[Bulldog91]

I have an Asus P4C800 Deluxe MOBO with P4 2.8c, 1 GB Mushkin PC3200 (512 DIMMs in Dual Channel config), Geforce FX5800. The onboard 3Com Gigabit NIC works for a short time, then quits receiving packets (this is consistant and requires a reboot to receive packets again briefly). I have temperarily installed a 3Com 10/100 card in a PCI slot which works, but is laggy on the Internet, and should not be.

I've seen numerous posts on the P4C800 and was wondering if anyone had run across this problem.

Also, board was completely unstable before changing memory voltage (which I read on the Mushkin site), and is now stable, except the NIC card.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Guest]

Welcome to the forums Bulldog91........... :winking:

Have you tried installing the latest driver available here........

 

[Bulldog91]

Will try

Thanks Speedo,

Looks like the new drivers just came out. Had tried the previous up to date drivers, but will give these a try and let you know how it goes.

 

[egv]

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

 

[Bulldog91]

egv,

Here is the URL for the Mushkin tech support site which talks about increasing the voltage:

http://forums.mushkin.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=354

Just increasing the voltage made my system much more stable while allowing me to leave speed on Auto in the BIOS, but recently found WinXP Pro still hung on shutdown. I have since change the timings to suggestions made in the thread listed above and that combined with the higher voltage seems to have fixed the problems I know about except for the onboard LAN (and PCI Lan card with lag).

The thread above seems to indicate increasing the voltage to 2.75 from 2.65 is ok, but there is also a reply that suggests not going any higher. The person advocating the increase in voltage is a site admin, but you might get a second oppinion before doing it (and I'm certainly no authority so don't consider my use of it any indication you should do it).

I am also having problems with Asus's FTP site and can not get the download for the new drivers so I have not confirmed if new drivers fix or do not fix the NIC problem. I will post when I find out.

If you find anymore info, please post.


Thanks.

Bulldog91

 

[egv]

Bulldog91,

Thanks for the lead. I hope that many catch this tweak along the way for it worked with my super duper Corsair memory.
I started by slowly going up the voltage options of the P4C800 DLX Bios. At each step I ran memtest86 (freely available). The closer I got to 2.75 setting the fewer errors I had (in particular #5 test). When I had it set to 2.75v memtest86 ran for some 16 hours without registering errors. Note to newbies of memtest86 you will end up running your machine for many hours; the testing is time consuming.
I haven't really put the machine to the test with a good game yet, but I am much more confident that it will run stably. Now if I could only fix the audio problem... I would be ready for some overclocking ;-)
By the way, the audio problem is that the board isn't turning on the audio support. The bios is set to AUTO, but the O.S. does not see any audio device available! Isn't that strange?! As far as I am concerned the BIOS settings should be Enable/Disable not Auto/Disable... what the heck were they thinking?
By the way # 2, the corsair is running with 2-2-2-5-8 timings throughout the testing above... (kickass)

EGV

 

[molokini]

I too have P4C800 with same Nic problem. I am going to RMA the board to NewEgg.com. The board also hangs on shutdown probably related.

Sean

 

[clintfan]

Yes, I read elsewhere that the Corsair needs to run at 2.75V. Can't recall where, but the Corsair support told the guy to do that and it solved his memory problem. (Whoops! Maybe it was Crucial, not Corsair! anyway...)

I believe the NIC chips on these mobos are both 3.3-V devices, so you might have something there about the supply. Watts ain't nothing if the volts are all over the place. I'm using True480, so maybe I just got lucky there-- but I do wish its fans were quieter.

There are a lot of other reasons your NIC connection could be dropping, reasons not caused by the mobo-- it's networking, for crying out loud!

No problems with dropped Asus download connections here, just a generally slow site.

And FWIW count me in the successful bunch: no real problems. Working NIC, I'm on it now.

-clintfan

 

[-Magnum-]

I have also got this same problem! maybe we can try and find a solution because besides this is the only bad thing about this board, besides that everything is great... If I manage to find a solution I'll update everyone. The problem also most definately is not network. I've run a crossover directly between two computers and repeatedly pinged each other and after a certain time, the ping just stops... Very strange (and annoying).. I really dont want to have to send the mobo back and get a new one...

Mag

 

[Bulldog91]

Solution to NIC problem - I'm a moron

I didn't post this when I first figured it out, but my lag on the NIC card and my network drops were due to the PCCILLIN real time scan and firewall I installed from the Asus mobo installation disk. I was trying to play a MMPOG and the game would be extremely laggy and after a few minutes would disconnect (I assume after the game server got tired of waiting for ack's from my machine).

I turned off the PCCillin real time scan and the firewall since I have a firewall appliance and the lag disappeared. One or the other was the cause, but I did not follow up on which one.

So the answer to the NIC problem was user error. Clinfan was right, there's alot of other variables that can cause the network problems and the user is often one of these.


Bulldog91

 

[-Magnum-]

Interesting... I'll unistall the PCCillin Garbage and try again... hopefully that is the cause of it. I'll keep you posted on my results....

 

[RC23]

I got mine fixed, and it seems to have been PCCillen that did it, as soon as that was uninstalled it all worked, that and getting rid of a usb controller on the same IRQ. either of those did it. or both

 

[molokini]

My box is still together. I actually did install the antivirus software.

I will try now!!

I'll let you know if it works or is RMA'd.

last think I want to do is swap the board.

Thanks,

Sean

 

[molokini]

You are RIGHT!!!

Took out the antivirus software (PCcillin) and the Nic has worked without a problem. I knew it wasn't a network issue, but never thought the AV software would cripple the NIC. Thank you for sharing your find and saving us all that time!



Thanks again,

Sean

 

[RC23]

what AV software are u talkin about?

 

[molokini]

PC-cillin 2002

It came bundled with the motherboard. Don't install it!

 

[-Magnum-]

yep Removing the PCCillin 2002 AV software worked a treat. Computer is working perfectly now.. Thanks everyone.

Mag

 

[clintfan]

I'm glad your LANs are working, but I'll bet there were network-specific options we could have configured in PCCillin to prevent these issues, options that weren't set properly by default at install time. I'm not putting it on, but I bet there's something that would make it at least stop killing the LAN port. For example, it probably tries to go out and check for updates to itself every 15 minutes until it succeeds, but since something isn't set up right, this dies... if so, maybe you could switch that to manual updating only.

The PCCillin website suggests it's just another antivirus program, but with an integrated firewall. Either one could be the problem. Or it could just be a load of bugs.

But running with no virus protection isn't a good idea. Just go buy Norton Antivirus, configure it for manual updates, keep your subscription current (if they still require subscriptions), then sit back and rest easy. Oh, and Symantec Desktop Firewall isn't a bad idea to run either. Keeps the worms out. I trust it more than some other firewalls, especially whatever's in a Linksys.

-clintfan

 

[clintfan]

NEWS FLASH!
Three days ago AsusTek Computer Co. acknowledged a problem with the PCCILLIN app on numerous mobo's (A7V8X, A7V600, P4G8X/P4G8X Deluxe, P4PE, P4C800 Deluxe, P4P800, P4P8X, P4P800 Deluxe, P4C800-E Deluxe, P4C800, P4P800S-E Deluxe), and they outline a fix approach here.

Not using PCCILLIN, I cannot vouch for the success of this fix. Read on,

-clintfan

 

[WaXmaN]

I had huge problems with instability a couple of weeks ago, ive tried everything, got hardware errors in prime5, the only configuration I got stable was that i really needed to run my memories in >400 mhz. that solved everything, has to be because i have 800 mhz fsb cpu, if i recall correctly i think i have read it someplace that those cpu really need 400 mhz ram or more.

P4 [email protected] HT ON, 2x512 Corsair CMX512-3500C2, Asus P4C800 Deluxe.