P5K-E WiFi-AP

Does anyone reading here have this board?

I bought mine a month or so back, fitted an E4500 and installed Windows.
There were a couple glitches during install but it recovered just fine.
However, once Windows was installed I really started to have problems.
Whenever it was under load it would crash. Hardware, not Windows. Instant
re-boot. It would even do that when I was trying to turn off and install
Windows updates. I couldn't get it stable, and despaired to the point of
emailing the supplier about an RMA.

However, after installing CPU-Z (ver. 1.41) and ASUS Probe II I noticed that
the vcore was abnormally low. It was dropping to 1.1V and never going near
1.325V, even when "loaded". It was crashing instead. I went into BIOS and
manually set vcore to 1.325V. After booting into Windows and checking with
CPU-Z and ASUS Probe I saw that it was in fact 1.295V with little
fluctuation when idling or loaded. I raised the vcore in BIOS by 0.03V and,
sure enough, in Windows I was getting readings of 1.325V. So the BIOS wasn't
setting the vcore correctly. I heard back from the reatailer and said to
cancel the RMA, it seemed fine for now (I explained the situation) but
please make a note that the board has been problematic in case I need to RMA
it down the track.

Anyway, it seemed stable enough so I flashed it to the then latest BIOS,
0602, hoping that it would fix the vcore problem. Well, once I'd done that
it was unstable all over again. Turned out, after experimentation, that the
BIOS was now setting the vcore even lower. 0.07V lower in fact. (I
stress-test my machines so am aware of anything like this. Anyway, once I
compensated for the margin in BIOS once again I had a stable machine. I
stayed like that for two/three weeks. Vcore stable at 0.07V lower than set
in BIOS.

Last night I saw that there was a new BIOS release for the board, 0806. I
thought that surely they've got it sorted with this one and flashed my BIOS.
Yeah, good one ASUS. Now my BIOS is setting the vcore 0.12V lower than it
should be. I have to set 1.445 in BIOS to get 1.325V (and stability) in
Windows.

I'm curious to know if anyone else has this board and this problem. I'm not
sure if I should RMA it as it seems to quite clearly be a BIOS problem, not
a hardware one as, once the variation is compensated for with each BIOS
version it doesn't change. Unfortunately the board won't let me flash an
older BIOS than is installed so I can't go back to one that was closer to
the correct vcore.

I'm a (mostly house-bound) invalid who relies heavilly on his computer for
entertainment, company and staying in contact with family etc. I'd rather
not have to do without it for any length of time. I've thought about
insisting that my supplier send me a new one before I send back this one but
first want to be sure that the new board isn't going to behave exactly the
same as this one. Hence my request for input from other owners of this
model. Other than this problem I'm very pleased with the board. However, one
has to wonder if there are others using it experiencing random crashes
without knowing why.

Thanks in advance.
--
Shaun.

(I realize this is kind of a late reply but anyhow...)

I recently (~1 month ago) built a system using the exact same
motherboard and a Q6600 processor. It seems I'm having the same
problem, I'm running the latest (and greatest?...) BIOS 0906. The
reported voltage by the BIOS was ~1.17 volts when the voltage was on
auto, and the system was crashing for no particular reason every few
minutes.

I did some hardware investigating thinking other devices connected to
the MOBO might be responsible, I had it down to the MOBO 1 module of
RAM (known to be stable) and the CPU (fanless heatsink) plus a
confirmed non-faulty 580W PSU. No video card, NOTHING else. Turned it
on, let it sit there and watched the system crash 3 times as
previously.

It didn't even occur to me that it could be CPU undervoltage as I
never overclocked this system. When I proceeded to set the voltage
manually, the same thing: actual voltage was lower than what's set.
Seems to be running stable now set at 1.4500V (1.34V actual).

Thanks for the post though! I was just getting ready to start giving
grief to ASUS tech support

Also another interesting point... before upgrading to 0906 bios the
CPU temp was always reading around 40-50C, even at idle, now it's
reading about 1/2 that around 20-25C even though the voltage is now
higher... maybe it was counting twice because of 4 cores? haha