuff is top of the line and I can't return it anymore. $280 down the drain?
5. All else fails curse the heck out of ASUS and vow never to buy they $hit again...
This is draining the enthusiast out of me...
EGV
