Tuesday, February 14, 2006

ASUS P4S800-MX MotherBoard

Hi all,

I have a ASUS P4S800-MX and I am using it in a windows media center PC. I was having lots of trouble with getting it installed in fact i wasnt sucessfull at all. I keep getting errors like after start before booting it says no HDD present however the HDD is there and if i turn it off and leave it for cca 1 min and start again it works perfect.

Another thing is that the USB ports at the back of the board stopped working but in a very strange way.

If i plug my USB mouse into them or USB IR reciever for the MCE they act like they dont work. Nothing appears in windows as a new HW nothing works. However if i stick my USB Wifi dongle into them that works fine... its the same for a USB memory key

Also the machine sometimes freezes completely. I have checked all the other HW and i cant see anything else beeing wrong

This behaviour only started when i changed PCI cards in it around and the mouse works perfectly in other PC so does the IR reciever.

All this leads me to a conclusion that there is something wrong with the motherboard itself so I have updated the BIOS to the latest version that is 1011 but it still didnt help.

Are there any known issues with this Motherboard or are there any chipset drivers I should install to windows?

It has a SIS chipset do I need to install anything else to windows?

Anyone has a similar issue?

thanks for any help

5 comments:

Y.C. said...

Hi! Brano

The specs for my DVR is as follows:

Dell Dimension 4600
Pentium 4 2.4GHz (800MHz FSB with Hyperthreading enabled)
1GB DDR RAM (Kingston HyperX)
300GB SATA Seagate HD
2 (TWO) DVD-ROMs
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 MCE (Dual Tuners)
Microsoft Remote Control (with USB IR Receiver)
Linksys WiFi 802.11g PCI Card (Can't remember the Model Number)

Y.C. said...

I suspect that it is the motherboard that is giving you problems. Although it could very well be an OS issue.

I have experienced the 'Cannot Download EPG' and 'No Signal' errors before. They occurred after I INSTALLED UPDATES from Microsoft...so if you did that earlier...you might want to turn the update notification off...and not install any updates from Microsoft.

A 'No Signal' error could also mean two things: either your TV Tuner is bad or the cable signal going into the TV Tuner is very weak (it happened to a friend of mine).

Have you tried re-installing Windows XP MCE from scratch? That might help...although it's very time consuming.

I am not familiar with the Hauppauge 1300 TV Card. Where did you get it? And I don't think there is a Dual-Core Socket 478 CPU. Most INTEL CPUs are Socket 775 now.

The SiS Chipset has given me problems before (audio problems), that's why I switched to a DELL machine instead.

Brano said...

Hi, I think it is the motherboard I have reinstalled MCE about 3 times and this is the 3rd week i am playing with this machine... I got it cheap of ebay so I think that is why it is such a sh.t the DUAL core i ment that it shows as 2 CPUs in windows device manager. It is the older socket 478 the one before the 775. And the 1300 Haupage TV card is basically the same as yours it just have analog and DVB-T tunner (that is as close as you get to DIGITAL TV in UK)

I was thinking that it is the motherboard for sure as the USBs stopped working as stated in my other blog post. I will change that and see if it helps ...

BTW what is a good chipset? Intel or VIA?

Also does the motherboard has to be MCE compatible or something?

Y.C. said...

Hey Brano...

Thanks for your comments.

Yeah, my colleagues and I think it's the motherboard.

The 'Dual Core' you are talking about is actually 'Hyperthreading.' With that option enabled, the CPU works like two physical CPU to Windows XP.

There are no Dual Core CPU on Socket 478.

Personally, I think INTEL has better chipsets (after all, the company is the one that developed the whole platform). Many would agree and disagree with me. AMD fans would say the nForce chipset is the best.

There are no MCE-certified motherboards that I am aware of (my first MCE DVR was built using an Asus P4P800S SE). But to be one of those bona fide VIIV Media Center PCs, you need to have certain hardware to be qualified.

Brano said...

HI y.c. thanks for ur reply. It must be the mother board in my case. I am looking to get a new one as I dont want to replace the whole thing... I have looked up the mabo you suggested the only problem is that my case is one of the fancy ones that looks like a dvd player rather than a PC so it is Micro ATX format only...