I ordered a new 8RDA+ from newegg last Thursday. It arrived at the Fedex location at 7:10 Friday morning - and the idiots refused to deliver it until the next Tuesday after 4pm! So I drove to the FedEx sorting facility and picked the durn thing up myself. Get back to the office, open the box - and it appears to be a refurb?!? WTF? I call them up, they (Carlos) are very nice, and even say they will pay the shipping back. So now that I'm covered, I take a closer look. And it appears that perhaps it is not a refurb, but something is not right. Once I remove it from the bag, and examine the back, I see that the hs on the northbride is loose - one of the plastic pins is loose, allowin the hs to move around, and in shipping this has pushed the bag enough to open it. But there appears to be no damage, and even gives me a no touble view of the NB chip. It's the SPP, A1 (refered to as the C1), and A3 on the SB, ver 1.1 on the board. Ok, I set the NB hs properly (that pin gives me trouble but finally works), and jump in with both feet.
Taking no precautions beyond ghosting my hard drive to another, I gut my main box, removing the old KT400 m/b. In goes the 8RDA+, the 2500+ with retail hsf and thermal pad, the PC3200, the Ti 4600. Everything connected, let's start the show and see if she works. Power on, blinking lights on the front, and she starts! Right to seeing the chip as a 1100Mhz, counting memory....so I enter the bios, and check to see that it is set to display the full screen logo (it is) and the EPA logo (it is), and manually change the fsb from 100 to 166. Reboot, still no foolscreen logo, no EPA logo. Update to the latest BIOS version. No change. Several questions here:
1) where does it give the 400Mhz fsb "Ultra" message? I don't see it anywhere.
2) Should it not see my 2500+ as 166fsb automatically?
3) Shouldn't it also show to 2 logos on boot?
4) Are these problems, or are these issues 'normal' for the board?
Still eager to see what I can do with this puppy outside of these issues, I press on. Winbows gacks and won't load, that's expected. Even in safe mode no go, I had hopes, but it almost never works for 2000 or XP unless the mobos are very very similar. Try the Install but then repair found installation option to get it up and running, but dies no matter what I do, change hardware and settings, all sorts of BSODs. BSODs? Not under WinXP!!!! yea, right.....you just get much more information on why your system has gone belly up. What to do, what to do....
Ok, connect the hard drive to the old motherboard, move the hsf and chip back, get winblows running in safe mode over there. From reading this thread, I figure it's got to be the Ti 4600 drivers, so I remove them and shutdown (I should have removed the network card at the same time!!!!). Move the drive, chips, hsf back to the 8RDA+, and I am then able to recover windows, without any drivers for the stuff on the 8RDA+. put the CD in, install the drivers. Seems to work, mostly, although the install is as lame as you would expect. Worse, enough hardware is being added at one time that it forces me to reacetivate my install, and of course the network is not configured yet, so I have to call and get grilled by microdorks at 3 am before being allowed to reactivate. When done there is no control panel item for the soundstorm, I have to go back and install it manually. Next up, getting winblow up to date, on to windowsupdate.microsoft.com. There's a newer driver for the sound, better load it! reboot, and my rear channel sound is gone, never to return. thank you Microbastards! Ok, reload the nvidia driver, then. Half way through, the screen goes blank, and the system reboots. I never am able to get that installation of Windows to again boot. Thank you ghost!
Another ghosting session to create a fresh copy of installation, I start again. The windows Install-then repair found installation works, and this time I'm smart enough not to run the driver installation. Instead I load the network drivers manually from the CD, and setup the network. It compains that another card as the same settings (that's why I should have removed the old network card when I had the chance!). I proceed to manually load all of the drivers. This works, no reactivation required, go figure. Evertything but USB 2 is working well, because I don't want to install SP 1. But Winamp 2.8 did not play output to the rear speakers, so I did have to update to Winamp 3, which fixed that.
All in all, nice board in general, although it appears to have some minor problems that a replacement will hopefully fix. Outside of that, I am running my 2500+ at 10x200 with stock hsf and fan and memory set to CL2, no problems at all. But if you think I've not gone into enough detail, let me know....