AAArgh BSOD!!!

[the_lone_wolf]

Hi,

First off the problems i'm having appear to be down to either my soundcard or my motherboard, or more specifically, the combination of the two.
My System:

Athlon64 3500+ Venice
1GB Kingston Ram ("Infineon" chips) running in dual channel (Asus "approved" RAM in recommended DIMM slots)
PCI-X ATI Radeon x800GTO2 (Flashed and auto-overclocked to 540/590)
Audigy2 ZS

The HDD and memory have both been tested using western digital's own diagnostic tool and memtest86 and both came back clear


Brief overview of the issue:

When my system is up and running (with a freshly formatted HDD and windows install) i install my soundcard in the lowest PCI slot (slot 3) on my A8N, this and slot 2, according to the manual, are not shared.

everything runs fine, windows login tune and system sounds are played without a problem. the problem occurs when i play any media with an audio element from my Lacie External Drive via the firewire port on my soundcard. after a minute or so of starting music in iTunes and randomly during playback of videos on the external HDD i get the BSOD which says "MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION" and the computer dumps the memory and reboots. this is repeatable behaviour.

i also have a PCI firewire card and my onboard sound is disabled, the drivers where never installed. so far i have done this:

- Uninstalled PCI LAN, Audigy and PCI FW card, enabled onboard audio and played music from local disk, this was stable as iTunes ran overnight without a problem.

- Installed a PCI LAN card in slot 3 (disabled onboard LAN) and played music over the network in our house from my mum's computer via iTunes, ran stable all this morning and most of this afternoon

- Installed soundcard in slot 2 and played music over firewire connection from external HDD, after a half hour or so the system went to the same blue screen

- Installed soundcard in slot 1, system Blue Screened in a ciuple of minutes...

After speaking to a few people on the creative and asus support forums it seems the A8N-E is not without a few bugs, and this is one of them, it's going back next week so now i need a new motherboard. not too sure on price, i guess under £100 is the limit, the A8N was about £65 from another site...

Requirements:

ATX form factor
Skt 939
PCI-X
Dual channel RAM
USB 2.0
Onboard LAN

Desired:

Onboard Firewire

what are good boards, been looking at the gigabyte boards, seem reasonably priced with onboard firewire. any brands to avoid? i've always used Asus up til now but this whole episode makes me a little wary of buying another one of their boards in case i have the same thing happen again

 

[Quixoticism]

I'm so looking forward to Windows Vista because then we'll have RSODs to along with the classic BSODs!!!

What's the chipset on your mobo? Creative cards have had problems with VIA chipsets.

 

[the_lone_wolf]

thats the funny thing, i've been using the card on a via chipset for months with no problems, switch to an nForce4 chipset mobo and i get issues

 

[Asus]

It sounds like it's how the Nvidia chipset does IRQs or at least how the ACPI function works with your setup. I'm not really sure what to recommend because Im not sure where the problem is. I wouldn't get the same chipset personally.

 

[the_lone_wolf]

lol, so which is it?

switch back to via or stay with nForce4

not taking the mick but lots of people have said both, does the motherboard BIOS not assign IRQ's instead of the actual chipset? i think i'll just buy another motherboard avoiding Asus and see if it works, lots of folks have recomended Epox boards so i'll see what they do, if not i'll just have to swap it out again til i find one that works:dozey: