A7N8X-VM/400 - it's official, Asus' most memory fussy mobo (long)

A7N8X-VM/400 - it's official, Asus' most memory fussy mobo

Careful when using this mobo with integrated graphics (which was probably
why you wanted to buy it). Memory timings when system memory is
shared with the integrated graphics processor are far tighter than when a
plugin agp card is used.

I'm running cheap & cheerful 400MHz ram at 333MHz and figured the
underclocking would leave me a healthy timing margin. It does, 24hrs of
memtest86 and 12hrs of Prime95 suggest it's solid, but run anything
graphics intensive, like a movie, and it falls flat on it's face. Symptoms are
typical of interaction between graphics & system accesses, corrupted
stripes in the display, then the inevitable crash as a crucial area of system
mem is corrupted. Ok, I've got cheap memory, but use a plugin agp card
and it's solid as a rock - seems a little unfair.

Asus uk tech support are patient & helpful, but basically they say go &
buy premium memory, which memory you ask, as there is currently no
approved memory list for this board. He suggests I visit my friendly local
retailer and try premium memory brands until I find one that works.

After a long call (friday afternoon) the support guy's resolve falters; he
says:

1. This board was never intended for public sale
2. It was produced at the request of large OEMs to satisfy the need for
simple, fully integrated boxes.
3. It is their most memory fussy board ever.
4. When the pet OEMs ran into memory problems they were asked which
memory they would like to use and the board/bios was tweaked to suit.
5. There is no publicly available list of the memory that this board has been
tweaked to work with.
6. A user tweakable bios is not in the pipeline for this board

I'm not prepared to take the risk of buying more memory without a
guaranteed fix so I'm using the known fix of a plugin agp card. It is now
solid, cheap memory and all.

Thought I'd make life simple this time, pay the premium, buy the big name
and go for integrated graphics, I won't be making that mistake again.
--
fred