Asus P5WD2 Compatibility issues, please help

PCRHitman · 3 Feb 2006 at 01:27

i've just upgraded my system and trying to put together the following bits

Asus P5WD2 Premium 955x Chipset
Pentium D 930 (3.0Ghz dual 2mb cache etc)
XFX Geforce 7800GT "Extreme Edition"
Corsair XMS2 DDR2 6400

I plug it all together, with the P8 8 pin connecter for dual core, the 24Pin mainboard power cable for PCI-E, CPU and Northbridge are watercooled. Plug in my 7800GT as normal into Main PCI-E 16x slot plug hard drives in (3x SATA) My Audigy 2 into PCI and all the other needed motheroard connectors and extentions etc. and power up. (Oh and plugged it the power to the graphics card)

The first time i did this i was using a tagan 480W, it didn't post, i couldn't even hear my hard drives power up, (didn't think of lack of power to begin with). so took out ram to see if i got any beeps.. no beeps

Took out GPU to see if i got any notion of life from it, and my hard drives powered up, but thenmy motherboard began to smoke (a little relay underneeth th DIMM slots). so that motherboard went back, and they sent out a replacement.

Thinking it was a lack of power i decided to get hold of the Seasonic S12 600W. to be sure that wasn't the problem. set it all up again, and hay presto no posting, hard drives weered this time though. Reading the manual i noticed that some cards didn't like the main 16x PCI slot onboard, so i thought i'd try putting the card into the secondary 4x PCI slot as from what i had read every card listed in the manual had passed in that. and guess what!

The board started to smoke again, same relay undereath the DIMMS.

I have testing the card in a mates computer and that works no problem. but i don't have any way of testing any of the other parts.

Is this a compatibility problem or is it something else that i seem to be missing. Coud someone shed some light on this for me, any idea's to what the problem may be.

Thanks, any help would be very much appreciated.

Albaba · 3 Feb 2006 at 08:28

I feel for you man. I had a million problems with that board. Check my thread here:
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17527040

Go to the Asus website and go to the page for the board. Check the QVL and see if you RAM is on it. May well be the problem. I RMA'd my gfx card that didnt work, i bought new RAM that didnt work, tried new power and everything.
Eventually just ditched the board and bought a Asus P5N32 SLi Deluxe. Seems ok now

Albaba

AWPC · 3 Feb 2006 at 11:33

Smoke on any computer component is always a bad sign and 99.9% of the time means you have to RMA that part as it will be damaged and eventually fail sometimes taking other components with it.

Sounds like a faulty mobo but the odds of having 2 fail is remote. Never ever power up a mobo without a Gfx card installed as this will most likely cause major damage. As you have now tried 2 x PSUs that almost elminates that as well. I suspect your Ram is the culprit as twice in the same Dimms area points to that causing a short or power surge to cause the smoke.

Only problem I had with this board was 1 faulty Ram stick which OCUK replaced for me earlier this week & its now working fine.

One very important thing to consider is that the onboard IDE ports cause a lot of problems if you do not connect the right devices to them apparently:

1: The Blue one should only be used for either IDE drives or optical drives. Do not mix the two together as depending on the drive specs can cause issues apparently.

2: The 2 x ITE black Raid IDE ports will blue screen XP on setup unless you have pre-built a customised XP boot CD using Nlite or something similar with the ITE drivers already integrated into the XP build.

The best way to build with this mobo seems to be in the following order:

1: Install only 1 Ram stick.

2: Connect only 1 Optical drive to the Blue IDE port as a Master device.

3: Connect only 1 x Sata HD to Sata Port1.

4: Only plug in the minimum of PCI/PCI-E/USB devices to the mobo.

What you are doing by building with just the minimum amount of devices needed to install XP is eliminate where the problems are. If you try to do it all @ once it can become a nightmare trying to nail down the exact problem (if there is one). On complex setups this seems the best way to approach things (I have 3xSATA drives, 2x Optical Drives + 5 USB devices and this worked good for me).

You can then introduce the other devices 1 by 1 to see what works.

Well worth calling the OCUK tech support line as those guys are very helpful & know exactly what they are talking about. They also have a lot of experience with this mobo and have build loads of high performance PC's (including Xfire support) with them recently.

PCRHitman · 6 Feb 2006 at 11:12

Thanks guys that was a lot of help, i would agree that under the circumstances it very much looks to me like this one is a ram problem. I've RMA's the mobo cpu and ram all for testing and they are going to make sure i have all working parts sent back to me.

Fingers crossed, i'll be 3rd time lucky!

(it all should fit, as i'm getting this upgrade due to my watercooling system leeking on jan friday 13th and killing my 6800GT

)

PCRHitman · 20 Mar 2006 at 01:29

Right, the problem has been identified.. and its an odd one.

I RMA'd everything, and everything came back working apart from the motherboard which had burt out of course. So i deciede to just plug in the essentials, as you should do, but i can get a little impatiant.

Any way everthing thing worked fine this time round, as i slowly add things to the board bit by bit, and its all working smoothly until, I put my zalman northbridge waterblock onto the board, after which it won't post!! so i take it off and it works fine again :confused:

. so currently havn't solved that problem, i'm probably just going to take the water block out of the system as there doesn't seem that much point in it.. although if anyone could shed some light on the problem so that i can use it, that would be great as i think the northbridge is overhheating slightly, which may be causing me some problems.

Question though, to those who may be able to help me.. although i havn't fiigured out everything the P5WD2 has to offer... but when i boot it comes up saying that my ram is running at 5400(i think :S, its 5*00 anyhow) not 6400 which it should be at, and the board is ment to support DDR2 800? anyone know why this is

Thanks a lot

gary996 · 20 Mar 2006 at 02:02

try the water block in place but leave the fan running from the old cooler (hold it off the mobo) I wouldnt have thought it would effect it but perhaps it needs the fan in its header.

PCRHitman · 21 Mar 2006 at 15:53

Sadly that isn't the case, as the motherboard in question is a fanless board :confused:

AWPC · 21 Mar 2006 at 16:17

http://steffbard.com/P5WD2_Premium/BIOS/WD2P0704.rar

Try this beta bios as it contains a few important fixes for the auto vcore setting going missing after overclocking!

Also with regards to your Ram must be something you are not setting correctly in the bios. Re-read your manual and browse the Asus forums as they are global & very active with lots of useful info for all their mobos.

http://vip.asus.com/forum/topic.aspx?board_id=1&SLanguage=en-us

Try to always use the bios settings for ocing rather than their AI utility as its buggy and can cause CMOS corruption!

AWPC · 21 Mar 2006 at 16:19

The waterblock issue is most likely something is being earthed on the mobo where it should not be so perhaps look into that after you have the Ram + mobo working to your liking.

PCRHitman · 26 Mar 2006 at 15:36

Cheers, that was very useful - The problem with the ram was it doesn't auto detect Ram at the frequecy in the bios it needs to be set manually under Advanced - Jumper Free Configuration - and Set AI Overclocking to Manual and then the Ram can be set to DDR800.

BigDom · 26 Mar 2006 at 16:10

I don't believe powering up a Mobo without Graphics installed will cause ANY damage...

In fact technically if you want to build a PC correctly you ought to plug in JUST CPU and check for Beep Code, plug in Ram/Graphics (can't remember off hand which is checked first ) does beep code change, plug in other do you get something on the screen?

Ok we never do that but it does potentially eliminate problems as your taking a step by step approach.

PCRHitman · 31 Mar 2006 at 11:55

That is what i thought, and thats why i did it.. but i'm assuming there is something about the new PCI-E slot, extra power or something that burns out the board :-S . to take a stab in the dark..