ECS Extreme and Athlon 3500+

[Rivers]

My cousin recently purchased parts and is having me put them together for him. He bought the Venice core Athlon 64 3500+ and an ECS EN1 Extreme motherboard. The board is okay only I read stuff about voltage issues and a shotty bios. The system booted up fine and runs blazing fast only after a few minutes will just shut down out of no where. I'm thinking its a voltage issue he's running it with a 420 watt PS with a 200GB SATA drive and an X800 XL on that beast. I was looking for a bios update but I didn't find anything that fits the bill quiet right. Any suggestions I'd like to see this beasts' 3D mark score. Should I set the voltage myself in the bios?

Athlon 64 3500+ Venice core
ECS KN1 Extreme w/Nvidia Nforce 4 ultra
420Watt PSU
WD 200GB SATA
2 GB Kingston PC3200 RAM
ATI X800 XL Video Card
And all the other usual stuff dvd rom and burner floopy drive etc.

[JIMINATOR]

Well, looking at their page, http://www.ecsusa.com/products/kn1.html , it seems like the board does everything and then some. still, personally i would rather spend a few more bucks and get a known brand name, like asus & msi. with their volume they will have corrected any problems on an established chipset (ie: NV NF4).
The 420 should be fine, a 480 is the minimum card for a dual 6800 combo, and ati uses less juice than nvidia, so i don't think the power supply is an issue. or heck, go into the bios, there should be a page that reports the voltages, wait a few minutes to see if they fluctuate and the system locks. big drives only use a lot of power to spin up the platters, they use very little after that, so if it was the drives power usage, it would have had a problem at boot.
what i suspect it may be is the cpu/heatsink connection. overheating there will shut down the system for self preservation. You have to be sure it is correct, tape may need to be peeled off the heatsink, or if you are applying compound, it has to be a razer thin layer... too much is bad.

Still have problems? Try a different video card, different configurations of memory, etc to see if you can isolate the problem.

The good thing is that i doubt it is the board or cpu...

[ME BIGGD01]

ok what brand of power supply is it?

you are sure the heatsink is on properly?
to make sure it is, go into the bios and look under hardware monitor. the cpu rarely goes over 35 degrees celcius. if you notice the temps much higher, you need to take the heatsink off and put it back on.


what is the cas latency of the ram? did you put the sticks in the right slots? they should be in with this design...

you have 4 dimm slots - put one dimm of memory in skip a slot and add the other in the 3rd slot.


i have not heard of any problems with that board and it actually got ok reviews. ecs in the past had some shady boards but this has not been noted with this chipset (i will look into it though).

do you have all of the power plugs inserted into the motherboard? this is a very powerful system and requires a lot of power.

do you have the latest bios update for this new chip core? the venice core is the latest and greatest so the bios may not recognize it and may be over volting the chip. can you report back on the bios version that is currently installed?

i will look into this further while you get back

[Rivers]

Yeah the CPU temp was at 50 ( I remember that ) so that's not good. The power supply is the one that came with the Raidmax case. (not the best choice I know but it wasn't up to me) I got the bios update but b4 I could install it it kept shutting down. Now I got a brand new problem on my hands. It powers on but won't show any video or even beep. I've run into this one plenty of times and everytime I did it was a dead CPU. Gosh I hope this CPU is okay. I'm take off the heatsink and put it back on see if that helps. Hopefully this thing didn't die on me. : (

[ME BIGGD01]

if that is 50 degrees c, you definetly do not have the heatsink on right. hell i have the older 130 nm chip and it never got that hot even gaming for a few hours. you need to unplug the the pc and reinsert the cpu and heatsink.

also just a note, always test the board and cpu before you insert into a case.:o

[Rivers]

I'll try that now. I fear things are getting worse as each time I try to boot it something new happens. Now the hard drive light stays on constantly without flickering and its still not showing video or making any beeps. I've seen this b4 and it wasn't good.

[ME BIGGD01]

look to make sure the heatsink is on correctly. you might want to take the board out while you are testing it. it is possible it could be grounding out on the case. a small mistake can easily happend and you will have to rma the parts.


heres a pic. look to make sure these are noted. disconnect all the led lights and reset connectors. you chould at this point only have the power connection connected to the small pims in the bottom right corner. also disconnect all the drives so you can atleast get into the bios.

please look at all the marks i made because i want you to make note of them

[Rivers]

K done. I also noticed (since i was building this with a friend) that the heatsink was put on differently then what the AMD instructions said it should. The blag peg that bogs it down I on the the same side was the little lever to lock in the cpu was on. Would that make a huge difference?

[ME BIGGD01]

the clip part should be on the bottom

[Rivers]

YES SIR I WAS RIGHT! (god im gonna kill him if he fried the CPU) i put it on the correct way now and im gonna see what it'll do now.

[ME BIGGD01]

i doubt you fried it because it should have a shutoff as it was doing.

[Rivers]

Well i put the CPU heatsink on the right way and I dissconnected the LED's and its still the same thing. I don't know what else is going on. Maybe it is dead.

[ME BIGGD01]

do me a favor... reset the cmos and try again:thumbs:

[Rivers]

At this point I dont care about sounding stupid.... I can't find that damn jumper or pin thingy on this mobo ugh.

[ME BIGGD01]

hey, relax, you do not sound stupid. have faith and we shall get this baby purring or we will atleast try every option before we consider it dead.

give me a second, i will post a pic

[Rivers]

Nevermind I found it....here it goes.....crap still no go its still not working dang this ain't cool.

[ME BIGGD01]

damn i had to dl the manual/

ok

lets eval whats going on...

but first i must ask---when you reset the cmos, did you have the system unplugged? try again and this time wait 1 minute before putting the jumper on to the correct pins. if you are unsure of you are doing this correctly, just take the battery out. i must stress that you unplug your system otherwise you may not be resetting it.

if still nothing proceed downwards

when you hit the power, do the fans go on?
if so are there any beeps?
if not i want you to try this

unplug the system--take both sticks of memory out of the pc---plug it back in and boot the system without any memory installed----do you hear any beeps?

after you try this report back:thumbs:

[ME BIGGD01]

just to make sure

[Rivers]

I did the CMOS thing and wait and it still didn't work. I also took out both sicks of RAM and it gave me no beep. I have yet to try that battery but thats next on my to do list.

[ME BIGGD01]

but the fans are going on?

[Rivers]

Yes the fans are very much still going.

[Rivers]

I also just tried the battery and left it out for a few min and put it back and still no go. = \

[ME BIGGD01]

well this does look like the cpu is having a problem.

now before you actually consider it dead, this is what i suggest.

you should take the board out of the case along with the power supply so you can benchtest it outside of the case.

possible problems
1-the cpu heatsink not being on may have damged something
2-the motherboard is being grounded from the case which can actually blow everything.

once the board is removed from the case, you should place it onto the box it came into. take off the heatsink again and also take the cpu out and examine it. look for bent pins and look for anything that does not look right. if all looks good, reinsert the cpu and make sure the heatsink is installed right this time. insert the video card in the pci express slot and the memory back in it's slots. use a screw driver to tap the two pins which are usually connected to the power button. make sure the power supply is connected to the board in all areas that it requires along with the video card if needed. connect your monitor also which i should of asked you to make sure it was connected before i told you to do anything:eek: but i am sure you would know to have it plugged in:confused:

after all of this, if it still does not go on then yes, it appears either the cpu or the board is bad. if this is the case, rma it but do not mention you have the heatsink on wrong.

are you going to try this now? i will wait for a response?

[Rivers]

Thanks for all the help big. Nah I'm through with this thing for tonight its almost 1 AM here and I got work at 7:30. However I will continue this as soon as I get outta work tomorrow and I will do as you suggest but, may I ask, how do you ground the Mobo to the case? isn't there really only 1 way to put in the case the correct way. Oh yeah, and for the record, I had my monitor on and plugged in the whole time so that wasn't an issue. ; )

[ME BIGGD01]

still waiting to see how ya made out. :confused:

[Rivers]

Same dill bigg. Something be dead in there. the thing is I dont know whether its the motherboard or the CPU or both. I just recalled that my co-worker as that weird ASROCK board that has both a socket 754 and 939 Pin so maybe I can try the CPU in his board. Thanks a lot for all the help Bigg and sorry I didn't reply sooner I just wasn't near a comptuer last night.

[Rivers]

Hahaha guys. I finally worked on this thing again and found out this WHOLE time it was the power supply that was bad. It wasn't under powered or anything just bad. PC's are so weird. Anywho thanks for all the help guys (especially to Bigg for giving all the helpfull tips) I learned a lot from this one. Thanks again.

-Rivers

[ME BIGGD01]

that's great rivers, i am glad you got it working. as the power supply was the first thing i mentioned in this thread, i feared it was worst considering the high temps of the system which is not normal for this platform.

anyway, as far as that board goes, it is getting some great reviews regarding performance and overall package. most of all the price is really good.

so now that you have it running and all, how do you feel about it considering anything else or other system you have ever used?

[Rivers]

I like the board actually. The manual was pretty good compaired to what I've seen b4 and it tries hard with lights and color to look fancy and flashy. It was fairly inexpensive (109 I think he paid for it) and has got all those neat nForce 4 Ultra stuff everyone talks about. All in all a solid board that didn't have any problems detecting the new Venice core. I think I just may buy it for my system that I'm gonna build in like a week or so (hopefully). It was between this one and the Chaintech Zenith Value board and I chose this one for him and I'm not sorry that I did. The only complaint I have is the onboard sound isn't all that great compaired to the other nForce 4 ultra boards I've seen. Other than that its a pretty good bang for the buck, something that I'm all about.