INQ to Asus: you have another problem

The same forum that lists dissatisfied P4S8X problems indicates that the P4T533, a newer board than the SIS based one, is also causing end users a heap of angst.

Over to Asusboards.com again, to see the apparent nightmares end users are having, but with little resolution so far, it appears.

One user tells us he has written to Asus technical support in both Taiwan and the USA, but so far has failed to get any joy out of the firm.

He points to the HardOCP forums, where there are dozens and dozens of complaints from exasperated mobo users.

He writes:

"It appears that many users of Asus's latest Intel i850e motherboard, the P4T-533, which comes with support for the latest 1066mhz RIMM4200 RDRAM, are experiencing instability problems, even when running CPU's at stock speed.

"I am one such owner of this board - I purchased it from a well known online retailer in the UK, with 2 of the 256MB Samsung RIMM4200 modules, which are ratified to work on this board. Initially I was running a P4 1.8A which the board seemed to work with well. Testing with prime95 it seems stable, and all is going well.

"After about a week I popped in a 2.50ghz 400FSB C1 stepping P4, and that's where the problems started. The system was not stable when running under load, which was very surprising to me as this is a 533mhz board and is running under spec with the 400FSB P4. After some playing around with settings in the bios to no avail, I looked at the core voltage in PC health and it appeared to be fluctuating far more than it should, deviations of as much as 0.5v occured, which is very unusual.

"I looked into things further and had a peek around the forums to see if anyone else was experiencing the same as myself. First person I found was running a 2.8ghz P4 and had purchased the motherboard from the same place as me, I asked him to test the board using Prime95 and he found the same as I - at stock speeds this board was not stable. He further tested by using different RAM and CPU and found the same, still unstable. I looked around a bit further and people having problems with this board started cropping up all over the place, many of then very unhappy and not being offered any support from ASUS, some even being denied RMA's, whilst some being lucky and managing to RMA their board.

"Not being an electrical engineer I dont fully understand what the problem is, but it seems to be linked to voltage regulation and capacitors. The faster P4s draw more power than lower speed ones, so this apparently causes the voltage regulators to be put under stress and causes deviation in the vcore, resulting in instability. A few people have even modified their boards to solve the problem, but in my opinion this shouldn't be necessary.

"I would be very keen to hear from anyone else who has these problems (preferably at stock speeds rather than overclocked). And I refer ASUS, and anyone interested to these forums where people have been discussing their problems (some are quite lengthy) this doesn't get really interesting until about 30-40 pages in."

He wants Asus to recall this board. We've attempted to contact Augustine Chen's replacement with no success so far. Anyone there at Asus who would care to respond? µ