Motherboard replacement

I have a asus p7p55d-e motherboard which has developed a problem It is 7 months old and has a 3 year warranty. I have been told that it will take over a month to RMA it. I wish to replace the board but as over the last 12 or so years I have had a 66% failure rate on asus motherboards, I do not wish to replace it with another asus motherboard. I am thinking of using the RMAed motherboard, processor and memory to upgrade another system and buy a new sandybridge intel dp67de motherboard cup and memory as a replacement.

The system with the dead p7p55d-e board is currently running openSUSE 11.3 x86-64 but has a lot of customization and takes many days to rebuild. Also this is not a good time to have the system either dead or for having it unusable while all the software is reinstalled and the system reconfigured.

Will I be able to replace the motherboard, cpu and memory and get the system to work with the existing 11.3 OS. The system contains 3 hard disks and about 8 volumes, some lvm. All volumes are mounted by label

I am looking at an intel dp87de board and I expect the following problems with 11.3.

  1. The audio chipset is different but i believe supported.
  2. The lan chipset is new and only supported in 11.4

I have a very old intel pci nic which I could use. and I should be able to redefine the audio device or even try the hdmi audio.

Am I likely to be able to get this to work quickly? I have seen a similar thread where it was said that changing the hardware was not a problem but this ended up with a reinstall.

If I do go to the INTEL p87 board I will eventually want to go to 11.4. I would prefer to upgrade, from DVD, rather than do an install. The 11.3 system was a fresh install. What is the chance of this working and is 11.4 now generally problem free?

The first mobo replacement I ever did was the reason why I got into Linux – I was so pssd off by having to go grovelling to Microsoft to “verify” that the change was not an attempt to bypass their control of licenses that I decided to change.

Anyway I’ve changed a few boards since then, usually as an upgrade. My PC gets the new board and the wife’s gets the old one.

As a rule, I make sure everything is backed up and then if I recall, simply attach the disc(s) to the new board. Getting back on line is the important thing, after which I can take my time sorting any problems. But there is always the worry about the new chipsets performing properly.

Upgrading from 11.3 to 11.4 (which I tried on my existing system) didn’t go smoothly – I was left in text mode and in the end I did a fresh install which I should have done to begin with. I’m quite happy with the way 11.4 is performing.

I’m afraid I’ve always used AMD processors so can’t say anything about Intel.

Good luck!

over the last 12 or so years I have had a 66% failure rate on asus motherboards

Of course I don’t know if 66% represents 20 out of 30 or 2 out of 3, but, in either case, if you’ve had more than one Asus board fail in the same or similar PCs then you might want to take a critical look at the other components in your PC. I’m thinking primarily of the Power Supply.

Before I recently retired I designed and built highly customized PCs, Servers, Industrial PCs for industry and the military, and occasionally for private users. I personally built and maintained warranty service on nearly 20,000 PCs, and I used many, many different brand of motherboards from consumer grade to the most specialized industrial type “single board computers”. I learned that, among the makers of consumer grade boards, there are many makers of poor quaility boards, but Asus is (IMHO) definitely NOT one of them, nor is Intel for that matter. In fact, when an “off the shelf” board would do the job my first choice was either Intel or Asus. Of the thousands of Asus and Intel boards I used I only ever had one bad board! Many failed, but all but one failure was due to some other problem, usually a bad Power supply, poor cooling or (once) a case design that didn’t adequately ground the board.

So my suggestion would be to figure out why the 66% failed before throwing another expensive board into that same environment.

It is 5 boards in 4 entirely separate systems with 3 failures so it is not a common problem external to the motherboards. Also a p7p55d-e will not work with a 12 year old power supply.

The p7p55d-e has always had a problem, it is unstable if the reset button is connected but now the nic does not work. I accepted that it was not worth RMAing the board for the reset problem but after a second problem the board needs to be replaced.

My real problem with ASUS is the warranty. Taking over a month to replace the board means for me the 3 year warranty is not worth a lot. I can move the data that I need now to another machine but this will work for a week or two. I therefor need to replace the motherboard before I will get a replacement out of the RMA process. Unfortunatly I am not building systems and do not have a supply of boards which I can raid to replace the dead board while the dead board is RMAed

I can’t remember what was the exact problem with the first board . I think that it just refused to boot after a few months. The replacement board ran for several years before it was dumped due to old age. I have a p5k-se on which I am writing this reply. This has been getting more and more unstable. This appears to be a memory management problem, not a memory problem. It now will not boot if there is memory only in the preferred A1, B1 or A1 & B1 slots. If memory is added to A2 or B2 or A2 & B2 it will boot. If all 4 slots are filled with matching 1G modules the entire 4G is seen by the system but the system is a little unstable. The system boots and is stable with memory in slots a2 & b2. The system neither crashes not finds any problems when running memory tests. I do not overclock the systems.

On Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:36:02 +0530, vindevienne
<vindevienne@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
> caprus;2331360 Wrote:
>> Of course I don’t know if 66% represents 20 out of 30 or 2 out of 3,
>> but, in either case, if you’ve had more than one Asus board fail in the
>> same or similar PCs then you might want to take a critical look at the
>> other components in your PC. I’m thinking primarily of the Power
>> Supply.
>>
>> Before I recently retired I designed and built highly customized PCs,
>> Servers, Industrial PCs for industry and the military, and occasionally
>> for private users. I personally built and maintained warranty service
>> on nearly 20,000 PCs, and I used many, many different brand of
>> motherboards from consumer grade to the most specialized industrial type
>> “single board computers”. I learned that, among the makers of consumer
>> grade boards, there are many makers of poor quaility boards, but Asus is
>> (IMHO) definitely NOT one of them, nor is Intel for that matter. In
>> fact, when an “off the shelf” board would do the job my first choice was
>> either Intel or Asus. Of the thousands of Asus and Intel boards I used
>> I only ever had one bad board! Many failed, but all but one failure was
>> due to some other problem, usually a bad Power supply, poor cooling or
>> (once) a case design that didn’t adequately ground the board.
>>
>> So my suggestion would be to figure out why the 66% failed before
>> throwing another expensive board into that same environment.
>
> It is 5 boards in 4 entirely separate systems with 3 failures so it is
> not a common problem external to the motherboards. Also a p7p55d-e will
> not work with a 12 year old power supply.
>
> The p7p55d-e has always had a problem, it is unstable if the reset
> button is connected but now the nic does not work. I accepted that it
> was not worth RMAing the board for the reset problem but after a second
> problem the board needs to be replaced.
>
> My real problem with ASUS is the warranty. Taking over a month to
> replace the board means for me the 3 year warranty is not worth a lot. I
> can move the data that I need now to another machine but this will work
> for a week or two. I therefor need to replace the motherboard before I
> will get a replacement out of the RMA process. Unfortunatly I am not
> building systems and do not have a supply of boards which I can raid to
> replace the dead board while the dead board is RMAed
>
> I can’t remember what was the exact problem with the first board . I
> think that it just refused to boot after a few months. The replacement
> board ran for several years before it was dumped due to old age. I have
> a p5k-se on which I am writing this reply. This has been getting more
> and more unstable. This appears to be a memory management problem, not a
> memory problem. It now will not boot if there is memory only in the
> preferred A1, B1 or A1 & B1 slots. If memory is added to A2 or B2 or A2
> & B2 it will boot. If all 4 slots are filled with matching 1G modules
> the entire 4G is seen by the system but the system is a little unstable.
> The system boots and is stable with memory in slots a2 & b2. The system
> neither crashes not finds any problems when running memory tests. I do
> not overclock the systems.
>
>

iv’e seen similar things happen, not with motherboards yet but with hard
disks. for a while pretty all samsung HDDs around 200-something GB went
dead within a couple of weeks. replacemant was fast and w/o problems or
hassle, but the replacement disks failed after a couple weeks again. this
didn’t happen only to me, but several people in my area, a rather remote
part of west bengal, india.

in other places on this planet, US, OZ, didn’t ask anybody in europe, this
problem didn’t exist. i think it’s certain batches of hardware, delivered
into certain regions, that are bad. it’s not important enough as it is
with cars, where they are forced to recall their bad products, and i
suspect some areas of the world are more likely to receive sub-standard
products than others.


phani.

66% failure should is a lot. 10-20yrs ago boards failed frequently but mostly boards should perform. I’m cheap so I’d backup my data and RMA the board **after a 7month failure. After 2yrs 8mo into warranty then I’d pick up another board but not after 7 months. **After an RMA you wouldn’t need to worry the hardware issues.

I’ve upgraded a few systems just by installing new motherboards and connecting the internal and peripheral drives. No problems except for referencing new/changed hardware. So, either I’m that good or more likely the changes were unmemorable. Even the switch from ATI to nVidia video pretty easy. IMHO, wired NICs are the easiest to reconfigure, i think 11.3-11.4 do the changes itself with udev, wireless more troublesome. I would say I don’t do 2 step projects in at the same time, ie, install a new motherboard and update the OS, instead I normally have a hardware upgrade and a few months later I might upgrade to a new release. I’ve been looking at some cpu/mb upgrades myself. If your ASUS has a NIC why bother with a old NIC? IMHO, onboards are as good as or better than externals.

Clean install or upgrade there’s always going to be some configuration or service issue you’ll need to deal with. Some annoyances in 11.4 are documented in the forum here, like AppAmour starting up in enforce mode for Samba issues, needing grub command “nomodeset” to bypass KMS video setting, etc. There will always be something, however, you should be able to upgrade 11.3 to 11.4 with minimal problems and IMHO, install using the DVD or network install.

If I go with a p67 board I would try an upgrade first. I am using an Nvidia graphics card so intel graphics is not a problem. What I am not sure about is if I can replace the board and cpu and boot 11.3 and get that to work and then later upgrade to 11.4 or do I have to do the 11.4 upgrade before I change the board.

After getting the system running I will rma the old board and use the replacement for something else.

If you have the 11.4 DVD and validated the media (media check) then I’d do the 11.4 on the current board and after that’s running good swap the for the p67.