Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

This Friday I received a box with several new computer components from our supplier NXSource, the business end of NCIX. I’m currently in the process of performing several new system builds and overwhelmingly chose the Asus P5Q series, in both -VM and -E based configurations.

As per its extension, the P5Q-VM will be going in an office/lower end configuration with no need for a discrete graphics card. It’s replacing a Sempron 2400+ configuration; the MSI Socket 462 board blew two or three capacitors last week and there’s not really a point in finding a replacement motherboard now. The onboard video from the Intel chipset should be sufficient for its purpose in life, and the board has a DVI-D port unlike similar systems with integrated graphics.

Eventually the machine may be repurposed with media center-type functionality, so all it should need is a DVI to HDMI conversion cable to connect to a HDTV. I did slightly overspec the processor (a Core 2 Duo E7200 at 2.53GHz) so that it could run 720p video without issues; in general, at least a 2.4GHz dual core is the baseline for decent playback of most popular MKV’s.

One nice thing about the new Asus microATX configurations is that they include an x16 PCI-Express slot for potential future expansion, as well as four DDR2 SDRAM slots instead of just two. This makes the configuration incredibly useful in the future when it comes time for a RAM upgrade.

I’ve replaced the P5B Deluxe pictured above and taken the new P5Q-E for my main workstation. The new board is now essentially the same platform as the file/media server upstairs. I’d originally chosen the board for its three PCI-E x16 slots, which makes powering a video card and two PCI-E RAID addon boards a possibility. One feature that I’d neglected to investigate is the instant-on “Splashtop/Express Gate”, which is basically a stripped down version of Linux partially embedded on a flash chip on the board. I can see this feature being really useful, but it has a few drawbacks:

• Installation is performed through Windows. You have to have a hard drive for the initial installation, which doesn’t really make sense when it comes to grabbing drivers or BIOS updates. Ideally, the motherboard utilities DVD would allow you to boot a read-only version or install the environment to a USB thumb drive. From there you could pull the latest BIOS, upgrade, and grab new drivers even before Windows enters the picture.
• I’d like to see more motherboard utilities included in the package. A temperature gauge, overclock tweaking utility and network cable tester would all be excellent additions.
• While on that subject, tools similar to SpeedFan, Orthos and Prime95 are sorely lacking.
• Where’s the music support? You’ve initialized the sound card, now get to business with it. Embedded Linux with a jukebox - even XMMS - would be really neat.
• Hard drives with NTFS show up in the Picture Browser, but there’s no way to even view their contents through the conventional USB drive explorer.
• Also, give us a command line and non-gimped web browser! The lack of console support in an OS that’s so obviously Linux hurts me.

All in all, the features of the stripped-down distribution make me want to try out Ubuntu again outside of a VM.

I experience this issue every time I go to seek a pre-Windows Vista driver for an Asus motherboard: their download servers always peter out at about 100KB/s, regardless of which mirror I choose. I have half a mind to set up mirrors of the most popular drivers - even if a LAN or audio driver isn’t necessarily the latest version, it’ll still help people get up and running sooner rather than later.

nVidia and ATI have persistently fast download speeds, even for the size of their respective driver suites. It’s just the motherboard and chipset manufacturers that have this problem. I recall waiting for a 4KB/s download from an audio chip manufacturer because nobody else had the right drivers.

Build it in to the cost of your high-end products if needed. I’m sure the people buying “gamer edition” motherboards, who are the ones updating their BIOS weekly and wasting time asking technical support about how to overclock their RAM and set unsupported timings, should be shouldering the cost. I just like to have drivers available and at fast download speeds when I need them.

Quite a number of new systems I’ve built have included the P5B Deluxe or P5B Deluxe-WiFi motherboards. After an aggravating experience with a new build today - really out of the ordinary for the hardware - I figured I’d write up my experiences to save other people a potential issue.

Symptoms: When installing Vista x64 on a P5B Deluxe with 4GB RAM, the installation wizard blue screens and fails with a STOP message. I’d initially tried to pin this to the Intel ICH8R storage controller, since this was my first setup running a RAID1-array on a 64-bit OS. Unfortunately, RAID1 is almost necessary for a new home system these days because hard drives do fail, and people don’t like burning 500GB of their personal files to DVD.

However, even after setting the IDE controller to “Compatible” in BIOS, I received different errors - some apparently related to RAM, and the Windows Memory Test on the Vista installation DVD indicated that the machine had hardware issues. I broke out my copy of Memtest86, which found nothing out of the ordinary.

I tweaked the BIOS settings - memory remapping, PECI support - all with no real results or varied blue screen messages.

The solution eventually came to me when I was re-browsing Asus’ download site for BIOS upgrades. As part of all new system builds, I upgrade the BIOS to the latest stable version available. Unfortunately, Asus has two separate pages for these upgrades: one which just indicates “new BIOS releases”, and another page that lets you know which ones are beta versions. One thing you don’t want to do for a stable family system is install a beta BIOS, and any revisions publicly available after April 2007 are considered betas.

I likely wouldn’t have experienced this issue (and indeed proved it) if there was only 2GB of RAM in the system, or I wasn’t using an Intel E6750 1333MHz CPU. So, lesson learned? Make sure you read all the BIOS pages on Asus’ site before downloading and installing one. Currently I’m planning on reverting back to the latest official 1101 version, as opposed to version 1216 which seems to display these issues.

Update: Apparently downgrading your BIOS is a trickier proposition than originally thought. EZ Flash 2 (the built-in flash utility) will not downgrade BIOS versions, so you have to locate a copy of a DOS application called AFUDOS that supports downgrading:

AFUDOS 2.07

From this application, you’ll need to make a bootable USB stick/CD/floppy with the older BIOS image on it, and then use the command:

AFUDOS /iBIOS.ROM /pbnc /n

where BIOS.ROM is the path to the BIOS file you’d like to flash.