19-09-2003 17:56									#1
	Abit NF7-S, my brand new ambulance (motherboard problem) Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

I'm building a system and having hidious difficulties with the Abit NF7-S motherboard. It starts to produce this ambulance-type siren noise in a seemingly random fashion.

Observe: Just now I booted up from the DVD drive after clearing the CMOS, proceeded to install an OS, and ta-dah, the PC speaker goes off and the mobo shuts the system down. I have to pull out the power cord to make the beeping stop.

One time I managed to fire up Knoppix from a live CD all the way to the window manager, but after I rebooted and tried again, the moment I saw the word "Knoppix" the blasted thing went offline with a screech.

Apparently it's a warning related to either the CPU overheating, or the CPU or PSU fans going on too low RPM readings. Sometimes it starts up right after booting, sometimes if I access the BIOS settings, sometimes it takes quite awhile. I have had few instances of bootup where the siren didn't go off for several minutes, so there might be hope.

The processor, an AXP 2500+, is about 47 celsius on idle with a Glacialtech Silent Breeze 2 installed with some generic silicone grease (not the thermal pad that came with the cooler, I cleaned it off with grease-removal alcohol and then wiped it clean with a wet cloth). I believe it is the fan rpm that sets the alarm off, as I was staring at the BIOS temperature readings, and the cpu was around 45 celsius when suddenly the mobo screamed and shut itself down. I had the limit at 75, and above all, I had the shutdown function disabled. I've never had them enabled in the first place, yet they kick in. Mind you, the mobo sensor probably isn't the most fine-tuned one around.

I can't jack the psu cooler to anything other than the mobo. Same with the cpu cooler. The cpu cooler is shown to be at 2300 rpm, if that's any help. PSU and CHA (?) coolers are 0 rpm according to the BIOS, I have nothing plugged in the CHA place since there's no free connector around anywhere that would fit.

I've also experienced random problems with "DMI data pool" when booting, but I twiddled around my 5.25" drives and switched my DVD-ROM and CD-RW around from slave to master and vice versa, and it disappeared.

The memory (2*256 MB) is also identified correctly as DDR400 on a fresh cleared-CMOS boot, but if I switch the system off and restart it the sticks are both identified as DDR333. The mobo also identifies my processor as a 1100 MHz Athlon XP on startup (IOW the FSB drops to 100 from 166), although the BIOS itself identifies it corrently. It's recognised on the startup screen as a 2500+ with a fresh CMOS, however.

I've also flashed my BIOS to the newest version according to Abit, 1.8, and it was supposed to cure all my troubles. The date on the startup screen matches with the date of the BIOS version, so it should be working fine. Curiously, I haven't had the problem where the 2500+ is identified as a 3200+ a single time.

I'm going to try to remove the components and put them all back together again before sending it back to the store to get either a new one or a 25 euro bill. First I'd like to try out anything possible, though. I can't access spare RAM sticks, I have switched my two sticks around in the dimm2 and 3 sockets both one and two at a time but to no avail. I'm simply running out of any ideas other than reinstalling the cooler or sending the mobo back.

I found a myriad of suggestions on the forums of ABIT USA and newsgroups, but everything that's been suggested I've tried, save for reinstalling the cooler in case it is misaligned. The temperatures are so low though that I doubt it'll do anything.

Oh, and I did try out switching the vcore setting from 1.65 volts to anything between 1.525 and 1.625. No dice. I considered upping the memory voltages to 2.7 from 2.6. but IMO the memory's not to blame.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Could someone for instance tell me what sort of memory settings I should have for 256 meg 2.5 cas latency sticks (M-Tec chips with a TwinMoss sticker) for this particular motherboard? Is it enough if the BIOS sets the timings up as "optimal"?

Here's a rundown on the parts I have installed:

Athlon XP 2500+ (11*166), w/ Glacialtech Igloo Silent Breeze II
LG DVD-ROM drive
Sony CD-RW drive
WD Caviar SE hard disk, 8 meg cache, 120 gigs of storage
Sapphire R9600 (128 MB)
Two 256 MB DDR400 sticks by M-Tec
And, of course, an Abit NF7-S motherboard.

Crammed in an Antec Sonata Piano case (that thing gets crowded), connected to an Antec TruePower at 380W.

Edit: Oh, and I get a "CPU not working correctly or has been changed, CPU SOFT MENU" or somesuch message on startup every now and then.

	19-09-2003 18:04									#2
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

Perhaps you have the alarms plugged into the wrong jacks.
Go through and double check that all the wires are plugged into exactly the right places.

	19-09-2003 18:41									#3
	Suffering from ads?

The CPU fan is in a connector called CPU1, the PSU fan is in a connector called PWR1 and the CHA1 connector is empty because the fan is attached to a special "fan only" power cord, not a connection similar to the CPU and PSU fans. The circuit fan of the mobo is already connected.

I think I'll give it another go, boot it and see what happens.

Edit - it's running right now straight from a cleared CMOS, however it hanged up on "Verifying DMI pool data .... update success". Maybe the bios didn't flash properly? Edit - or the HDD is hosed, sayeth google. It ought to boot from the DVD-ROM to setup the OS, though. Edit - there we go again! I was peeking around the BIOS settings when it happened. The cpu was around 45 celsius. It has to be either the fan alarm or a malfunction in the mobo itself. Why can't I disable it!

Last edited by Kassiopeia on 19-09-2003 at 18:52

	19-09-2003 18:56									#4
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

As someone who has sweated and sworn while building PC's with funky MB's (just cos I'm a stubborn SOB) my advice is to send it back, and get something else (Gigabyte GA-7NNXP or GA-7N400-L1). If you cant even get the thing to post correctly with all that you've tried I'd say you're wasting your time.

	19-09-2003 19:00									#5
	Put an end to popups!

Yeah, that's exactly what I've been screamed at by the rest of the family for the last couple of hours. I'll send it back on Monday if I can't get it to work during the weekend.

The fact that it recognises both the CPU and the memory quite erratically does imply a motherboard problem. That and the fact that the alarm goes off even if I have it set off. There's supposedly been a dud shipment of NF7-S's in Finland lately, so it's likely I've a piece of junk inside my case.

	19-09-2003 19:54									#6
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

Sounds like a bad mobo to me.

	19-09-2003 20:05									#7
	Enter the AD-FREE zone

I went out on a limb and switched the cpu to 10x166. Now it passed the DMI hangup, started to boot up from the DVD drive, and then sounded the alarm and cut off. If it wasn't for the DDR* mismatch on startup, I'd suspect the cpu is having problems. The siren shouldn't still go off if it's turned off, though.

I guess the mobo's hosed then. Unless the reseller has some miraculous wonder cure nobody on the whole bloody Internet has figured out yet.

	19-09-2003 22:20									#8
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quote: Originally posted by Urban Ranger Sounds like a bad mobo to me.

	19-09-2003 22:23									#9
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Knoppix?

	20-09-2003 12:19									#10
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quote: Originally posted by Provost Harrison Knoppix?

It's a Linux distribution that can be run "live", straight from a CD. You just pop it in and boot from it. It's pretty clever when it comes to automatic hardware recognition.

	20-09-2003 19:01									#11
	Remove this text

I removed the cooler, cleaned out the thermal grease from the CPU and the cooler, reapplied slightly more of it and installed the cooler back. It still hanged up on "Verifying DMI Data pool...", failed to recognise the memory correctly after a reset, and even spat the "cpu unoperative or changed" message at me once.

I don't have a floppy drive, so I rebooted with Insert key down, set it to boot from the CD drive, went ahead, and managed to get very far into the OS installation process when the siren went off and the system shut down. Very frustrating.

It's got to be the motherboard.

Edit - the plot thickens! Apparently the mobo does not misread my memory, but it optimises it to match the FSB on my processor.

This means two things: it recognises the CPU correctly as according to settings, and it recognises the memory correctly.

So, the problem has to be one of the following:

- The mobo is toast and sets the alarm off itself.
- The processor, despite my efforts, still runs too hot and causes the shutdown.
- The processor's inside thermal sensor, which is used to set the alarm, is malfunctioning and gives a false reading. The mobo sensor shows around 43 degrees when idle, but the mobo sensor isn't used by the alarm. That, or it gives a false signal, that overrides my specific settings that disable the alarm in the first place.

Last edited by Kassiopeia on 20-09-2003 at 19:47

	20-09-2003 20:11									#12
	Remove this text

quote: Originally posted by Kassiopeia Edit - the plot thickens! Apparently the mobo does not misread my memory, but it optimises it to match the FSB on my processor.

So does your XP2500+ has a 333MHz FSB?

quote: Originally posted by Kassiopeia This means two things: it recognises the CPU correctly as according to settings, and it recognises the memory correctly.

Not necessarily. A glitched mobo can still work correctly some of the time (but not all the time).

quote: Originally posted by Kassiopeia That, or it gives a false signal, that overrides my specific settings that disable the alarm in the first place.

If you have disabled the alarm in BIOS and it still goes off, that is a toasted mobo all right.

	20-09-2003 23:02									#13
	Increase the size of your Attachments

quote: Originally posted by Urban Ranger So does your XP2500+ has a 333MHz FSB?

Yes, 11*166 is the standard clockspeed.

quote: If you have disabled the alarm in BIOS and it still goes off, that is a toasted mobo all right.

Probably, probably. No matter what I do, the fact still stands that the blasted thing goes beep-boop-beep-boop even when I have explicitly told it not to.

I am running it at 8*166 and managed to install an operating system on it. I can take out the HDD and slap it in to a new system with a new NF7-S, and I can't send it back until Monday, so I could all well just do the driver installs, updates and whatnot now that I can. Posting with it, actually.

	21-09-2003 04:59									#14
	Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

Since you're still fighting with it Have you tried to find out exactly what the beeps etc mean? After a quick read of this site and one other a couple of things occur to me.

1. the northbridge is too hot
2. your ram is not high quality
3. check your FSB/DRAM ratio in the bios. apparently its more stable if synchronous

Last edited by SpencerH on 21-09-2003 at 05:04

	21-09-2003 08:35									#15
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

It looks like it got a fan on the North Bridge.

	21-09-2003 11:53									#16
	Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

Yeah, there's a fan already installed, and it came already connected. Works like a charm when I power it up.

I have checked what the beeps mean from the Abit USA forums, and this problem is very, very widespread. A Finnish forum I peruse on technical matters has several NF7-S ambulance owners as well. The Silent Breeze II is specified to work on up to AXP 3000+, and some folks are overclocking this processor with it to AXP 3200+ and beyond.

Like I said, I've tried out everything I could find that has been suggested: turning the alarm off, setting the alarm temperatures up, memory placings, reseating the heatsink, and updating the BIOS to the newest version. I'm going to take out the PSU fan monitor next, see if its rpm readings are still messing it up.

The FSB/DRAM ratio is set by the mobo automatically, I thought it was misidentifying my RAM when it showed it as DDR333, when in fact it had independently set it to match my FSB.

One thing I could do is flash in a slightly older BIOS and reflash to the newest, since my problem was explicitly addressed in the BIOS I have now, so maybe it somehow didn't happen properly.

	21-09-2003 12:10									#17
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

This is just silly. The BIOS tells me that the processor is running at 19 centigrade after a long night resting in my rather cold room, and just now I ran the Windows monitor on it, and it claimed the processor was 20 C warmer. I started to calculate pi with it and lo and behold, once the monitor hit 52,50, it shut down. The problem is either with the sensor inside the processor or the part of the motherboard that interprets the signal of the processor sensor.

	21-09-2003 12:18									#18
	Get a bigger avatar today!

Your best bet is to find another board to test the CPU. If the CPU works fine on that, well, you know the story.

	21-09-2003 12:33									#19
	Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

I would have tried out different RAM, cpus, another motherboard and stuff, but where the devil am I going to find someone with an nForce2 board in this neck of the woods... I can't really walk up to complete strangers at school and ask them "You wouldn't happen to have an nForce2 motherboard? Even an Abit NF7-S by any chance?" and my schoolfriends have Wintel machines. I'll probably ask the store to take in and check both my CPU and my mobo. This shouldn't be just a compatibility problem, one of them is not working.

(Another boot, this time took off the PSU fan monitor cable, still siren sound after a few minutes of stress.)

I'll probably reseat the heatsink one more time today just to hone my assembling skills.

	22-09-2003 08:41									#20
	Remove this text

You don't need another nForce2 mobo. What you are trying to find out is whether the CPU is good or not, so any working boards for an Athlon XP 2500+ will do.

	22-09-2003 09:44									#21
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

Ah, true, a KT333 or whatever for instance.

Anyway, the truth is, I had made a not-so-slight and quite embarrassing fubar when installing the heatisink: I had put it in the wrong way. That way all of the processor wasn't covered and the contact between the die and the heatsink was faulty, causing the processor to zap to over 120 celsius, where the critical temp alarm which can't be turned off (because of first-time assemblers like me?) kicked in. The software and bios sensors which measure the temperature from the outside of the processor couldn't keep up with the rapidly increasing heat, leading to a large disparity in the readings.

I've even OC'ed the CPU now to 11*200 and ran tests on it without problems. The hardware monitor gave me temps of ~56 degrees celsius under duress. Now I've kept it up for almost fifteen hours at regular clockspeeds without a hitch.

Thanks for your help, in any case. The problem's now solved, and I'll never misinstall another socket 462 fan again.

	22-09-2003 09:48									#22
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quote: Originally posted by Kassiopeia ...causing the processor to zap to over 120 celsius, where the critical temp alarm which can't be turned off (because of first-time assemblers like me?) kicked in.

Ouch.

Lucky you didn't fry the CPU.

Maybe all those people on the BBS with amulances have the same problem?

	22-09-2003 09:54									#23
	Full PM-box? Change here!

I suspect most people are better at reading the friendly motherboard manual, where it said which way to put the fan in. I do think that the cooler's manual said to put it in differently, but really, common sense should have dictated that 1/6 of the processor shouldn't be visible.

And yes, lucky I didn't destroy a 99 euro processor. Gotta love those Abit engineers.