another ASUS story today...

My new Asus P4P800 that I bought 3 weeks ago stops playing sound via the onboard Realtek ALC850 Soundchip without notice...

and "Asus doesn't know about it" as my supplier says.
other freaks around the world messed with mostly lack of success with this...

Checking heat, driver revisions, etc. and even finding the IDE cabeling being responsible for the chip bug...

Comparing Boardrevisions ... some issues about a power drop were in there as well... OMG!

Most of those bought a PCI sound card to disable their onboard-sound feature they paid for... it's a real mess... I didn't believe I would waste my precious time on something trivial as a 10 EUR sound component... I tought those issues were gone with the 386 aera and 8bit IRQ config...

and guess what else: the onboard GigaBit LAN component start to sing around in HF range of 10-12 kHz like a little bird when loaded at 100Mbit max (massive gigabyte transfer from peer PC)

oh well - the last 4 mainboard generations didn't mess with sound, so this should do it once again... or?

I believe ASUS has a name to lose and these strange issues don't look like a very famous engineering excellence... (did I tell you that my last 2 board generations were MSI without any hassles ? maybe I know why know... )

Config:

• ASUS P4P800 - bios 1004 beta 1
• P4@3000/Prescott 1MB
• 2xKingston DDR400 512MB
• 2x Samsung 1614c 160GB
• 3 other IDEs on 2 other aTA controller

My debugging steps so far:

1. checking the heat issues some people described - 4 fans and 31 celsius board temperature are fine!
2. disable Hypertheading - no effect - still stopping
3. installing RealTek drivers 3.67 - still testing

Possible Options:

1. Bios Upgrade to ?
2. wait for new, stronger super-silent power-supply
3. ...
4. replace whole mainboard - oh - and I got a replacement mainboard from my supplier - and might test that as well...
5. last resort: build an ANTI ASUS page, disable onboard sound and buy a PCI sound card...