Legit Reviews

And no, I'm not being a pirate, although I did go see Pirates of the Caribbean on its first day out here in the UK today.

Well my rig is now officially bricked.

To start off with, my board doesn't keep any BIOS settings when you turn off AC power, so either a bad CMOS battery or its not being charged...
(Does someone want to check for me with a MM what the voltage the motherboard should be putting out of the battery holder to be charging the battery? Mine was 0.6v when i checked it without a battery in)

So the result of that, and the combination of my board not reading my memory's SPD correctly, and setting 2.2v 800Mhz 4-4-4-12 RAM to run at 1.8v 533Mhz 5-5-5-15, means that it fails to POST after an AC power off, so to fix it I have to remove all but one RAM stick (I have 4 x 512) and manually set all the BIOS settings back (including fan speeds, RAID, and any OC i might have been running if i had of been on water). But this wasn't a huge problem as I had my PC on pretty much all the time till lately.

So in an attempt to get the board to behave with my memory I thought I'd update the BIOS. I would have liked to have used a floppy as its safer outside of windows. But, the stupid BIOS BIN was too big to fit on a floppy that was bootable. Grr. I had to use the uGuru flash utility and do it from windows. So the inevitable happened and my BIOS was only 33% done and the whole PC locked up. I had no choice but to reboot.

Now it obviosly doesnt post as it only has a third of a BIOS ^^. But the worst thing is, is that it wont boot from a floppy to even let me attempt to fix the BIOS (it says that its reading from the disk and it doesnt do anything more (tried it with 2 different drives, the first I had to go out and buy! (I didnt actually own FD before yesterday!)).

So here I am, stuck with a BIOS-less board. I am not amused. Well it could be funny if I could fix it and I hadn't had so much go wrong with my rig in the last week.

Dan

(lol, there is a distinct lack of enough .'s in this post)

is it that Abit in your sig? I was never a fan of that max. Chance you could hot flash it? Go over to the abit forums and see what they say

I don't know of anyone with the same board as me to hot flash from.

But because of it having several issues, like the CMOS settings being cleared from AC power off, I've decided to RMA it. So hopefully that will go through and I'll have a problem free board in return.

Dan

The battery in your board is a lithium battery, ie. it doesn't recharge! They last for years, but need to be replaced when flat!

Remove the battery, change the reset jumper and leave for an hour or so, then boot the system with only one stick of ram (closest slot to the CPU) and re-enter SAFE timings etc, save and power off. Leave the system again for a min or two and try reboot, still with one stick, and see if it keeps your settings. If not, try it with the other stick of ram.
Sounds like either the bios is corrupt (which means you'll need to re-flash it) or the RAM's SPD has lost some settings (which means you'll need to send it back to Crucial).

Are you certain nothing is causing a short on the board? Since you tested it outside the case, I doubt it's a loose screw or something, but does your waterblock use a mounting bracket on the back of the board? If it does, is it metal? It could be making contact with some solder points on the board???

Its definitely a bad BIOS at the minute, as it declares that it has a "bad BIOS checksum" and it tries to boot off of a floppy, states that its reading the disks content and doesn't do anything else with bootup or non bootup floppy disks in the drive (tried 2 different drives).

I don't know what is up with the losing CMOS settings, but the board is known to not read memory very well. They've apparently improved it in the last two versions (but it died before I could check it out its improvements).

I've asked for a RMA as I'm fed up with trying to coax the board back to life, I could get a replacement BIOS chip from ABIT but I'm sure that there is something else wrong with the board that I just can't put my finger on... (like the CMOS issue).

I was getting lithium mixed up with lithium ion

Dan

Dan:

Sounds like you'll be good to go, after you get the BIOS chip replaced.