Graphic corruption p7n diamond

Question

I have had a p7n diamond MB for quite some time now as has my wife, since day one we have experienced the graphics corruption problem so many speak of. Our problem does not always happen when playing movies, sometimes it can happen just when viewing jpeg files or even just renaming files in explorer. We are running xp home, I also run xp 64 and this graphic problem is not predictable, days or weeks can go by with no problem, but sometimes we can get it several times a day.
I have taken some screen shots of what the corruption looks like with the use of the Prt Scr key and then pasting the clipboard into a paint program and then saving, no easy task when this corruption is present. I have made sure all my drivers are up to date, even gone back a few revisions on some, recently I flashed my MB bios to 1.4 but still the graphic corruption happens at random. Never when I am playing 3d games like fallout 3 or similar.
When I did flash my bios I did not turn off power and pull plug after I flashed and did not press the cmos reset button near the IO panel, was that needed, and if so even after flashing and booting now several times can I just power down, pull plug and now reset cmos or do I need to reinstall 1.4 bios again ?  Sorry if this question is noobish but I am just about ready to give up on this MB 

Answer 1

Quote from: adihot2008 on 30-December-09, 13:52:06
Well Well now we are slowly running out of options. Personally I have never tried to stabilize my P7N Diamond in Windows XP, so this is the max stability we can achieve I think in Windows XP. I recommend you to upgrade your OS to windows vista or windows 7 as soon as possible,the board can me made perfectly stable under these OS.Haven't you thought about it yet?
Sorry to say, but if its stable in Vista and 7, why cant it be done in xp???
Its a load of rubbish, imo, to make someone go to another OS, if XP, which is one of the most stable MS OS at this time, cant be run stable.
Vista can be a horror, I talk out of experience, since I had it since day one, 7 is fairly new and thus still pretty expensive and these people are, if im correct, on a budget.
1, do you have new sata cables at hand??
I saw that one of the last times it happened you had Winrar running and again when formatting a drive, so it seems to happen when you use your HD a lot.
If I remember correct, those can be faulty too (loose contacts, not shielded very well, bad wiring internally) and cause similar things, they dont cost much and is well worth thinking about.
2, do you still have that pesky Creative soundcard??
If so, remove it (best option) or disable it and remove all its drivers and stuff, creative can be a pain, especially those drivers and try again.
Use Driver Sweeper (freeware) to get completely rid of all its drivers, look here:
http://downloads.guru3d.com/Guru3D---Driver-Sweeper-(Setup)_d1655.html
Ive seen people with creative cards getting all sorts of troubles, including myself and after they removed it, all was fine.
If I recall correct, it was already a problem on your boards predecessor, the P6N diamond and your board isnt that different, it runs the newer Yorkfields and has PCIe2.0 instead of 1.x, but thats about all the difference there is.
I had games stopping due to a driver from Creative and BSOD's, needlees to say I scrapped that card and Ill make do with my onboard 5.1 realtek, which suits me just fine 
If it is the problem, get a normal card for a few bucks, they dont have to be that expensive, unless your a big audiofan who can separate all different frequencies and tones 
Upping the southbridge (SB) voltage isnt a good idea either.
This is the connection to the slower stuff in/on your system like, HD's, cd/dvd stations, keyboard and such and therefore dont need to have more voltage, at least not on any of the systems I had.
On my current system it caused more troubles then it did good.
Try 1 thing at a time and test/use/wait to see if it changes anything.