"Couldn't find the option to disable onboard video in the BIOS" lol I hade the same problem with a Compaq. A bios upgrade did the trick
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A8N SLI Premium, 64 - 3700, 160g sata hd, 1 GB 3200 cl 2.5, Asus Extreme EN7800GT, 19" Acicero and win xp

PMS stands for:Perissable Man-Slaughter, Preposterous Mood Swings, or Punish My Spouse
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Hi all,

My BIOS is now POSTing and everything seems to be okay again. I did 2 things: vacuum cleaned the AGP slot and reset the CMOS/BIOS. I played a bit with the overclocking options and it seems the latter was the problem, with the AGP card in I can't overclock the FSB as far, which I find strange, but there you go.

Hope this helps,
Pete

ps. also see the very informative post by Mark Lloyd at http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/18627/?o=20 if you're having problems during startup.

I'm happy you got video card working

From my experience, I can tell you that there is no option in the BIOS to disable the onboard graphics. It is automatically disabled when your AGP slot is occupied.

Unfortunately my problems are not solved but I'm closing in on the problem. I get random blue screen crashes "machine_check_exception". This is not related to power or cooling problems. I suspect a memory problem. I downloaded Memtest 86. This detected memory errors but I am not technically adept to decipher the error reports. It has to be one of the two RAM modules or the CPU onboard cache.

MSI says for 128bit memory support you need to populate banks 1 and 3 only.

What is "128 bit memory support " ? What is the alternative if the slots are not properly populated? I guess 128 bit memory support is simply a wider memory communication band width. Yes? No?

junkmanj wrote:

What is "128 bit memory support " ? What is the alternative if the slots are not properly populated? I guess 128 bit memory support is simply a wider memory communication band width. Yes? No?

Yes.
Its puts your system in to dual channel memory mode. While I couldnt see it being a problem since it should work ether way, I would move the stick in the 2nd slot to the single green slot.

Thanks WSM, I appreciate the explanation. I've tried the memory in slots 1 and 2 as suggested. I noticed only a mild performance hit.

Can anyone interpret the attached memory failure report? This is greek to me.

Test Pass Failing Address Good Bad Err Bits Count Channel

7 1 0000fe7b24c – 127.6 MB 752ac0c6 652ae0c6 10000000 1
7 3 000091e324c – 145.1 MB d5534597 c5534597 10000000 1
7 4 000046ab24c - 70.6 MB d6092857 c6092857 10000000 1
7 8 00012a2324c - 298.1 MB d351cc76 c351cc76 10000000 1
7 8 00011f4324c - 287.1 MB 1cafd54g 0cafd54f 10000000 1


This test was running 15 hours. I guess it keeps running until you die of old age or you terminate the test.

I tried to disable the onboard CPU cache but the computer barely runs at all.

I guess my next step is to pull one stick of ram out at a time and re-test to see if I continue to get machine_check _exception errors

As always, I appreciate any thoughts and advise

junkmanj

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Hey there Junk (and others..)

It's been a while since anyone posted .. and maybe u got things fixed .. maybe not (maybe you have thrown the card out the window, I was certainly close to doing so). What happened to me personally is that the problems turned out to be memory related.. not so much physically, but more in terms of memory-management. There is a tweak for this ... but it is known to only be helpful in case someone uses and AMD-cpu. Intel-users can try .. but will probably have no luck. If u dont mind messing (and take this lightly .. its in fact only 'altering' ) with your registry try the following. Start regedit and navigate to the following key: (Not a perfect syntax .. but close enough ... you'll find it)

Hkey local machine/system/current controlset/control/sessionmanager/memory management.

In the right window create a new DWORD and call it LargePageMinimum (and be wary, this is case-sensitive).. and after you have done so, adjust its value to: (check the 'decimal' option)

4294967295

Exit the editor, restart your comp and see if it helps. Myself, I had earlier turned my agp port down to 4x ... and disabled vpu-recover and fast writes to improve stability ... but it was this last method that finally stopped all blue screens... Haven't been able to test it yet with the port/fast-writes/vpu-recover options back to normal.

It's maybe a long shot .. because it only helps in very specific setups .. but if it helped me .. it's certainly worth a try, right? And if it doesnt help mr Junk then maybe it will others...

Lemme know if you have any luck... I hope you will

Later!

PS. the stable system I have now runs on the catalist 5.3 drivers.

Hi Bultrug and welcome.

I think that's mainly for Win 2000, but might also help with XP. Dunno.

And here is an easier way to do all that... just down load this file and double click on it.

largePageMinimum.zip
Description:	Had to zip file, just unzip it and double click on the .reg file... you can right click and choose edit if you would like to look at it first	Download
Filename:	largePageMinimum.zip
Filesize:	327 Bytes
Downloaded:	600 Time(s)

Its a virus that has DR.EC dancing naked on your desktop DONT CLICK IT!!!!! ...i am just kidding dr.ec isnt that evil it is prolly the file he says it is.
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Ignore this^^

I think junkman's issue was mobo related... I heard second hand that his was one of many in that class action suit regarding bad capacitors.

Cant think of much else to chk.....but definitly keep a good eye on the powersupply....i use a program called speedfan....you can google it.
Anyway it will monitor voltages on ide say any board.But you can turn it on play a bit of your games it crashes on and it will show you a graph of your voltages....if you see alotta flucuations or the powersupplyis old try a newone.