sudman

Yep I gotta say I had a few initial teething probs with my Expert but after lots of reading & tweaking I've gone from hating the board to absolutely loving it. I can now overclock my Opty to same levels as before but now with much less volts which is important as it's being cooled by a Zalman resorator in sli config with 2x7800gt's. 3.0ghz in total silence

Have you tried these guys for a PCP&C psu??? http://www.extremeprometeia.com/acatalog/Power_Supplies.html They also do the fsp epsilon 700w which is a great unit. And I can also recommend the Seasonic S12 600w but you need the later revision to avoid problems.

Heres mine:

The reduction in drive space I reported was cause by Samsung's crappy software not the board. As to the others I think that is down to firmware, at least in my instance.

Thought I'd just post to say I am finally begining to like my sli-dr Expert board. I had a number of issues but reading through the threads here & at bleedingedge ocz support forums things are starting to look up. The 12/07 bios is not as bad as I thought as long as I use Big Toe's bios settings with it, the wierd behavior (cold boots, ps2 mouse etc) has gone. My Opty 146 is now overclocked to 3ghz again & is 12hours prime stable. My Samsung Spinpoint 250g is now showing it's proper size & is being detected in the correct mode, LBA. I really do think the learning curve on this board is much steeper than previous DFI boards & i just hope that the user effort put in is rewarded, so far it seems to be.

Problem sorted!! The Samsung Hutil software is buggy and once a soft clip has been applied to the drive you cant undo it. I found a program called HDAT2 which allowed me to return the drive to its former condition & size and all is ok now.

http://www.biosmedic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18 Go there & you can burn yourself a little nifty bios flashing disc that include's big toe's (aka ocz tony) modified bios.

Have you tried a different bios? My board has real issues with 12/07 bios but seems to work best with Big Toe's modified 11/18 bios.

Hi naddie, thanks for that explanation, I kinda came to the same conclution. Unfortunately my problem is a bit different in that Windows also detects it as a 137g drive and so does the Samsung Hutil tool. All attempts to correct this with the tool result in an error message "Error: To Try Again Repower Hard Disk" Basically somehow the drive has had its size clipped at a firmware level & because the bios wont detect it in the correct mode (LBA, as it's gone back to detecting it in CHS mode) I don't seem to be able to change this. I think I may just rma both the board & disk

No, the only options are auto & large (which is not the same as lba), interestingly enough the drive is now reporting as a 137g, instead of 250g & is now in LBA mode. I can't seem to get it to report the correct size even using a samsung dos tool which just errors out when I try to change the LBA size to 250g.

I would if the option was there!

Yep same for me. The first disk is Maxtor Sata 1 drive & is detected as LBA, second disk is a Samsung SPinpoint Sata II drive & is detected as CHS. Performance tested in windows shows the drives to be about even so surely something is wrong. Changing to large does nothing. What gives DFI techs??

Thanks for the reply but I spent about 3 hours last night playing with the memory settings & using guides from OCZ & various other places. I'll have another go tonight particularly with those two vaules & see what happens. The ram is not being overclocked as it's on the 133 divider & I'm using my Patriot PDP TCCD stuff which is good for 320 fsb. So I dont think the ram is holding me back which is why I thinking that there's something else I'm missing. Either that or I need to find a bios better suited to my board, as demonstrated by the wierd mouse & boot behavior. And finally, yeah I know DFI's need more tweaking than an Abit board, check the sig, I ain't new to the DFI game.

Can anybody help me, I have an Opteron 146 that used to do 3.0ghz stable on my Abit AN8 Ultra. I then purchased a DFI sli-dr Expert and now I can’t get 3ghz stable. I upgraded 7/12 bios and it was useless, couldn’t get past 2.5gig (250x10) & had loads of issues like the PS2 mouse non functioning on every other reboot & then no powering up on every 3rd reboot!! Had to disconnect the power lead & switch off the psu before it would power on again. So last night I flashed the bios to OCZ Tony’s bios and things have improved vastly in that I can now boot in to Windows at 3gig but it’s not prime stable. By the process of deduction I’d guess that this is a bios issue as opposed to hardware. So does anyone know of a better bios for problematic boards than Tony’s or where would be a good place to play around with in the bios? Tony’s bios is not completely trouble free either, I still have mouse issues although not so severe, increasing the cpu voltage past 1.6v usually causes freezing & the vdimm under volts by 0.1v (this is a board problem not bios) Or should I just try & rma this board and get another AN8 Ultra.

Well my rma replacement which is a 600 w S12 Rev A2 certainly seems to be fine in my sli-dr expert. Wish i could say the same for the crappy bios