Stupid green mainboard

The first non- Asus mainboard I have owned for several years, and also the one that has irritated me more than anything else... enter the magic world of MSI 865PE Neo2-P rubb... eeer, mainboard... It hosts one 2.8GB/512 cache/800FSB Pentium IV (HT enabled), and 2*512 dual channel Kingston RAM, which comfortably passes the Memtest86 trial.
It only has one 4X AGP card, a single 160 GB SATA harddisk on the onboard controller, plus two Cd-ROM devices, each as master with no slave at the regular IDE channels. Computer BSOD's or just freezes completely when large files (several gigabytes) are written to harddisk- it doesn't seem to be an "out" problem, as I have exported some 50 GB in one go via the embedded network interface to the net neighborhood without problems. Harddisk tested with maxblast 4.09 and found perfectly healthy.
Disabling the onboard sound or ethernet, which share IRQ11 with the SATA controller doesn't help at all- anyway those modern mobos are supposed to allow IRQ sharing.
If I change the IDE mode status from "legacy" to "native" the problem seems resolved, but the PC speaker is beeping randomly, and the mouse either freezes for a second or begins banging the screen walls... I have tried both PS/2 and USB mouses, the keyboard is PS/2.
Currently the only OS installed is Mandrake 10.0 and all partitions are ext3, but it's not an OS bug- it was behaving like that when it was still dualboot with XP, and also freezes randomly during large filetransfers when it is booting WinPE or Linux Live CD's (Knoppix/Knoppel, PCLinuxOS, Slax, and I may forget another dozen...). The harddisk partition table seems being mighty OK, the BIOS is the latest one, BIOS settings were resetted to the "safe" ones several times. But it DOES seem to work OK when I unplug BOTH the Atapi drives, which is clearly not a solution...
Any ideas other than throwing the mainboard to the wastebin and bying another Asus?
 
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Try an ordinary ide harddisk to your mobo primary ide channel as master and the fastest cdrom device as slave and the 2nd cdromdevice as master.....forget a minute about your ata drive.....
 
roadworker said:
Try an ordinary ide harddisk to your mobo primary ide channel as master and the fastest cdrom device as slave and the 2nd cdromdevice as master.....forget a minute about your ata drive.....
I've already done that with an old 40G Seagate I have, and it's working fine. The symptom is SATA-specific.
I also forgot to mention that I tried another monstrous PSU as well (650 real watts, measured 30A on +12, 60A on +5, 52A on +3.3) and it fares much better, but not perfectly. And heck, there's no need for 30+ kg PSU's (and hundreds of $$$) for such a system!
I tend to believe that it's either the mobo, or the extremely poor quality of the local AC network (or actually the two of them creating a deadly combo). Next I will try with a big UPS hooked on, and report back...
 
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You have the latest bios,and it's supposed to fix:
- ATI X800Pro (R420Pro) AGP Card can't work 3DMark.
- Fix CPU temperature is too high.
- Update microcode.
- System can't boot from SATA HDD.
The board was quite popular around here,and when browsing a dutch forum,I found out that this particular mobo is a real problem child for many users.
Although having the latest bios too,there are still peeps that report that the high CPU temperature and Sata problems aren't fixed....
there are also lots of reports that the Northbridge runs hot,making the mobo instable as hell...causing unpredictable behaviour for some peripheals.
 
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