Tuesday, January 2, 2007

nTune and the 680a

I have been looking for a utility to monitor my system "health" while overclocking. I thought I found it here. I installed it, which seemed to execute without incident. I went to run "nVidia Monitor" and found that my system immediately stopped responding. Great... I tried the "Stability Test" as well and found that my system crashed again. Go nVidia.

Asus ships no tools for determining if you are harming your machine while overclocking. A little more robust set of tools would be nice.

Incidentally, I think that I have isolated the USB reboot hang to having the the external USB drive turned on.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pictures?

Unknown said...

I have noticed hanging on booting with other systems when USB flash sticks and USB hard drives are plugged in before (on 32bit, 64bit, AMD, Intel, etc. platforms) but I am not sure why yet.

Logan Greenlee said...

thanks jason,

i have a suspicion but haven't really tested it - i think it might have to do with that usb init delay option in the BIOS. I wonder if the timer works correctly. You should submit a bug report to tfd@asus.com.tw - their engineers will have a look at it.

Also, I have found that my usb flash card adapter (with a card in it) does not cause this problem, but it is detected as a drive.

Fish said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Fish said...

Logan, Any luck yet? Gonna do my build tomorrow, not looking forward to going at it with no monitoring:(

Logan Greenlee said...

Hey Fish,

The state of the union for monitoring utilites doesn't look so good. I've tried several 3rd part utilities but they display incorrect or incomplete information. I think because this board is so new it will take a little while for people to figure out what chips are in use. It also doesn't help that there are two 570's on it, most motherboards do not have two south bridge chips. I think for now we are stuck at guessing. I'm not going to do any long term overclocking until I feel that I have a good handle on temps during heavy system use.

The one thing that I do know is that the 8800 puts off a tremendous amount of heat (I get the temp through the nVidia control panel) no load average of 70C!

Are you going to install XP64? I think it may be the source of some problems as well.

I think overall you will be happy once you have you system up and running.

Fish said...

Bummer, prolly gonna dual boot XP64 and Vista for starters. The heat has me a little worried, I had planned on putting this in a 4U server case but may have to go with an old Inwin Q500 full tower just for some extra air. I'm into Distributed Computing and all my systems run at 100% load 24/7. My FX70's are on the fedex truck for delivery today:) Will let you know if I find out anything new.