Steve,

Thanks for the response.

I think that we are in agreement that the ASUS helpdesk response (it
appeared to be a 'caned' response) is what is known in the Air Force as a
"goat rope" project, one having little significance or meaning.

I think we can rule out the power supply since its a new TruePower550 ATX12V
Antec unit (P/N#S40ATX) rated at 550w. My Navy submarine experience taught
me to always build in more than ample electrical capacity for growth.

I doubt that the memory sticks were the problem since the system would work
just fine once I got past the BIOS interactions. My BIOS settings were
generic (I generally accepted the default settings except for HHD boot
settings) without any attempt to overclock.

My guess is that the M/B had a faulty current trace somewhere and it'd open
or shut based on mechanical strains on the board shut as going from
horizontal on the workbench to rotated 90 degrees during installation in the
case.

Now if the replacement board has the same problem, I'll return to the
electrical grounding theories. I don't know exactly what's going on inside
the power supply, but I'd bet that both rectified DC and the input 60 Hz
have a common ground reference back to the ground plug on the power cable.
The M/B has many "Common" connections back to the power supply. So, my
uneducated guess is that the washers and tape is approach is an ASUS
helpdesk "urban legend". Probably a better idea would be to remove the tape
and electrically ground the whole case to the house ground (thru a power
strip ground pin?).

Come back?

-pgm


"Steve Sr." wrote in message
...
I just RMA'd the same brand-new board to Newegg.com because the PS/2
mouse port wouldn't function and the PS/2 keyboard was flakey. If you
think Windows is flakey by itself put it on flakey hardware and you'll
pull out all of your hair!

For EMI it is better to ground ALL of the mounting screws as this adds
an additional return path for high speed signals. I don't think Asus
guys know what they were talking about unless they know they already
have a design problem they are trying to get around.

I would also look at your power supply. The effect of removing or
insulating the screws also increases the impedance of the power
distribution of the board which will lead to more voltage drop and
could explain your different test results if the power supply was
running on the low side. At the same time this will also increase any
noise on the internal sections of the board which may also cause an
issue. What type of power supply do you have?

The biggest causes of instability apart from overclocking are memory
and power supply issues.

HTH,

Steve



On Sat, 15 Nov 2003 18:44:05 -0500, "Patrick Martin"
wrote:

I just RMAed my two week old P4C800-E Deluxe M/B to NewEgg.Com because of
BIOS problems http://helpdesk.asus.com and I couldn't correct. Even
after
updating to the latest BIOS version, I'd typically get "New CPU
Installed"
alerts from the BIOS and have to manually reset BIOS data to get the M/B
to
complete startup. ASUS was concerned about "EMI interference" and/or
improper grounding of the M/B to the case and suggested removing the M/B
from the case and test with just video card, and keyboard (no memory) on
a
non-conducting surface (wooden workbench, phone book, or the box the M/B
came in) and if this worked reinstall in the case with electricians tape
over the metal M/B stand-offs and red-paper washers under the heads of
the
ten screws that secure the M/B to the Lian-Li M/B tray. The system
wouldn't
peep or show any life until I installed the RAM. After installing the
memory, it'd would fine and the BIOS retaining all the settings. The
tape &
paper washers seemed to fix the problem (it'd regularly boot to XP w/o
incident) until I exchanged the newly assembled PC for my eight year old
200MHz machine. After hooking up things like the phone line, printer,
joystick to the game port, and an open-ended serial port cable, the new
PC
would halt during POST with a "Black Screen". After a few cold reboots,
I
got a display indicating the BIOS had again halted due to "CPU
Overclocking". The maddening thing is that the dam thing would again
boot
to XP after removing the M/B tray from the case (M/B still bolted to the
tray), hooking up the internal stuff (power, HDD, floppies, PCI Modem,
video
card, and CD-RW devices) and powering up. At that point I said "M/B
latent
defect" and RMAed it back to the point of sale.

Is anyone else have any "EMI interference" and/or improper grounding
problem
solutions they can share with us along with the workarounds?

Patrick