Jetway J9F2 Reboots / BSOD

**HyperZulu** · 01-27-2008, 04:53 PM

I just bought this board and a Core Duo 2500. I've been trying to get my head around the issues I've come across with it. So far the first time it booted into XP I had all kinds of lines of graphics garbage. I managed to keyboard my way to the restart button and when it came up, everything was fine (this was after seeing that the board didn't like my 450w psu which only has 20pins on the power connector).

So, start messing around with it and immediately see some BSOD's that don't reset, just sit there until a hard boot is performed. I'm not really into deciphering blue screens on new boards. I figure if I can't switch drivers to fix it, I'll return it. So far it's blue screened a few times, at random... sometimes during driver loading, but I don't think the drivers are the issue, or I'd see persistent issues with one device, not just randomly with different things.

I disabled stuff and had no better luck. Finally I started running burnin tests and those were inconclusive except for the one time I woke up to a blue screen and then I noticed I'd get random reboots. Not bsod's. So, I went into system properties and disabled reboot upon system failure to see what I could catch and I got a strange occurrence - the system had these bars that streaked through the screen like the matrix and the system was frozen.

I then ran my burnin tests with 100% load on memory and graphics but lowered my RAM's clock from 667 to 533 and so far it's ok after several burnin runs.

Just wondering if anyone has had this issue. I'm pretty sure it's a hardware issue, and most likely it's the board, but if it truly can't operate at 667Mhz I wonder if I should RMA and hope for a stable board or live with it because Jetway's ability to handle different kinds of RAM all at the same frequency is shady and there's nothing I can do to get around that. I guess I could try 667 and more conservative timings (right now I'm running it at 4-4-4-10... I could do 5-5-5-10). I don't see anywhere to bump the voltage on this board though. Maybe I missed it.

Has anyone bothered to read this? Oh well... let me know if anyone has input. I guess if it blue screens or halts at 533 I'll RMA the board, otherwise, I'm not sure if I should just stick with it as it's already fast as hell compared to other systems I've used... hell, it's faster than the laptop I'm using now.

**HyperZulu** · 01-27-2008, 05:29 PM

I'm gonna respond here quickly that perhaps it's not a hardware issue after all. I stopped to actually try to make out what the BSOD was saying (the words are all garbled) but I did see igxpdx32.dll which is a graphics driver file. I'm going to try using the drivers provided on Jetway's website and see if those work better than the latest ones from Intel.

**HyperZulu** · 01-28-2008, 09:46 AM

If anyone is interested, it seems that this board is just really picky about its ram timings. At least that is what I get so far. Setting the ram timings to the manufacturer's specified ratings causes instability. That is 4-4-4-10@677 it does not like. I ran it at 5-5-5-12@533 for 12 hours and no instability. It kept churning through torture tests. When I rebooted and set it back to 5-5-5-12@667 it crashed. So now I'm trying 4-4-4-10@533 and if it can stay stable, I'll be ok with that. 5 cas at 667 is what it SHOULD run at at the very least, but 4 at 533 is about the same speed. So we'll see. Otherwise, it's time to switch ram to see if I can find something more compatible.

Oh, for anyone reading this who is having problems with this board and updating BIOS - go to bootdisk.com and there is a download there for boards without floppies. You will burn a the bootable ISO and you can add files, but most importantly, the ISO will load the proper CD drivers under R: drive to allow you to access added files (BIOS and flash utility). This is the only thing that worked for me. I even tried booting from flash drive and got nowhere.

Anyway, I guess we'll see how it goes.

**Alfredbra** · 01-30-2008, 06:43 AM

How did the BIOS update go?? try another psu also. I had a computer repair yesterday that was randomly blue screening and giving me corrupt graphics. thought it was ram or video card. turned out to be faulty psu not giving right voltages.

good luck

**SevenEleven** · 01-30-2008, 09:03 AM

Thank you for updating, I am looking at getting this board possibly. So it is very helpful.

**HyperZulu** · 01-31-2008, 09:20 AM

The problem was the motherboard could not function properly with this particular RAM at 667Mhz no matter what other settings I chose. I had video BIOS cached ON/OFF, RAM timings conservative/aggressive, this, that and the other and it just wouldn't work. Perhaps in another BIOS update, Jetway will fix this issue or perhaps give us the option to bump up the VDIMM which may fix this.

I ended up just sticking with it. I was going to get a couple sticks of Patriot or Corsair which would run nat 4 and 3 CAS respectively but figured the boost in speed would be negligible since the machine was already much faster than really necessary. I was just being a geek. So with this Mushkin Enhanced RAM, 533Mhz with 4-4-4-10 timings should be fine. I ran a burnin test on those settings for a day with no errors, bluescreens or shutdowns. I had video BIOS cached ON and everything else set aggressively, but left it at 533.

\\EDIT: Yes, I took it to work and tried another PSU as well with no luck (three PSUs I tried total). I will just live with it and maybe it'll get fixed one day. Still 4CAS@533Mhz is roughly equivalent in speed to 5CAS@667Mhz which most of the RAM operates at anyway except for a select few sticks of RAM.