RLM

Ryn, that's an interesting one. Hadn't considered that. I'm back on the expert now anyway, and as said all seems fine for the mo. I do know that creative cards have their issues. Had a few probs with my Asus card and creative drivers. ronin688, I have expereinced that as well, however the shutdown issue was a bit different. It would get to the windows shutting down page no probs, then it would stay like that for an absolute age. I've got corsair memory with LED's, so I could see that the memory was very busy during this duration. A process basically wasn't terminating properly. (Guessing?) From my conclusion, and I appreciate it's not 100%, it is a hardware problem though. I do exactly the same installs on both the expert and the ultra-d. The expert no problems, the ultra-d problems. It's good that fixes are being suggested, but I do ask myself why should you have to? I think you also have to take into account that one ultra-d isn't going to be the same as another. I'm coming to the conclusion, it's almost the same as buying cpus. i.e. A model from june last year, might perform better than one produced in December last year. I am guessing here though. Anyways, waffling. Cheers for the feedback and help folks. Appreciated RLM

Logger, Cheers for that, but I also tried all those regedits to no avail. Worth having that link though, as it might help someone else. Cheers RLM

Allegedly the PCI express makes no difference at all, though some will beg to differ. Would be interesting to know exactly what your stepping is? It would certainly give us a rough idea as to whether your OC seems about right or not. As someone else said here the stepping is written on top of the chip and would read something like LDBHE 0602XPCW as an example. Just read on another forum how a guy with an x2 3800 managed to jump from 2.66 to 2.9 by loosening up his async latency and read preamble settings. Don't know if that was prime stable though. Few things. Personally I wouldn't bother increasing the chipset or LDT volts unless it really is making a difference. Just creating unecessary temp increase if not. Secondly don't know what your memory recommended voltage is, but please bare in mind that the Ultra-D settings can be a bit off. Insome cases they can be up to .2v higher than what you actually set i.e. 3.0v instead of 2.8v If you read above where you set the Dram voltage you should get a close to actual reading. On my ultra-d I had to set it to 2.7v to get 2.8v. Does this make sense? Anyways there you go. RPG

UPDATE Right you can forget that UPHClean. Didn't really make the slightest difference. Was suffering with a bit of instability in everyday work/usage and the shutdowns were really starting to get on my nerves. Sometimes taking several minutes. So I stuck the expert board back in. Did it make any difference? Well no not straight away. However, I re-installed the dual OS x32 and x64 and everything is now tikadeeboo. Shutdowns are as they should be. What does this say to me? Well the Ultra-D possibly has a problem, or causes a problem/corruption during installation of windows XP. Don't know why exactly, but interesting that the problem carried over to the expert board, until I did a fresh install. Please remember I did numerous installs on the Ultra-D to no avail. I just wonder now, if I stuck the Ultra-D back in with current OS, whether it would shut down properly. Would be nice to put this issue to bed. RLM

As above. Exactly my thoughts. It maybe paranoia, but sometimes it's almost like they want you to mess up, just so they can say, we told you so. I tried this latest bios. Just before entering windows one of my screens started displaying a load of rubbish. Hadn't seen this before. i rebooted without OC and all was fine this time. However thought that was enough of a warning so have gone back to previous bios. They say you should only update bios if you are having problems, which seems fair advice. My system has an incredibly slow shutdown, and I wanted to see if this helped at all. RLM

Question that crosses my mind then, is if it is kind of pointless why have it as an option in the bios? Seems a bit daft :confused: RLM

Can't pretend to know the ins and outs, however in games I'd guess you are talking about an interaction between cpu and graphics card. Basically what I'm guessing here is that games stress is a whole different ball game to prime stress. I've experienced proof of this running cinebench. In the opengl examples I get a higher score in certain fields, with a higher cpu overclock. Anyway enough of that waffle. All I would say is keep an open mind. You might find that a different driver works better. Just another thought. Can't remember who, but someone here mentioned that they had to up the PCI Express Frequency to get stability. I haven't experienced any difference in touching this setting myself but maybe trying a setting up to 105 might be worth a try. Anyway, hope you sort it RLM

As Baldy says. What are your temps in bios PC HEALTH? RLM

Just some thoughts. Could it be driver related? I've had a lot of issues which have come down to dual core issues, the need for hotfixes or nvidia driver problems. Have you recently installed any new drivers? Maybe try posting on the nvidia forum to see if someone is experiencing something similar. An unstable OC may corrupt your OS apparently. Maybe that has already happened. Might be worth uninstalling graphics and sound drivers properly, and re-installing. As I say just some thoughts. RLM

Well it's crystal clear now. UPHClean brought up this in the Event viewer. The following handles in user profile hive *********************************************** have been remapped because they were preventing the profile from unloading successfully: svchost.exe (1036) HKCU (0x378) *=comp name etc. UPHClean is a diagnostic app/service, which will also force services to close, freeing up ram and shutting down the system. Seems to work However WTF is svchost.exe (1036)? I know it's blasphemy, but I still suspect that it's a conflict brought on by this motherboard or it's conflict with other hardware. It's only the same install I've done a number of times on my asus'es and it's never been a problem. Why now? Anyway, if you do have a similar issue, I'd recommend installing UPHClean. RLM

No Confused, don't seem to have that problem. Mouse moves about just fine. I haven't installed logitech drivers yet, trying to keep things simple, while I try and figure this out. Cheers for the feedback Should really delete this thread, as have started a new one in nforce4. RLM

Cheers for the feedback Function8. Haven't installed my creative drivers yet. Thing is in msconfig, all processes, excluding essentials are disabled. (Well not at this moment as I'm online, but in my tests) Don't use Norton anymore. have mcafee, but again this is prevented from starting up in msconfig. Even uninstalled graphics drivers. RLM

Light at the end of the tunnel. Just did a boot in safemode. Hit restart, and it was as a quick as a flash. Need to find that offending process :confused: RLM

The fan suggestion is a good one. Mine shot up to 70c (WARNING) during prime the other day. Bit of a shock. I now have a fan over it, connected to fan 2 on the motherboard, and my max temps are about 51/52 now. The fan also helps cool the chipset. RLM

Asked the mods to move this from amd overclocking. Sorry about this. Post #1 Am just doing an install of xp32 and 64. One of the reasons for this was that the shutdown was incredibly slow. Well fresh install and same problem. Not sure from memory (mine that is, not comp) whether this slowdown has come about since I've moved from the expert to ultra-d. I know there are quite a few other threads on this matter. Just wondered if anyone has since found a solution. Thanks ahead. RLM Post #2 Update: msconfig, cleared all but microsoft system processes. It's a fresh install so there wasn't much to clear. Removed the ide and floppy connection from motherboard. Reflashed bios 2005-11-14 Removed one stick of ram. Removed all usb, but keyboard and mouse. (Haven't installed drivers for these yet) Removed internet/lan cable. Checked rhe registry. Can't remember the exact name but virtual mem backup was already set to 0/disabled. Rant on Still a slow shutdown. Never in all my years of installing fresh installs have I come across this. I'm starting to believe it's a hardware/motherboard issue. It's certainly a waste of my time. Had I known that I would of still had slow shutdowns, I would skipped the fresh OS install and just done some work instead. Rant off One sympton is that during shutdown the memory leds (corsair) seems to be very busy. Any help, or confirmation of an Ultra-D trait would be greatly appreciated. If it is an Ultra-D trait, then I can stop arsing about, and learn to live with it. RLM