Asus in SK8N Athlon FX board fiasco

WHILE WE were in Denmark we tried to overclock the Athlon FX and we managed to get it to 2870MHz stability but we had some major problems with the Asus motherboard we were using, even when it was not overclocked at all.

It was very hard to boot machine with attempts taking two or three times before success. If you were unable to boot it, after a few attempts you had to unplug the power cable, and wait for a few seconds before you could retry.

Once the machine booted, it was fine but when we installed Windows on the machine, we simply could not get onboard LAN to work at all, no matter how we tried. We tried an external LAN card but got the same problem so we could not download any Winupdates apart from service pack one, that was already on our PC.

Here you have a machine where the CPU and motherboard cost close to €1000 and you cannot surf the net. How good is that?

We were advised to get new Nvidia chipset drivers and we were transferring all this stuff through a 32MB USB stick, having learned from the past that you have to uninstall previous Nvidia drivers before the new ones. We did so, installed new 3.13 drivers and got a famous blue screen telling us some IDE file was missing. Nvidia swears that it fixed this with this last revision but I guess we found a situation where we crushed our machine with a mouse click. Come on guys, please fix this horrible driver bug. We decided to install from scratch.

Well after the second "from scratch" Windows installation and all driver and SP 1 updates we had strange delays where it took up to 20 seconds after the machine was booted to start any application.

I have to say that this happened with machine running an Athlon FX 51 with Kingston memory that is listed on Asus site as supported while this machine was not overclocked. We managed to get this machine to close to 2.9 GHz with the same problems inherited that we had with non overclocked machine.

That this is not an isolated problem is proved by the fact that we tried this on tgree different SK8N boards. Two of those boards died after flashing BIOS and the third board suffered from same problems.

The three broads were bought from a retailer so they were no fancy PR samples.

The board on the face of it has a very overclocking friendly BIOS and if all the things mentioned worked I could only recommend the board. But how can you say good things about a mobo that has no network card installed?

As Asus is well known as a manufacturer that produces high quality boards there has to be some explanation for this. One of our UK based INQ readers confirmed he had similar problems but swapped the board for a Gigabyte 940 board that works fine and uses the Nvidia Nforce 3 150 chipset.

We will get you an official Asus or Nvidia statement if either firm cares to comment. µ