[K8N Neo2 Platinum] BSOD - have had enough of them!

Question

My first K8N Neo2 was a DAO - no current to the PCI slots. Got a new one as replacement, seemed to work fine. "Seemed", indeed.
I've had plenty of sudden resets and BSODs.
I've seen:
STOP 0x000000FC (no error or driver named)
STOP 0x000000EA in ATI2DVAG
STOP 0x00000050, PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA in win32k.sys (also saw some 0x00000050 without the PAGE_FAULT error or driver name)
STOP 0x0000008E
Just yesterday I had two BSODs, just when surfing the internet.
System - Athlon 64 3200+ (boxed), Tagan 380W PSU with 22A on the +12V rail, ATi Radeon X800 Pro, Creative Labs Audigy 2ZS, Promise Ultra133TX2, 3x Maxtor 7200rpm HD, 2x GEiL 512mb PC3500 DDR-RAM (running at PC3200), Lite-On DVD+RW and Lite-On CD+RW.
Please note that my videocard, PCI cards and harddrives worked perfectly in my previous system (Soltek SL-75FRN2-L, nForce2 Ultra400 chipset with a Enermax 350W PSU). I've already tried running without the PCI cards.
Voltages very near to specs, according to Corecenter -- 3.33V on the +3.3V rail, 5.05V on the +5V rail and 11.96V on the +12V rail. That's at this specific moment, under high stress (due to encoding a DVD to XVid).
Memtest86+ : 30 passes, no errors.
3DMark 2005: one full benchmark pass, no errors or graphical artifacts.
Seti@Home: can run for days without any problems.
I have noticed reproducable problems: encoding a DVD to XVid with GordianKnot and encoding DVD9 to DVD5 with DVD Rebuilder. Both resulted in me waking up and finding the login screen of Windows XP (SP2, latest Athlon 64 CPU driver, latest drivers for everything else).
What could be causing this?
Currently I'm running the system with only one stick of RAM, to determine if it's some kind of dual-channel problem or if Memtest86+ somehow didn't find an error while actually something was wrong...
I should note that somewhere in the past week my floppy drive controller must have died, it was working last week and not anymore at the moment. It's recognized by Windows, but no matter which floppydrive I attach it won't work. I've also tried swapping floppy drive cables and even the powerconnector. All of no avail.
So what's most likely to be the problem? Faulty motherboard? Faulty PSU? Faulty videocard? Or perhaps even a faulty CPU?

Answer 1

Quote from: WaltC on 21-February-05, 21:29:11
My first (and only) K8N Neo2P has consistently worked well from the start--with the exception of some blue-screen STOP and MACHINE CHECK errors which I no longer have any problem with after doing a couple of things:
(1) At first I couldn't even boot into WinXP (locked up every time with a MACHINE CHECK BSOD) unless I entered the bios and turned off UDMA in the IDE config and set everything connected to the onboard IDE to PIO4 manually.  After that, I could boot into Windows without error--but of course without UDMA which was unsatisfactory, too.
(2) Next thing I did was to update the firmware in both my optical drives after being reminded about the need to look at that by Glenn, a moderator in this forum.  Well, that fixed the UDMA bootup problem I'd been having as all of my drives would correctly boot as UDMA devices with IDE bios config set to "auto," and I could at last correctly boot into WinXP without error.  But then I noticed another problem...
(3)For some reason, about 60% of the time while booting the optical drive attached to IDE 1 as slave was not being detected by the bios as anything except "NONE", and so when Windows would detect it in software at boot it would automatically incorrectly configure it as a PIO4 drive.  Fixing that problem was easy once I'd guessed the cause--replacing the orange MSI IDE cable that came with the board with another UDMA IDE cable immediately and permanently solved the detection problem I'd been having with the slave IDE optical drive.
Of course, now I wonder if the entire IDE configuration problems I'd had weren't caused by the faulty orange rounded MSI IDE cable that shipped with my motherboard--such that possibly all I need have done from the start was replace the IDE cable...  But, of course, it didn't hurt to  update my optical drive firmware anyway.
Anyway--after these steps I've had no more trouble with the Neo2P in any capacity.  Your solution may not lie here, but I thought you should know about mine in case it might help you sort this out.
Thanks for your reply. However, I haven't used MSI's cables at all. I used the ones from my previous system...
Besides, I haven't had any issues with detection of the IDE-devices.
Edit: Update - I'm currently running with only one DIMM (in slot 1) instead of two DIMMs (slot 1 and 2, also tried slot 3 and 4). An encode from DVD to XVid would cause a reset previously, now with only one DIMM the encode completed succesfully.
By no means is this a 100% assurance that the RAM was causing the problems, but it sure looks like it. This night I'll try an encode from DVD9 to DVD5 using DVD Rebuilder, previously that wouldn't complete succesfully either. If it does now, I'm quite sure the RAM was causing the problems.