Asus Motherboard and Antec NeoHE PSU Compatibility Problems
From WikiTechia
After a significant, and albeit expensive upgrade, I was very happy with my rig. Then to add to my happiness, I upgraded my power supply from a Coolermaster, to a fancy and absolutely PERFECT, Antec NeoHE 550.
Initially, all was good, that was up until random power shutdowns started occuring. Unfortunately, due to the significant amounts of new hardware in the system, I could not pin point a source of the problem, until I had actually swapped out every piece of hardware. I finally came to the conclusion that it was indeed the fault of the Power Supply.
The Asus A8N32 SLi Deluxe Motherboard and Antec NeoHE 550 PSU simply don't play ball together.
Contents |
System Specs
- Asus A8N32 SLi Deluxe Motherboard
- Antec NeoHE 550 PSU
- AMD X2 3800
- 2x1024mb DDR RAM
- 2x Sony DVD Writers
- 3x SATA HDD's
- 2x 7800 GTX Video Cards
Solution
The problem has been officially recognised by both Antec[1] and Asus.
On their website, they say that in a majority of cases, the act of flashing the BIOS is enough to alleviate the problem and fix your system, but there may still be those who continue to experience problems.
Flash the BIOS
WARNING: This is not recommended to be done by the average user. If you mess up the process or something goes wrong, you are left with the possibility of having a motherboard that is absolutely no good to you, and you will have to get the BIOS flashed professionally. Get someone that KNOWS what they are doing to attempt this.
To flash the BIOS, you will need to download the latest BIOS from Asus' website, and also get the latest version of Asus Update to do the actual Flashing. The program makes it seem easy and harmless to flash the BIOS, but be warned, it can damage your system, so pay attention. You can either update the BIOS from the internet, as in the application downloads the BIOS, then flashes it, or you can download it yourself, then select the file to be flashed.
The web downloader application at the time didn't yeild any current bioses, so I had to download the BIOS file from Asus' website. For the A8N32 SLI, the latest version at time of writing is 1205.
Keep an eye on the progress of flashing to see if it reaches 100%.
Once this is done, you will want to shutdown your system, then turn it back on. If it made it to 100% flashing, but your system had a BSOD, I don't think you have to worry. It happened to me, but it could be related to WinXP x64.
Suffice to say, it is safer to flash your bios with an old school floppy.
Contact Antec
If flashing the bios failed to solve the problem, you may want to contact Antec to see if they can offer you a replacement PSU. As of this moment, I can't tell you what their likely response will be, but I will change this article when I hear from them regarding my case.
From their FAQ they do say that they will be willing to replace the PSU.
External Links
- Antec's FAQ on the Asus and NeoHe PSU compatibility issue.
