Re: Tech Support

Pete Rynas wrote:
> even thier tech support doesn't answer thier email support forms after a
> person spends all that time filling it out - it has been about a week - no
> answer, no "pending"] - no nothing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i quess you get what you
> pay for
>

There are some contacts listed here. If you look around,
you may find some contacts more appropriate for whatever country
you live in.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_37856.html

In terms of the quality of interaction on a motherboard website -

1) Web mail - frequently broken, and the company operating the service
are not usually aware it is broken. Most seem to be unaware that you
can test the service once a day, just to be sure it is working.
2) Normal email - the support email address is swimming in spam, and in
some cases it is so bad, the email box is "full". The spam level can
be so high, it can be like a denial of service attack.
3) Telephone - generally works, but don't expect miracles. Some companies
promise to phone back (when overloaded) but never do. The phone number
will likely be a toll call, to add insult to injury. But if all else
fails, this is the method of choice.

If the normal contact channels don't seem to be working, I've also had
limited success by using the email address of the website administrator
(webmaster). Sometimes the webmaster's address may be on a web page, or
in Firefox you could attempt to use "View Source" to see if there is
any hidden information. Or even drop the presales staff an email,
and see if they have any better contact info.

HTH,
Paul

Pete Rynas wrote:
> Thanks again Paul , i just feel i have to follow through with this one a
> little more , do you think a BIOS update could/would fix the prob? how about
> too much power being drawn from my 3 HD's and the 2 DVD / CD and all the USB
> stuff , although on Boot or "initialization" i quess that there is quite a
> demand and perhaps thew 450 Enermax or Smartpower won't do enough? like i
> said once up and running after several pushes on the reset and power button
> s everythoing is nice and snappy but not dependable enough for my wife to
> get it going so i stick with the onboard to stay out of trouble.
> pete

Does it start reliably, with excess electrical load removed ?
(Unplug the hard drives and CDROM and see if that makes
a difference.)

A hard drive can draw 2 to 2.5 amps for the first 10 seconds.
During this time, the video card is not running at full power
(maybe 30% of full load). On my processor here, the BIOS operates
the processor at about half power during startup. So while the hard
drive power may look bad, some other things are not as bad. As a
general rule of thumb (a guess if you will), startup should be OK
with up to four hard drives. For more than that, you should do a
more detailed calculation of power at startup and max running
(say gaming or running 3DMark). In other words, if you had 10
hard drives, that might "tip" a power supply over the edge.

If you get into Windows and run a heavy load (3DMark of some
version would be a test case), does the benchmark complete ?
Can you run Prime95 for any length of time ? Those are examples
of things that might draw a decent amount of power while in
Windows.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/3Dmark_d99.html

http://www.mersenne.org/gimps/p95v255a.zip

I wouldn't generally reach for the BIOS update, unless
there is some evidence the instability is due to the
BIOS. Certainly, you wouldn't want the machine to
crash in the middle of a BIOS flash update. Try to
investigate the machine as it currently stands,
and see if you can gather enough evidence to point
at the busted part.

Paul