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IDProjectCategoryView StatusLast Update
0000295SpeedFanS.M.A.R.T.public2005-08-31 01:18
Reportermakal Assigned Toalfredo  
PrioritynormalSeverityminorReproducibilityalways
Status resolvedResolutionfixed 
PlatformnForce 4 SLIOSWinXPOS VersionSP2
Product Version4.24 
Summary0000295: S.M.A.R.T. and nForce4
DescriptionCiao Alfredo, I read somewhere in your site about smart issues with nForce4 chipset, then I forgot because speedfan was properly working (on a fresh os install), even after installation of nVidia IDE drivers (if I remember correctly, but am not sure).
 I kept on installing software and it eventually stopped working, randomly hanging the system, but mostly during high HD activity (file copy and the like).
After countless hours of testing I finally recalled what I read and disabled smart in speedfan.

But somehow part of the problem is within speedfan itself; I have now running DTemp and ActiveSmart (www.ariolic.com) - both polling drives every minute - and no more hangs.

I can't temp-control the (noisy) HD intake fan anymore, but besides this I tought this info could be useful. I sent a report some days ago.
Additional InformationMB: ASUS A8N-SLI deluxe
TagsNo tags attached.
Motherboard Model
Video Card Model

Activities

alfredo

2005-06-21 10:43

manager   ~0001005

Are you sure the hang is not due to something else? Might it be you have an nVidia video card and that it is that that is causing a collision? Try to reenable SMART and use /NONVIDIAI2C instead.

makal

2005-06-21 19:32

reporter   ~0001012

It eventually crashed, after many hours.
It looks like the problem was actually related to the nForce IDE driver. After many headaches I managed to revert back to standard microsoft drivers (I had to downgrade mb bios to v1008, otherwise windows complained about IDE controllers not being supported by the current hardware configuration and there were random errors and crashes after login). It takes ages to boot (15 seconds fresh install, 2 minutes now), but with SpeedFan (smart enabled) and activesmart, it didn't hang yet (after 6 hours).
So, probably, it is just yet another bug in the nVidia IDE driver (this piece of software is so buggy that it spawned countless devoted forums on the net).

About the video card (Asus geforce 6200TurboCache): looks like speedfan doesn't recognize anything at the starting scan, so unless it periodically rescans I guess this couldn't be the issue. Actually it only finds two meaningless temp sensors even on the nForce smbus (I have the nVidia SMBus driver installed, btw) but maybe this is normal or due to lack of nForce4 support in SpeedFan 2.42 - all the useful stuff is on the IT8712F on the ISA bus.
Anyway, I already had /NONVIDIAI2C so I removed it for testing purposes. I'll be happy to post again should new hangs occur.

flachschippe

2005-06-21 22:30

reporter   ~0001013

Alfredo, is there a way to send mail to another poster?

Makal, my experience with this mainboard model is the similar. At first, of course, I wanted to use what I paid for, and used the "high-performance", "offloading the CPU" Nforce 4 Ethernet and Firewall (NAM). With these, I had many worries with crashes or lockups every few hours and multi-100msec pauses. At first I suspected the Realtek onboard audio to cause the pauses and replaced it with a PCI sound card. The card is so much better, but the pauses stayed. Since the system was new, it took a while to identify the Nforce 4 Ethernet and Firewall as the culprits. Now I use the Marvell onboard Ethernet and the Sygate Personal Firewall (free and does not slow down the system), crashes and pauses are gone. So the GPU driver is the only remaining Nvidia driver. By the way, interesting that you combine this rather high-performance (and expensive) mainboard with such a rather slow (and cheap) GPU.

makal

2005-06-23 21:11

reporter   ~0001021

Well, after 35 hours of uptime (WITHOUT /nonvidiai2c), I guess the issue is really in SMART and nForce IDE driver. So, no blame on speedfan - but I am still curious why it made the system hang much more promptly than other SMART utilities.

Keep the great work, Alfredo!

To flachschippe: I took this mb basically because it was readily available in the shop ;-) btw, I'm not in 3D gaming, so I will find a use for SLI if and when there will be cheap boards with compositing/visual effects software capable to use their GPUs - the boards actually are there already, what is lacking is software support. Ah, just think of those superfast pixel shaders and that huge gpu/ram bandwidth that I could use (with my cheap 6200TC) to speed up the creative process and rendering to 1000% - but I can't, damn... so, I shelled out the extra 40euros as an obol for the god of inspired software developers %-}

alfredo

2005-08-31 01:18

manager   ~0001132

NVidia nForce 4 disk drivers contained all sorts of issues. Anyway: recently I started receiving less emails related to them. This might mean that nVidia fixed them (or that users purchased other hardware :-)).
I'm closing this issue as it seems to be fixed.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
2005-06-20 20:10 makal New Issue
2005-06-21 10:43 alfredo Note Added: 0001005
2005-06-21 10:43 alfredo Status assigned => acknowledged
2005-06-21 19:32 makal Note Added: 0001012
2005-06-21 22:30 flachschippe Note Added: 0001013
2005-06-23 21:11 makal Note Added: 0001021
2005-08-31 01:18 alfredo Note Added: 0001132
2005-08-31 01:18 alfredo Status acknowledged => resolved
2005-08-31 01:18 alfredo Resolution open => fixed