My home PC gave up the ghost earlier this week. Apparently the chipset fan on the A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard has a tendency to fail or run too slowly. In my case, it ran too slowly, which caused my Nforce4 chipset to overheat. Thankfully it’s still under warranty, so I’m sending it back to Asus today. They make you pay for shipping to them for warranty repairs. What a crock of shit.

The main load on the chipset was my RAID1 setup. Still on Vista x64, I was sorting some pictures when I got a notification that the RAID1 had degraded. Great, I though… bad drive. I immediately shut down, and let it sit for about 30 mins to cool off. I rebooted and got a “Chip Fan” error at POST. I hit F1 to continue, and it went on to the NVIDIA RAID config screen and hung there. I couldn’t get into BIOS or anything.

A quick call to Asus confirmed what I had suspected… my chipset most likely fried. We’ll see what happens once I ship it to them. Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth about the shipping. Warranty replacements shouldn’t cost the customer anything.

On another note, I finally acquired the additional 2GB RAM matched up with my existing RAM. I was excited until I found out that my motherboard will clock down the FSB to 333Mhz when all 4 banks are full. What the hell? Shoddy design if you ask me. Why should I have to sacrifice speed for quantity when it comes to RAM? (To be fair, I recall reading the actual reason somewhere, but I forgot.) Luckily enough, I can manually clock it back up to 400Mhz, but there’s also another setting (T1 or something) that stays lower with all 4 banks full no matter what you do.

Yeah, not very happy with that board right now.