Thursday, March 1, 2007

Motherboard RMA

I have an RMA into Asus regarding the on-board network card issue. Another reader pointed out he had the same symptoms under xp 64 - I hope that the hardware is broken and not the software. Hopefully they are going to be able to send me a new motherboard so I can just do a swap.

In the mean time I will continue to make due with my little Netgear 1 GbE card.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the reply regarding the ethernet issue with this board...FYI,i did reinstall WinXP 64 a second time and the ethernet ports still didn't work no matter what i tried,and believe me,i've tried a lot of possible combinations....


Main problem is that the sole PCI slot on the motherboard is already using a scsi card,so that only leaves me with 2 options basically....Either try to find a network card that uses a 1x PCI-e slot or use an outboard USB powered network adapter and hope that in either case,they have drivers for WinXP 64 bit..



I'll basically only RMA the board if i can't make either of the above options work,because other than the ethernet port issue,the board is running great...

Anonymous said...

Well,the USB ethernet option is a bust,since the brands i've seen so far don't have WinXP 64 bit drivers at all,so that leaves the PCI-e option,and the only adapter i've seen so far,is made by Intel itself,wich also has WinXP 64 bit drivers as well(already downloaded)...


But being made by intel,it's pretty much a given that it'll be more expensive than the average adapter,and i'll have to move the 7950 GX2 card from the first PCI-e X16 slot to the third one,as the card in it's current location pretty much blocks the much smaller 1x PCI-e slot right beside it.


I'll check on price and availability for that particular network card tomorrow,and go from there....

Anonymous said...

Well,got the PCI-e network card a couple of days ago(Intel),and everything is running great....The 7950GX2 is now running on the third PCI-e slot(Blue one),to unblock the PCI-e X1 slot where the network card had to plug in....


Now there's only one last thing to tackle,and that's the noise levels, as well as getting overall system temps down in the process...


I noticed that my video card is running quite a bit hotter in this particular system than in the old one,sometimes hitting load temps as high as 85* C,since the 7950GX2's are known to run hot on their own ,never mind on a motherboard with 4 CPU's and 2 chipsets running in tandem....


First thing that will likely go are the stock coolers since one of them has this annoying tendency to speed up to 6000 RPM every few minutes and stays there for a few seconds,as soon as the CPU it's cooling down hits 50*C under load,while the second CPU cooler(the one furthest from the PCI-e slots),always maintains a steady RPM no matter what(about 2500 RPM).


Was thinking about using the Zalman coolers,but the smaller and lighter 9500 series,as the weight on the 9700 lineup already exceeds the cooling specs in terms of allowable weight by quite a lot(wich is around 500 grams)....


I'll also get a couple of very quiet,double bearing,speed selectable case fans and play with their airflow orientation to get both the video card and overall motherboard temps a lot better...

Anonymous said...

The ethernet is gone on my L1N64 too. The first few days were fine, then all of a sudden they stop. Windows shows a nonsense mac address of EF:9F:E9:F7:F7:F7 for both adapters. A fresh install didn't fix it. Booting a Linux disc, gives them random new MAC addresses which does allow the to work normally.