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ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe

Agent Orange

Agent Orange

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Joined
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SE MI
I'm looking for an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe XP RAID driver. I recently resurrected this old K7 mobo from my loft and have so far been successful in rounding up all of the XP drivers except for the RAID. Thanks in advance for looking.
 
Plasma said:
This?

http://www.siliconimage.com/docs/3112R_x86_10620_logo.zip
Click to expand...

Thanks anyway for the info. That probably came from 'Soggy's web page. That driver won 't load. All of his drivers are for the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Rev 2.0, where mine is REV 1.01. There were only two releases for this board and the on-board RAID chip may be different. The LAN driver from his page is also borked - won't unzip. I was able to trace the the LAN driver back to the Marvel-Yukon site, which by the way has an excellent page, and download the correct driver. So far, so good. The RAID driver isn't all that important as I don't plan on setting up a RAID. However, I would like to gather all of the drivers for that board for posterity's sake.

Here's an observation for those who may be contemplating this type of a build. While not truly vintage, it's heading in that direction. I have a Intel based PIII board up and running with a Tualatin 1.4 GB chip and 512 MB of RAM. The OS is XP and it's a real good gamer. The ASUS A7N8X-E board presently has a Socket A (462-pin) K7 Sempron 2800+ 'Thoroughbred' which runs and 2.2 GHz and 1 GB of RAM (runs XP real nice and can do W7). The plan is to go with the Sempron 3300+ 'Barton' which is basically the same chip but adds a 512 KB L2 cache. Also, the memory will be bumped up to 3 GHz. So, the ASUS A7 is a noticeable step-up from the Intel PIII, however, it's not quite a Pentium 4 in terms of speed (2200 vs 2800 for the P4), but the Sempron has other advantages such power, and ability run the 'older games' a little more efficiently. Of course, this argument has been going on for a decade and a half, and I supposed that it all boils down as to what kind of hardware that you have ready access to. Again, if any one has the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Rev 1.01, I would appreciate your RAID driver.
 
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Late edit on the above:

I may be guilty of cranial anal insertion (again). Got thinking about the RAID setup up and of course it won't load, as I suppose I should have had the driver on a floppy and hit the F6 while installing XP. Don't know if it's possible to install/slip stream that driver with out running XP setup again. I never had much luck with the XP repair console and all. It shows up as not being loaded in 'Device Manager', so I'll just whack it there and out of sight out of mind.
 
I dunno who "Soggy" is, that driver is from the Silicon Image website. If your board has a Sil 3112 it should work. But if not there are several other versions on the Silicon Image site you could try.

I have both an A7N8X Deluxe and A7N8X-X and the accompanying driver CDs. Not sure if that would help.

Also, both my boards developed bad caps...you may want to check yours if you haven't replaced them yet.
 
Agent Orange said:
Late edit on the above:

I may be guilty of cranial anal insertion (again). Got thinking about the RAID setup up and of course it won't load, as I suppose I should have had the driver on a floppy and hit the F6 while installing XP. Don't know if it's possible to install/slip stream that driver with out running XP setup again. I never had much luck with the XP repair console and all. It shows up as not being loaded in 'Device Manager', so I'll just whack it there and out of sight out of mind.
Click to expand...

Yes, it's possible to slipstream drivers onto an XP install CD. You can do it with Nlite:

http://www.nliteos.com/

In the case of more modern motherboards in relation to XP (later P4 and Athlon boards), you'll often have to slipstream the chipset drivers as well as the disk controller drivers or setup will BSOD.
 
Plasma said:
I dunno who "Soggy" is, that driver is from the Silicon Image website. If your board has a Sil 3112 it should work. But if not there are several other versions on the Silicon Image site you could try.

I have both an A7N8X Deluxe and A7N8X-X and the accompanying driver CDs. Not sure if that would help.

Also, both my boards developed bad caps...you may want to check yours if you haven't replaced them yet.
Click to expand...

Here's "Soggy": http://soggi.eu/mbs/asus/A7N8X-E-Deluxe.htm

Didn't know you had the setup CD. The caps 'look' pretty good but looks aren't everything and please don't give me reason to worry.

Late edit: Do you think you could make an image of that CD?
 
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GiGaBiTe said:
Yes, it's possible to slipstream drivers onto an XP install CD. You can do it with Nlite:

http://www.nliteos.com/

In the case of more modern motherboards in relation to XP (later P4 and Athlon boards), you'll often have to slipstream the chipset drivers as well as the disk controller drivers or setup will BSOD.
Click to expand...

After I applied the registry hack, XP update installed the RAID driver as well as updating some of the others, and now all is well. My ASUS Sabertooth 990FX allows you to setup a raid through UEFI.
 
Plasma said:
Yes, if you still need it?
Click to expand...

Yes, please, if you have the time. I would like to archive it in my collection. The SATA-RAID driver that installed is that same driver, 'Sil 3112'. I have a NIB Sempron "Barton" 3300+ 2.2 GHz w/ 512 KB L2 cache on the way, as well as 3 NIB sticks of 1 GB PC-3200 RAM that I found for $ 9.82, delivered. If the CPU/RAM upgrade goes well, I may attempt to install W7 and see what happens. I ran Doom on the DOS partition and it was all very nice and smooth. This afternoon I'm going to pull the 160 GB PATA HD and install a 120 GB SSD and clone it.
 
Plasma said:
Also, both my boards developed bad caps...you may want to check yours if you haven't replaced them yet.
Click to expand...

ASUS motherboards from the late 90s all the way up to 2009 use garbage capacitors. I've repaired dozens of ASUS boards with blown caps, most of which had Asia-X brand (Teapo (Cheapo), OST, Fuhjyyu, fake Nichicon, fake Rubycon, UCC KZG series, etc.) What makes them annoying to repair is that they like to put the solder mask on backwards or the component key on backwards, often times interchangeably on the same board. This makes you have to first go through and mark the polarity of each cap with a marker before you start replacing caps.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
ASUS motherboards from the late 90s all the way up to 2009 use garbage capacitors ... fake Nichicon, fake Rubycon
Click to expand...

A brand like Asus using fake capacitors? This seems extremely unlikely. You were almost certainly dealing with counterfeit Asus motherboards if you encounted any non-authentic components onboard. This has been an occasional problem for Asus due to their reputation of being a manufacturer of high quality products.
 
Thanks to Plasma my SATA/RAID driver problem was easily solved. The box is up and running with XP on a logical partition. I have an 8X AGP on the way, as well as a new Sempron 'Barton' chip and three 1 GB sticks of PC-3200 RAM. I attempted to install a Kingston 120 SSD as the primary drive and that failed. The system BIOS and DOS would see the SSD as the primary boot device okay, however, XP would only see it as the secondary drive. While attempting to install XP with the SSD as the primary drive, the XP install procedure would halt with a "HD not found" message. The SATA/RAID drivers loaded without an issue, but the XP install routine refuses to see the SSD during the install phase. I spent way too much time trying to solve that issue. As an afterthought. it may be a blessing in disguise, in that the A7N8X-E is a non-ACHI motherboard and there is a possibility of TRIM issues down the line. I plan to further isolate the problem by attempting to use a SATA HD and see if it's just a Kingston SSD issue. In my experience, there have always been a few 'gotchas' when trying to retrofit new technology to older systems.
 
Interesting. A7N8X Deluxe could do IDE or AHCI mode but I always used IDE mode with SATA because it just made things easier with utilities like boot managers and partition editors. Never tried an SSD with it though.

cthulhu said:
A brand like Asus using fake capacitors? This seems extremely unlikely. You were almost certainly dealing with counterfeit Asus motherboards if you encounted any non-authentic components onboard. This has been an occasional problem for Asus due to their reputation of being a manufacturer of high quality products.
Click to expand...

Lol, I can tell you first hand they did. I ordered my ASUS boards directly from Newegg and they both had crap caps that eventually bulged, leaked, and caused rebooting. ASUS has always had the reputation of quality, but just like Antec PSUs, reputation does not always equal reality. At the end of the day they are still consumer products using low-cost components. Since the caps work fine initially and take several years to develop symptoms, it's quite likely that ASUS had no idea there was anything wrong with them and thought they were just getting a good deal on caps.
 
Agent Orange said:
I attempted to install a Kingston 120 SSD as the primary drive and that failed. The system BIOS and DOS would see the SSD as the primary boot device okay, however, XP would only see it as the secondary drive. While attempting to install XP with the SSD as the primary drive, the XP install procedure would halt with a "HD not found" message. The SATA/RAID drivers loaded without an issue, but the XP install routine refuses to see the SSD during the install phase. I spent way too much time trying to solve that issue. As an afterthought. it may be a blessing in disguise, in that the A7N8X-E is a non-ACHI motherboard and there is a possibility of TRIM issues down the line. I plan to further isolate the problem by attempting to use a SATA HD and see if it's just a Kingston SSD issue. In my experience, there have always been a few 'gotchas' when trying to retrofit new technology to older systems.
Click to expand...

While SATA is supposed to be backwards and forwards compatible, older SATA I controllers usually have problems with newer SATA II/ III drives. I have several motherboards from that vintage with SATA I controllers and they won't work properly with a newer drive unless I jumper the drive to SATA 150 mode. Most mechanical drives have this compatibility jumper next to the SATA connector, but I'm pretty sure that was removed on SSDs. Some SSDs have the option to downgrade their firmware to work in SATA 150 mode, but that's always a dicey process.

cthulhu said:
A brand like Asus using fake capacitors? This seems extremely unlikely. You were almost certainly dealing with counterfeit Asus motherboards if you encounted any non-authentic components onboard. This has been an occasional problem for Asus due to their reputation of being a manufacturer of high quality products.
Click to expand...

Counterfeit ASUS motherboards? That's a good one. ASUS has never been a reputable company in my book, not only because of using junk capacitors for decades, but because they also cut corners in their designs that results in an unstable or non-working product. Then you have their awful customer no-support, which people have been complaining about for well over a decade. Even die hard ASUS fans over at Hardforum have started abandoning ASUS for these reasons.

Plasma said:
Lol, I can tell you first hand they did. I ordered my ASUS boards directly from Newegg and they both had crap caps that eventually bulged, leaked, and caused rebooting. ASUS has always had the reputation of quality, but just like Antec PSUs, reputation does not always equal reality. At the end of the day they are still consumer products using low-cost components. Since the caps work fine initially and take several years to develop symptoms, it's quite likely that ASUS had no idea there was anything wrong with them and thought they were just getting a good deal on caps.
Click to expand...

ASUS has long used United Chemi-con capacitors from their KZG series on many of their motherboards. The KZG series has been well known for over a decade to be unreliable and fail but ASUS never bothered to address the problem and kept pumping out products using them. I took another look at some of their recent boards on Newegg and they still use garbage Taiwanese or generic Asia-X brand caps. Some of the caps don't even have names on them, let alone farad/voltage ratings.

I did find the names of a few caps like Tk, which is a Japanese company that sells rebranded OST Taiwanese capacitors.
 
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Just to add some ASUS-ain't-so-great evidence:

My experience with ASUS includes dealing with a P5N-E SLI mainboard, and discovering:


  • The BIOS is half-assed and only supports a single 1.44" HD floppy; anything else or even two floppies, forget about it. No installing a 360K DSDD into that box and no using that box as a tweener.

  • With the wrong kind of USB hub attached, the PC won't boot.
    This is the fault of the mainboard and the USB hub, who are both doing something they're not supposed to do. Per spec, powered USB devices/hubs are not supposed to reverse-supply +5VDC to the mainboard (their own power is only supposed to be used downstream and for their own purposes, not upstream), but equally, if the mainboard does encounter something like that coming from some USB device, it's supposed to tolerate that. The ASUS P5N-E SLI doesn't tolerate that. The presence of (very common) low-quality powered USB hubs/devices (who do supply +5VDC upstream) actually prevents the mainboard from booting; the PC won't switch on in that case. This can be fixed by nannying the mainboard by inserting Schottky diodes into the +5VDC wire for all USB ports that low-quality powered USB devices might conceivably be attached to. You can make an "ASUS condom" USB dongle or you can modify the low-quality USB device outright and put a diode into it.

But yeah, ASUS ain't so great. I've had my local small PC store guy sneer/snicker at the mention of ASUS, and now I understand why.
 
ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe update: The native mobo SATA ports did not play nice with the SSD or the SATA HD. So, I installed a PCI SATA/RAID adapter and was able to get the system to boot DOS on the SSD and the WD SATA HD. However, the adapter would have no part of the XP install routine, even after it properly installed the SI drivers via F6, and still insisting that it couldn't find a HD. The bottom line is that I'll continue to use the Samsung 160 MB HD (not the fastest in the land) and shelve the SSD thoughts for a while. There may be some wild drivers out there somewhere, but that search is going to have to wait a while. Maybe an IDE SD card would do, but I hate forking out for something just to prove a point to myself. But, on the other hand, it's never stopped me before. (being old you can kind of justify these things in your own mind)
 
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Have you tried an IDE to SATA adapter? I use this adapter with a P4 board and Samsung 840 and 850 Pro SSDs. No F6 drivers needed.
 
Plasma said:
Have you tried an IDE to SATA adapter? I use this adapter with a P4 board and Samsung 840 and 850 Pro SSDs. No F6 drivers needed.
Click to expand...

Haven't tried that approach. I have both, the 840 and 850 SSD's, but they're currently in use on my big gaming box. Maybe I'll give it a shot as it's probably cheaper than a SD card. Thanks for the tip.
 
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