MotherBoard failing

i think my motherboard is starting to fail(Gigabyte P965-DS3)
at times it freezes at the HDD detect(the HDD load light is glowing)
at times it will boot without video(Nvidia 8600GT)

& need to know of any good

Asus boards that are good for gaming & support DD2 & DDR3 RAM that are under AU$200(US$180)

thank you

 

I would bet your hard drive is failing, not the systemboard. Gigabyte makes excellent hardware.
Get this to check: http://www.hdtune.com

 

I agree and IMHO their motherboards have better quality control than Asus. Personally, I think Asus motherboards are one of the most over-rated products in the computer industry. On the whole (in my experience) Asus boards have short life spans, and your chances of getting bad one out of the box is too high. Due to the nature of PC components, esp. motherboards, it's only natural that a bad board will get through once in a while. I'm OK with that. But my experiences with new Asus boards have been really, really bad. I'd say over half of the new Asus boards that I have personally dealt with have been bad out of the box or failed in under a year. On the other hand, Asus makes great laptops and I've had NO trouble EVER with their video cards. A friend of mine has a Geforce 4 MX440 64mb AGP card that's still going strong. I don't know if they make their motherboards in a different factory or different country or if the motherboard warehouse has a 2-for-1 on domestic beer and well happy hour, but the MB quality control sucks.
Yeah- test the hard drive. Your HD maker's web site will have a free diagnostic tool you can download. Run the in-depth extended test to see if the drive is healthy.

(sorry for the rant )

 

If you suspect the mobo, but not really sure if it just might be the HD, then I'd take the HD out of the equation by booting up with a test program like Memtest, (on either a boot floppy, CD or Flash Drive) that won't run the HD at all but will check the mobo and ram. Let memtest run for at least an hour.

I have a Dell tower on my bench right now, that was booting erratically and sometimes crashing. Dell tech's said it was a bad mobo.

I removed the one (?) DDR ram stick and cleaned it, then replaced it and the system booted up normally and has for many subsequent boots.
So you might just give that a try too.

Good Luck
The Shadow :cool

 

plus it doesn't let me overclock

when i over clock by the smallest amount

it turns off, then on then off & continues until the clock resets it self


one of the reasons i picked gigabyte is due to the good things i heard about them

 

I guess I just don't understand this whole overclocking thing. If you NEED to have a CPU running at a certain MHZ, then buy one that runs at that speed.
Being an old Gearhead, I can equate overclocking to putting Nitros on an old car engine. It may run like a scalded dog......till it blows up!
Everything is designed to run at a certain speed, and exceeding that speed can cause all sorts of problems.

Every time that I've ever set my clock rate too high, my computer has failed to boot. Then I'd have to reset the cmos to defaults and start over. So, I find overclocking troublesome at best.

Gigabyte mobo's are usually very stable and feature rich. I've used dozens of them over the years, when I was still building computers.
So I think I'd be looking elsewhere for a solution to the problem.

Have you done what I said? If you won't do the things we tell you here, then we're just wasting our time. If I were there I'd do it myself and we'd have that thing figured out in no time at all.

I mentioned the Dell desktop PC on my service bench..... I installed a floppy disk drive in it last night, then booted up the system with my Windows ME Utilities floppy and FDISK'd and DOS Formatted one of the two Maxtor 160 gig SATA2 drives that came in the system. I scrapped the RAID thing.
The FDISK went off just fine and the DOS Format took all night, but the job is done and the hard drive is fully formatted.
I've just rebooted with the Memtest disk and I'm now running a test of the ram.
It's just like Dell to put only one ram stick in a system that requires ram to be installed in matched pairs. System performance suffers greatly when you do that. D'hell strikes again!

I mentioned that I "Cleaned" the ram stick and that seems to have solved some of the glitchyness the system was exhibiting. Dell techs told the user that the motherboard was blown and that the Intel CPU was a bad model that Dell no longer uses.:confused

I've saved tons of ram by just cleaning it. Cleaning can range from a dry brushing with an old toothbrush and polishing up the edge connector with an eraser, followed by a good cleaning with an alcohol dampened rag, , ,
to a full out scrubbing at the kitchen sink, with hot water and liquid detergent, followed by an alcohol rinse and thorough drying before reinstalling.

When diagnosing a faulty system, I always go for the easy stuff first.
Cleaning ram is easy.
Jacking in a new (and known good) power supply is easy.
Re-seating all plug in cards, like a video card, is also easy.
I clean the edge connectors on all the plug-in cards before re-installing them.
Checking for swollen electrolytic capacitors on the mobo, is also easy.
Booting up the system with a boot disk, to bypass the HD is also easy.
Every day, we hear someone say that they replaced a mobo because they "thought" it was bad, then found out that was not the problem.
That's just DUMB, to say the least and can be Expensive too.

I once worked on a system for a man that had a PC under warranty and the warranty company had sent him three different motherboards, none of which fixed his problem. Then he brought the whole mess to me. I found one of the replacement mobo's was actually bad. But the problem wound up being the Power Supply, not the mobo. He was my customer for life, after that.

Anyway.......that's my story!
Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?

The Shadow :cool

 

my ram is clean
all cards are in fully

i couldn't overclock when i got the board(maybe i ended up with the faulty one :mad)

but the issue comes & gos

my hard drive is find ran the HD tune Test plus it is a Western Digital which have never failed me yet