[quote]Originally posted by lazyman
[b]Your cable skill is the better I've seen; keep up the good work.:)QUOTE]

Yes, I'm amazed at how much air circulation room you have compared with mine. Even so, my CBOX3 Apogee digital temp reads a pretty constant 44 temp, not bad for here in Hawaii, and, with two 10,000 rpm raptors in RAID0 and a WD 80GB HD.

I'm pleased to say that my 9cjs rig is the most stable (actually totally stable this past week) it has been since putting it together 8 mos ago.

Thanks all, especially jmke.

Kerry

Thanks for the compliments, folks. I have a spacious Antec full-size case, which actually has room above the power supply to tuck extra cable. That's how I am able to keep the motherboard area clean. That little space above my power supply looks like spaghetti. In my case, it's more about having room to hide the mess than skill in arranging it. :-)

I ran all the CBOX3 cables that I could down along the right side of the motherboard to keep those from cluttering it up. The USB cables were the only exception. I do not think they could have found a less convenient place to mount those pins on the motherboard.

I just went out and bought four Vantec Stealth 80mm Case fans yesterday. For anyone considering case fans, these are very quiet and very efficient. My CPU temp dropped about 2-3 degrees C compared to my earlier Antec fans that came with the case ... and these are quieter as well (ball bearings).

My case temp reads 30-31 degrees C, and the CPU is usually 36 degrees C at rest and about 50-51 under lheavy load.

I still had some lingering instability with my system this week, probably due to my overclock. At least a couple of times a day, it would crash out on me with repeating sound and a complete system lockup. My guess is that something is overheating. (Or it could be Service Pack 2 - I had to install it when I installed XP).

In an attempt to remedy this, I installed a case fan above the right edge of my motherboard, pulling air up across the RAM. This did not help.

So, I took a look under the Northbridge chipset cooler, and found an amazing quantity of pink, sticky goop. After 45 minutes of delicate scraping and cleaning with alcohol, I could actually see the 875 chipset. I applied a thin layer of Arctic Silver, clamped the heatsink back on, and have not had a lockup since then (crossing fingers).

I also disabled some of my USB ports to free up shared IRQs. For some reason, this system seems to have a shortage of IRQs for components. It does not free up IRQs automatically for other uses when I disable serial ports, floppy drive, etc.

Has anyone else had stability issues with this board and the Audigy 2? I like the onboard sound, but gave up on it due to the microphone issues.

Haven't read about Audigy probs on the I875 boards yet. providing good cooling to the northbridge will stabilise overclocks, seems that helped for you, I never removed the HSF on the NB as I had no problem pushing it to 250Mhz without issue. This was also in a closed case (Antec Overture) so I think it depends a lot on the room temperature and NB itself of course, as no 2 chips are the same (pretty much like CPU's :)) they will all have their own limits.

about the IRQ's, why do you need them? Windows will work correctly even without, no?

I was having major issues with sound when the Audigy and a USB port were sharing an IRQ.

The issue manifested in games, specifically when the motion of vehicles in Tribes: Vengeance became very jerky and the sound would cut in and out. Disabling the USB port sharing that IRQ fixed the problem.

I have also seen a lot of posts about Service Pack 2 causing hard lockups. It may be the root cause of my issues ... I think it may not be compatible with at least one of the devices in my system. Following advice on the net, I disabled the Security Center and the built-in firewall (I have a hardware firewall). I did that at the same time I put Arctic Silver on the Northbridge chipset, so it's hard to say which one fixed my crashes.

Can't enter BIOS? Problem with rear channel sound
 

I have also had past issues with the Audigy 2 and hardware/irq conflicts. Haven't tried it on the Chaintech board yet, though. I want to see how this ENVY chip does.

Last week, I built a new RAID 0 system on the Chaintech 9cjs board---great quality board, incredible bundle! After doing that, however, I can't get into BIOS! I press "delete" during post, etc., as usual, but it just ignores this and freezes at regular bootup Intel RAID screen. Any guesses as to why this is? I can, however, do an ALT-F2 and have it open the bios flash function. I've tried letting it boot past the RAID and CTRL-I or CTRL-S to get into RAID config, and this works, but I can't change boot order in that screen---it's set to be determined by BIOS. I also have no problem allowing it to boot into XP and start and run XP, play games, whatever. I just can't get into BIOS. I'm hoping there is an obvious "D'oh!" for this.

While I'm at it, I have a problem with getting surround (rear) channel audio. (I was wanting to get into BIOS to see if I was set up for this). I have a 4.1 speaker system. I hooked up the front panel CBox audio without thinking about what I was doing, then unhooked it and reset the jumpers to allow for rear panel function for audio, which is what I want. I plug my 2 audio plugs into the mainboard rear jacks (not the expansion card---nothing happens when I plug into this). I get nice sound out of my 2 front speakers, nothing from my rear speakers, and the woofer is active (too active, I think--is this the problem? a jumper somewhere?). I have installed the latest ENVY drivers from the VIA arena board.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

concerning the bios issue, did you try a CMOS reset?
flashing to the latest version may resolve this issue

Thanks JMKE.

I have the latest BIOS---haven't tried the flash or CMOS reset. May try the latter tonight. What about leaving the keyboard unplugged? Wouldn't I get a error message then---would it open the door to let me into BIOS then? Any particular magic when having a RAID? It is set at first boot device, then CDROM. Wondering aloud.

try a CMOS reset first, power off the machine and look in the manual for the jumper to move. should allow you access back into the BIOS,

for BOOT
CDROM or RAID can be switched as first device, if there is no bootable CDin the drive it will go the next , your RAID setup for boot.

Thanks again, JMKE. I'll give that a go and see what happens.

Any clues on the sound issue? I'm stumped.