A8JM Video artifacts problems and solution

After reading the almost 100 % positive comments on this board (and lets face it, the only negative things I could read on were about the look or the keyboard so..) I went and bought the A8JM from NCIX a week ago.

Since I helped a friend setting up his own A8JM a few days earlier without a hitch I expected a smooth ride.

Wrong..

As soon as I played any divx, any games and especially graphic intensive softwares (like 3dmark06) I realised that this almost perfect creation was plagued with artifacts all over the screen (graphic glitches). Not seeing any signes of overheating I was truly wondering what could cause those. I got my answer when I installed RivaTuner and ran it : It failed the stability test at stock setting. The 400 mhz on the memory (again, stock) was the root of all problems. Down clocking to 330 mhz the test ran fine and artifacts were gone. This however caused a severe lost of performance. I was about to RMA the laptop, thinking I had defective video ram (man.. how unlucky is that for a laptop) when I tought about the only thing I hadn't tried yet (I did reinstall windows numerous times and tried to update all drivers) : flashing the bios.

From what I understood, there are 3 versions out there of the bios for the A8JM. I must have had the earliest one (I believe it was 2.06 or 07 not sure) and Asus website was showing a 2.08 which I tried.

MAGICA ! ... who would have thought ? From what I understood, the memory timings had to be to tight on the video ram in the bios I had and flashing it resulted in the timings going back to more reasonable values.

I can now easily clock the memory at 335 and the core at 520 ! That's pretty amazing.

Conclusion : Never give up (it was close to 5 AM when I found that out) and don't RMA stuff to quickly ! I hope this helps others as it was quite a freaky experience for me.

 

Interesting.. never had that problem with mine. I'm still using 207 BIOS, and it's fine.

 

Thanks for sharing Darrick, I was wondering if it could only be bios related. It has to be a combination of factors then.. altough flashing the bios was the real fix.

BTW 2568 in 3dmar06, not bad for a mild OC. I truly wish they come up with a clockgen profile for Core Duo so I can start to play with the CPU

 

how do you check the bios version?

 

I know that before you flash your bios with Winflash, it will actually display the current BIOS.

I also believe that CPUZ( http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php) would tell you that. You can also see it if you are quick enough when you boot up (press escape to remove the Asus splash screen and see the startup screen

 

AStral.. what was your core/mem when u got 2568?

I was at 510/405 and got 2548, then stopped since I didn't have time to test out stability. cdd (another A8Jm owner) managed to get 2600+ with a bit more tweaking (I think he was at 515/425)

 

F2 on startup boot to enter BIOS edit page. The BIOS version will be in there.

 

Darrick : I remember seeing your 3dmark results in an other thread

My mem was at 430 and the core must have been at 520. I can still push it more but was wondering what should be considered as a safe max temp for a go 7600... I am pretty used to OCing desktops but laptops are new for me

 

Yeah I still have the 207 bios and haven't even had a hiccup so far. 519/426 scored 2611 for me.

 

cdd543, any idea how to overclock the CPU ?

 

Astral..I imagine it is locked in the bios, but I haven't looked.

I did move my gpu up a bit more to 531/429 and scored 2633 3d mark 06. My memory is maxed, but the core is something.

 

Astral: As long as you don't see artifacts, you should still be fine (I'd assume it's the same for desktops). Once you start seeing artifacts, then that's just a tad over limit. Some have suggested to lower settings by 10MHZ at that point, and that's the safe setting for your card.

 

cdd543 : The bios options are extremely limited so yes, you could say that it is locked. However, Clockgen (an OC utility that works from Windows) would lets us Oc it if we'd know the proper PLL setup (and for that, we have to crack it open and find the chip...). Knowing the PLL, we could match it to a profile in Clockgen if one already exists or contact the developper so they add it. That or SetFsb

The Yonah have exceptionnal Ocability, requiring little to no voltage increase to reach much higher clocks. Unfortunately, all the tests were ran out of a desktop mobo with easy OC settings built in the bios.

Darrick : Sounds great, I'll run more test this Friday (out of town for a while) and see where I can push it. Great little machine though. Running FEAR and Hitman Bloodmoney at Max settings is quite good

 

so upgradign to bios 208 helped u oc the little beast eh? i dont have any problems with 207, and i dont like the constant fan with 208 which is why i didnt upgrade

I was on laptop video2go, could someone tell me which are the best drivers to use rt now, cos i see the ones supplied by Asus are very old, .26 and there's liek .57 and newer

 

How are your gpu's not melting??? I gut my a8jm 9 months ago and its usually running at like 90c( its overheated on me probably around 40times at about 95c) ive never over clocked it and I think its fried now. Im getting lots of artifacts while playing anything andit now shuts down at about 60c. When i reboot i get either an error massage or the screen will start turning on and off and there will be artifacts everywhere. Can anyone confirm thats what happens when your GPU is dieng?
Im sendin it back either way cause it has that screnn spliting problem most a8jm's have.