Quote:

---

Paging Oskar Wu!
I chose the DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard because it had been a model citizen for me when I'd used it in past testing for reviews, but when it came time to build my own system around it, things changed. Seems like they always do when I'm working on my own, personal PC. I can pick my way around problems with finicky pre-production hardware everyday while working on a review, but when I start working on a PC for myself, the wheels come off. Previously stable hardware develops a serious need for counseling, and my IQ drops 60 points, making troubleshooting nearly impossible.

Foolishly confident in the DFI board and in my ability to build a system, I installed pretty much all of the core hardware for this system into the case, attached everything, and then fired it up. No go. Thus began a long troubleshooting process in which I disconnected absolutely everything unessential from the DFI board, removed it from the case, and was still unable to get it to POST. Power would come on, the screen would remain blank, and three of the board's four boot-time troubleshooting LEDs would light up. Then nothing. I spent what must've been hours working through the problem, swapping out different configurations of video cards, memory, and processors.

After some work, I was able to get the system to POST, but only intermittently. The problem seemed to be related to several things, including:

The number and positions of the DIMMs in the memory slots
The PCI Express slot used for graphics and possibly the type of card
The type of memory used
I found that when I varied these things, the system seemed more likely to POST. With lots of different types of cards, CPUs, and DIMMs on hand, I was able to rule out any one component as the sole source of problem. Of course, I tried flashing it to the latest BIOS rev, and I attempted various BIOS tweaks, like very conservative memory timings and higher DIMM voltages. Nothing I did would make the thing POST reliably from a cold boot.
I googled around and found that lots of other folks had run into similar problems with this board, but I didn't find any definitive solutions. Then I got lucky, I suppose, and discovered something about this problem, at least in my case, that was something of a fix. Turns out that if you leave the board on for a while after powering it up, like two to five minutes, it will pretty much always go ahead and POST eventually. You've just got to be patient.

In the end, I basically tweaked the board for stability and performance, using the built-in Metest86+ bootable option in its BIOS to test, and left it at that. I don't reboot all that often, and so long as I know that the thing is going to come back out of its momentary coma and POST, I can live with the intermittent boot-time delay. Perhaps a newer BIOS or some magic memory timings tweak will fix the problem once and for all, but until then, I'll live with it.

---