RMA my nf4 sli-dr

[hajj_3]

i need to RMA my sli-dr, there are a million and one problems with it, it was fine up until a few days ago. i will go on to tell you the problems in a minute.

 

do i just send the motherboard back and not the accessories, who pays postage to and from dfi?

 

the problems:

 

a week ago, i went to work with computer downloading then i come back and it had a bsod, latest drivers and firmwares are installed, it did this when i was encoding sometimes too, so i cleared cmos, put setting back to my custom, with no overclocking. kept happening, cleared cmos this morning, then it started beeping this morning after that, it has 3/5 lights on which is "dram" in manual, i reset cmos again, no difference, i took memory out, blew slight dust off it, put it back in. then windows stalled on the loading page where the green bars go across, restarted several times and same thing, this is with xp sp2 on a raid 0 maxtor 9 sata 2*120gb. i cleared cmos and same thing, tried getting into my x64 installation, same thing. i then downloaded 3/10 bios and flashed it, made no difference. i installed xp on my 250gb non-raided drive, worked properly, then restarted after installed all drivers was fine another restart and was still fine, after another restart it hung on loading windows again, cleared cmos, got into windows, then my raid 0 array wasnt in my computer, then got array corrupt or something similar message when computer is starting up, then windows tries to do scandisk and stop after a few percent and stays like that for 30 mins, restarted and tried again, this time got bsod during scandisk and it restarted.

 

now currently i am into my new xp sp2 installation, i have pulled each wire out of mobo and put it back in, blew any dust away, last time windows crashed and restarted itself, this mobo is completely messed up.

 

please can a mod reply with how i can rma this board and how long everything will take.

 

it has been a great mobo until recently.

 

thanks.

[Worm]

What are the details of the BSOD? Each of them carries a code which tells you what the problem is. There's a list of them here

[hajj_3]

the bsods appear for an instant, then the computer restarts, so cant find out what the bsods are.

 

im from england btw for rma'ing.

[pduan87]

What optical drives do you have?

[pumbertot]

the bsods appear for an instant, then the computer restarts, so cant find out what the bsods are.

 

im from england btw for rma'ing.

 

theres a setting somewhere that stops the reset so you can rerad BSOD. damned if i can remember where it is though. Anyone????

 

edit:found it. control panel----system---advanced---startup and recovery------ and uncheck the automatically restart on system failure.

[hajj_3]

wont that damage the computer by not auto restarting?

 

drives:

 

nec 3520, lite on 5232k

 

optical drives wont have anything to do with anything, they arent first boot device, they have nothing to do with anything.

 

any other suggestions?

[pumbertot]

wont that damage the computer by not auto restarting?

 

drives:

 

nec 3520, lite on 5232k

 

optical drives wont have anything to do with anything, they arent first boot device, they have nothing to do with anything.

 

any other suggestions?

 

 

no it wont as it freezes where it is.enought ime to write it down, will not cause damage mate.try it, might be an obvious driver issue or such.

[RGone]

Yoiu location on the globe use this address.

 

RGone...

 

the bsods appear for an instant, then the computer restarts, so cant find out what the bsods are.

 

im from england btw for rma'ing.

[pduan87]

wont that damage the computer by not auto restarting?

 

drives:

 

nec 3520, lite on 5232k

 

optical drives wont have anything to do with anything, they arent first boot device, they have nothing to do with anything.

 

any other suggestions?

 

Wrong, I had a BenQ 1620 with older firmware and it would BSOD and reboot the system before loading into windows. Finally fixed it with a firmware update.

[prodigy_]

optical drives wont have anything to do with anything

 

Now that's completely untrue. You can easily check yourself (regardless of BIOS boot-sequence). On any working PC - put a known unreadable CD/DVD in drive and try to boot to XP or 2k3. Bet you'll end up anywhere from simple freeze in black screen (HAL fails to init due to constant errors on PCI/IDE bus) to BSOD (one of IDE-related drivers fails). Where you'll prob never get to with this is XP desktop...

 

XP and 2k3 are known to handle IDE errors VERY poorly. Even 2k was slightly better, not to mention good old rock-stable NT4.

 

 

Back on-topic: can be an nVidia drivers related issue. Did you ever install/update them? From what I've read (and from my personal experience) not only nForce drivers are not very stable, they also can't be updated easily.

This may not sound good, but in some cases nothing short of clean OS reinstallation helped ppl to make new nVidia drivers work for them... Full system backup prior to update is surely a good idea.

[hajj_3]

rgone. what do i write in the email for the email address you gave me? do i send a link of this page so that a support person can read all of this or something.

 

thanks!

 

the nec and lite-on have latest rpc1 firmwares, they have been flashed for a few weeks with latest ones. as for nforce and detantor drivers latest drivers are used on the x64 installation, old x32 installation and on the new installation i did when these problems started happening. i.e 6.66 nforce drivers and 77.77 detanator drivers.

[prodigy_]

as for nforce and detantor drivers latest drivers are used on the x64 installation, old x32 installation and on the new installation i did when these problems started happening. i.e 6.66 nforce drivers and 77.77 detanator drivers.

 

BSODs appear after your install nForce drivers or even before? Try to use MS ones and see if it helps.

 

Also have you tried BIOS 623-3?

 

Also what chips are your OCZ EL sticks made of? If it's TCCD and you've been feeding it with 3.2V for a long time it can be dead already.

By your timings though I assume it's CH-5 or UTT. Then 3.2V may seem OK but believe me it's enough to kill a marginal stick, especially if they're not actively cooled.

(In any case, I'd run memtest for some time if only just to be sure.)