Comments on: Windows 7 on ASUS P5NSLI

By: $167

$167 — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:20:06 +0000

My god… you guys are my hero!! I originally put this system together for dualboot 3 yrs ago. I spent so much time getting XP x64 to worked but the network was super slow. For the past years I been using just XP x32. Win7 came out and I read this post… I put in an extra NIC and installed the driver, everything works!! I’m so excited, thank you SO MUCH!!!

By: XeLLisCompleX

XeLLisCompleX — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:25:12 +0000

can someone give me a direct link where to download driver for P5NSLi that is compatible with window7. thanks!

By: Morgan

Morgan — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:13:46 +0000

Thank you Christian Donner & Kevin C!!! The Chipset RTL8139 really works!!
I lost 1 fecking year trying to solve this issue, but now I can use Windows 7 x64 with 6 GB ram.
THANK YOU AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By: Kevin C

Kevin C — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:52:14 +0000

Hi, I also have the same motherboard running in Windows 7 x64 with 4Gb 800Mhz RAM. i was able to make networking work by installing an off board PCI NIC with a Realtek RTL8139D chipset. I just turned off the on board Marvell NIC through BIOS, installed the Realtec NIC, and Windows automatically installed the drivers needed for it to work. Hope this helps.

Kevin

By: Santo

Santo — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:03:08 +0000

Hi all,
I hope this helps. I’ve had the P5NSLI for about 8 months now & it runs a quad core Q6600 cpu & 3gb of DDR2 ram, 1x2gb & 1x1gb. I run both the x32 & x64 bit XP pro OS’s on two different HD’s. Last week I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 temporarily onto a 500gb IDE HD with the idea of buying a SATA 1TB HD to install Win 7 onto permanently. The install was easy & when completed, I put in the same ISP details that I’d been using for the last 3 years. It connected & downloaded all the latest updates from M/soft. A few days later I bought the 1TB HD & couldn’t resist a 2gb ram stick. I installed the ram & then the HD. I fired up Window 7 & redid the Windows experience index bit & the 3gb ram had a “score” of 5.9. The 5 GB ram had a “score” of 7.1, great I thought, as you would. I then powered down & disconnected all the other drives & I installed Win 7 onto the primary partition of the 1TB drive. Again, smooth as, & as before, I put in my ISP details into the IPv4 properties &, no network! I went back to the first Win 7 install &, no network. I fired up in turn, both the XP installs & neither x32 or x64 bit XP had any connection issues at all.
After several emails to my ISP, they suggested it was either a Windows or driver issue. After downloading & installing all the drivers I could find, & nothing making a difference. In desperation I pulled out the new 2gb ram stick, & hey presto, I was online again in Win 7. I tried every ram combination I could, & as soon as I put both 2gb sticks in together, I couldn’t connect. Win 7 works fine & connects to the net with 3gb of ram.
So I know the ram is good. I scoured the M/soft web site for a solution, but out of the many, many problems people have out there with Win 7, none were similar to this one. I ended up on the ASUS web site & found a thread,
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20090807005915453&board_id=1&model=P5NSLI&page=1&SLanguage=en-us
Post #2 seems to explain everything. Just in case the link is broken, here’s a cut & paste of post #2.

Since I was not getting any responses to my inquiry on this forum, I decided to send an email to the Marvell support team to get their feedback on the memory issue. Below is what I received from Marvell, hopefully this will help others also.

“We did see this problem with this particular motherboard when using Vista 64-bit. The problem is with the Nvidia based chipset and we are not able to fix this problem. There are a few solutions:

1. Use Vista 32-bit
2. Use Vista 64-bit with 2GB of memory
3. Use Windows XP

Unfortunately this motherboard was released before Vista came out and it has some compatibility issues.”

Also have a look at the 4 posts at,
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20090926223954015&board_id=1&model=P5NSLI&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

Again, just in case the link is bad.

Post #1 About a week ago I began noticing a very high pitched whine coming from my computer case. (When I say high, imagine the ring in your ears after leaving a heavy metal concert). Now, the interesting thing is this whine is present not only when the computer is on and running, but it is there after I have shut down and turned everything off except the stand by power.

The only way it stops is when I flip the switch at the back of the case to off.

Post #2 I had this and it was a leaky capacitor on the MotherBoard.

Post #4 it will eventually go completely bad either opening up or worse shorting, you will know when that happens, you will hear a very loud snap and then smell something nasty, not smoke but electrolyte. When you look in the case it will look like someone threw a paper bomb into it lol. Little tiny pieces of brown paper all over. Oh last but not least it won’t boot again.

My mobo is making the same noise, so I’m looking for a replacement board ASAP. As I doubt ASUS can, or will, fix the problem

Again, I hope all this helps explain the problem.
Santo

By: Christian Donner

Christian Donner — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:53:53 +0000

I bought a Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC. It works like a charm and cost $19.
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 3.00 GB

By: Thiago

Thiago — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:13:19 +0000

Hello, there is a known problem on ASUS P5N-SLI motherboard with more than 3GB of memory. I have 2x2GB modules and when I try to use Windows 7 64bit, it works fine but the network doesn’t!
I tested my offboard PCI network card (with the onboard disabled of course) and the same shit happens, I never get the connection working and when it works it is just for 1min max and after it crashes.
Why Asus doesn’t release a patch to fix this issue?

By: Christian Donner

Christian Donner — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:34:26 +0000

Dan, my problems with 64 bit network drivers were a couple of years ago on this board, and they were subtle so that I kept trying for about 3 months before I gave up. The network would work in principle, but transfer rates were bad, and once in a while something crashed. For instance, a sure way of killing the Windows Explorer was to copy to files over the network to the same destination at the same time. It is possible that newer Marvell drivers for XP no longer have these issues. Or, like you said, it is possible that it was my specific setup.

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:26:35 +0000

When I read this, I admit I was worried that I’d have no network. I’m running a p5nsli motherboard w/2.4GHz Dual Core Duo and 3GB Ram. My normal OS is XP64-Bit and I’ve had no problems with the network, Altho I have had previous problems as soon as you put in certain PCI cards with conflicting interrupts. The most severe problem I had was when I ran a second raid card and it would only run correctly in the last PCI Slot. There’s not many choices with only 2 pci slots and not to mention at that point I was running 2 * 6600 GT’s and there physically wasn’t any room to put a pci card beside the 2nd pci-e card and even if there was room, heat would become a factor since I overclocked these cards as well. Yes I like to punish my system

I’m also running a 12.5% overclock – which sets the cpu @ 2.7 GHz, Ram @ 600 MHz, PCI-E @ 2750 MHz, 9600GT and a lot of cooling (Australian Heat vs P.C.’s = Phwoar!) and it’s rock solid stable. Passes all burn in and cpu tests and runs Doom 3 flawlessly.

When I installed Win7, the network came good but was unavailable during the setup process. When I logged in the first time (after the last reboot where you enter the cd-key) the network drivers were all loaded. I’m running the latest bios available.

I’m off to play with it now and perform updates etc.

My suggestions from experience are this :- Check any extra cards for conflicting interrupts because the onboard network device is the first to go when having such problems. If you don’t have another card, check the interrupts anyway because there’s really no reason none of the above shouldn’t work.

When I originally got the above system, I ran XP Home 32-bit because that’s what I had available at the time before upgrading to XP Pro 64-Bit. I had a LOT of problems with a feature in the bios called HPET Technology and when this was turned on :- the p.c. would crash whenever you played movies.

There was 2 fixes to this.

Fix #1: Leave it turned on and then during the Windows Setup you press F5 which disables the APCI componants within Windows. This is not recommended because when you go to do a shutdown you get a familar message unseen since Win98 saying “It is now safe to turn off your computer”. I hadn’t had to do this since I ran a Gigabyte Pentium 2 Motherboard years ago because the APCI was incompatible with Windows.

Fix #2: Disable HPET technology and do a full reinstall of Windows XP. If you don’t do a reinstall, then you can guarentee blue screens during bootup because this driver is somewhere embedded in the bootup process and Windows likes these features untouched. Once I disabled HPET technology, the p.c. would stop freezing whenever I went to play a movie.

I don’t know the full details as to why it crashes, but I do know that HPET Technology is a feature used in Vista for precision timing playing media, so I then came to the conclusion that is why it was so distasterous.

I haven’t tried it with Vista on this particular machine because after the whole drama I had with XP and HPET, I got rather sick of reinstalling over and over trying to find the solution and when I found it, I was happy.

Hope this helps!

By: Christian Donner

Christian Donner — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:16:19 +0000

As I said in the post, I bought a separate network card and I am not using the onboard network port.