I recently purchased this board, along with an Athlon X2 4400+, and 2GB Corsair memory as a combo from Ebay. The first thing I do when I make a purchase like this, is open the package and make sure that all the parts that are supposed to move, do, and those that aren't, don't. Low and behold, the northbridge chipset fan is "hit". (Common problem on this model, so I'm told)

I immediately contacted the seller and explained that I was a little "put off" about the bad cooler, and I wouldn't have bid on it if that info had been disclosed. He says  "I don't know when it went bad, or even that it had, but I've never had any problems with it." He went on to say that he was very sorry, and that he is very interested in keeping his feedback at 100% positive, so he graciously offered to warranty the board for one year. (Nice, guy. Ebay needs more people like him)

Now, it comes time to test it.
I removed the bad chipset cooler and replaced it with another, I removed the stock CPU cooler and replaced it with a Zalman (applying fresh thermal compound to both, of course), I mounted the board on standoffs, in a case with two 80mm case fans blowing out, and one 80mm fan blowing in. (Case flows very well)  I then connected it to my 500W Ultra power supply, an older 10GB hard drive as master, and a 5GB slave with drivers other software on it, a DVD-ROM, and an ATI HD3870 PCI-E video card, all from previous machines.  
 
I booted the machine up and entered the BIOS to check the settings. I turned on the features I would be using (onboard sound, LAN, etc.) and turned off the ones I wouldn't be (all the raid stuff, mainly). I checked the RAM and processor settings to make sure they were all set to "auto". After saving any changes I had made, I restarted it.

All was normal except for the fact that the motherboard was calling the DDR400, DDR333. (Not a big deal, I guess that's why Asus allows the user so much control over system settings.)  

LEFT AT DEFAULT, I then proceeded to install Windows XP Pro SP1, and all looked well. After that I installed Windows installer 3.1, then the Nvidia chipset drivers,  LAN drivers,  sound drivers, DirectX 9.0c (August 08 redistrib), .NET Framework 2.0, Everest Home Edition, and then the ATI Catalyst Control Center and drivers (version 8.8 from ATI). Rebooting when nessesary, all seemed to be going great.

I popped in my SP2 upgrade disk and as soon as the DVD drive spun up, the system froze, immediately followed by a BSOD stating "Machine_Check_Exception" . I reset the system, and tried the SP2 upgrade again. Same thing.

So I thought maybe I had installed an improper driver somewhere, and double checked Asus's site. Nope, right drivers.  Then I decided to start fresh, by formatting and reinstalling. (That's why I use 10GB drives to test with, they format fast!) I followed the same procedure as the first time. Same result again, as soon as the DVD-ROM drive spins up, "Machine_Check_Exception" .
 So I swap out the DVD-ROM drive, for another. Ran through the whole process again, to no avail. I ran through the whole process one more time, but this time I went into the BIOS and "relaxed" the memory timings as much as possible, thinking it may have been the RAM. No joy.

I did a little research on this "Machine Check Exception" issue, and found out that it's a pretty non-specific failure, usually caused by overheating. I was closely monitoring all the system temps with Everest, and all looked very good the whole time. (motherboard temps never rose above 33C, CPU stayed below 40C.)

So my question would be, is the board cooked, or am I missing something?

I just noticed your sig, Great minds...  huh.  

Ok, I think it may be the power supply. While it's more than able to keep up with my older machine, I noticed that in the hardware monitor of the BIOS, the 12V rating is hanging down in the high elevens. (the HD3870 is likely eating up the juice) Egg is a good color on me!

So I pulled the HD3870 out, and put in an old ATI rage 3D pci card. No crashes so far.

I know that I'll need a new PSU, but would the undervolt cause this type of crash?

WOW!!! The PSU is still having trouble keeping up (12V dipping to 11.8V, not good I know)  But the problem seemed to be the two DVD drives I was testing with. I put in a third, and all seems well.

Now I thought my last rig was pretty good for as old as it was, but this thing really doesn't disappoint! Doubled my 3Dmark '06 score from 4100+ to more than 8400+!

Thanks for the help Congo, I'm now off to see how Crysis looks!

Ivan wrote on Sep 15^th, 2008 at 3:58pm:


There may have been different revisions of the deluxe, but as far as I know the one with the heatpipe chipset cooler is the A8N-SLI Premium.

I appreciate the heads up. A new powersupply is the next thing on the list.

It kills me. I've never been able to afford the latest and greatest, and I really thought my P4C800 was doing pretty well. Then I get ahold of this rig, and the difference is night and day. I hope this one can satisfy me for a while!

If you have an FX-57, I'll trade ya.