Blackout,

I hope "for some reason it was choosing 5.1 volts? when it should be no more than 5v." was a typo.  I don't recall any memory since vaccum tubes that uses anywhere near that voltage.  I would think that at near that voltage the memory and the CPU memory controller would be just that.....  a memory!

Current memory on this board would be around 1.65, 1.5, 1.3 and less depending on the memory.

Well it has been a few days since getting a new board and I do not see any problems like most of you are having, but I just noticed it has been quiet in this room. Seems I have no sound not even windows startup music. Audio in bios is enabled though. I hope they can fix this Monday.

Please don't be offended by a silly comment,.  But, did you load the drivers and software for the sound?  If I remember right, I didn't have sound at first either.  Then after loading the drivers and software  I miraculously had sound.  I have forgotten to plug in the speakers before.  In fact I have probably made every stupid mistake possible over the years.

I should have my RMA replacement board on Monday.  Then I can what happens.  Since I have already had issues, I will probably build slow and in stages.

Hey I'm not perfect either! I loaded all that was on Intels disk, the board is suppsed to have sound on the board. I will waste their time fiquring it out along with my time again and again.

If you go into the Control Panel/Hardware and Sound/Sound/Manage audio devices,  on the Playback Tab, are Speakers selected?

In the device manager does everything under the Sound,video and game controllers look ok?  I think I wound up downloading AUD_Vista_Win7_6.0.1.6343_PV from Intel's site and using these drivers and software.

I am not using the DX58SO2 right now, so I cannot give your specfics as to what you should be seeing as far as drivers in the Device Manager.

Are the speakers powered on?  If you remove the speaker plugs to the motherboard do you hear a pop in the speakers?

Hi bgolden,

              After your first responce I loaded the Intel disk but saw nothing I missed. Then I traveled to site and saw an updated driver, AUD_Vista_Win7_6.0.1.6343_PV and still nothing. Then your second response about the control panel and speakers on, did the trick so thanks. I just do not know how they could send out a board with driver  that has no sound. Seems that quality control is lacking somewhat.

Hi bgolden,

Well, I thought I was home free but Intel keeps throwing curve balls at me. About 10:30pm I left my computer on with nothing but machine idiling. I heard a sound about 15 minutes later and got curious because nothing was running at all to my knowledge. To my surprise was a window saying IAStorIcon has stopped working and generated an exception ID=0xa00(2560), thread ID= 0xa04(2564) and said it was related to Rapid Recover technology of Intel Matrix Storage Tecnologies.  Heard the hard drives working so I opened Storage Tech program and found the disks were verifying and repairing. Left it running all night and 8AM the next morning it only finished 67% and took until; 10 Am to finish. I asked myself, how am I supposed to turn over this computer to be used as a replacement for her business when things like this are going on??  I can't or will end up in divorce court. I did notice after rebooting a few times that  Icon said Irst not running and learned this storage program does not always come on after a reboot. What is with this Intel?

Well upon going to their site and using the Intel driver update utility which showed no updates for my board I got curious and went to download center where it looked like I had a few choices of drivers to install. Does not Intel have someone to add these to the  Intel driver update utility to make things easier for their customers? Not knowing about the chipset driver version or where to look I decided to try  4/22/2011  9.2.0.1030 driver which I hope is ok. The second choice I had was  the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (RAID) driver version 10.1.0.1008 for Intel® Desktop but it said ther was two files I needed, this one and a second file for my win7 pro 32bit version.  If someone has done this as I was hesitating because I did not know if one file should be done before the other, so please respond if you have been through this steps. Hopefully these two files might fix the problem of errors(19) on my two new disks(WD04re) in raid1. Such a shame that the end user has these types of problems which should be corrected before putting out sofware that is not working properly on a new board and system.

bobm202,

I can't help you much with the onboard raid.  I do not use it.  I have a dedicated raid card using 4  of the same RE4 drives that you are using.  I have never had an issue with these drives.

As far as the chipset drivers, here is a trick a guy on another forum showed me a while back.  As usual with any suggestions you find on the internet, use at your own risk.  It seems if you just run the driver program, not all of the Chipset drivers will necessarily update.

1. Download and save the INF_allOS_9.2.0.1030.exe file on your hard drive.
   
2. Right Click on the saved INF_allOS_9.2.0.1030.exe file
   
3. Select copy
   
4. Goto your desktop and right click in some open space.
   
5. Select Paste Shortcut
   
6. Right Click on the new shortcut and select the Properties tab
   
7. It should open to the Shortcut tab in the Properties tab.  If not click on the Shortcut tab .  On this tab, you will have a field labeled Target.  In this field you will have something that looks like "K:\DL Intel\DX58SO2\INF_allOS_9.2.0.1030.exe" (with your download drive and folder and leading and following double quotes)
   
8. Put your cursor after the INF_allOS_9.2.0.1030.exe" part and add a space and -overall.
   
9. Now the Target should look like "K:\DL Intel\DX58SO2\INF_allOS_9.2.0.1030.exe" -overall    (note that the  -overall is outside the last ")
   
10. Click on Apply and then OK.
    
11. Now Double Click on the shortcut and answer the prompts as you normally would.
    

What all this does is load every driver in the Chipset file your computer needs and forces the Intel Drivers to overwrite any existing version (including Microsoft's drivers).  At least this way you know that you have all the current Intel Chipset Drivers loaded.

Maybe, someone else can chime in about the Intel Raid questions.

OK, I have the replacement board and it is up and running.  I only have 1 hd and the video card in place, in addition to the cpu and memory and lan cable and usb keyboard and mouse.

So far the only issue is the Back2Bios button.  This one hung on the i/o plate and kept kicking in.  A bit of gentle prodding with a small screwdriver fixed this temporarily.  Before I tweaked the i/o plate, I could depress the button and the red light would go out.  But apparently the switch was still making contact.  Next time I have the board out, I will tweak the opening some more .

The only thing I changed in the Bios was to set the XPM profile for my Dominator memory.  The board started up just fine.  No beeps.  No restarts.  Just booted to windows without issue.

Side note...  Intel sent along a 0.5g tube of Dow Corning Thermal TC-1996 paste with instructions to use the entire tube (ok, 0.5g is not much).  But, I have never put so much Thermal paste on a CPU in my life!  I am just being a good boy and following instructions.

I am going to shut down with this configuration and do a restart later this evening.  Will let you folks know how it goes then.  Afterwards I will start adding drives and the raid card.

Swiss_Cheese,

You are right on the go slowly.  I just fired up the board again.  It has been off for just under 6 hours.  This time I plugged in the raid card (Areca 1210) with 4 drives attached.  One beep (probably recognising the Raid card) and booted straight to windows.  No reboot.  No hang of any sort.  So far so good.

Next steps, I have 4 more drives and a DVD drive left to hook up.  I think I will do these 2 then 2 then 1 at a time over the next few days.  Currently all drives are getting power but not hooked up to the MB.

Here is to hoping!

Swiss_Cheese,

This afternoon I hooked up the DVD and then hit the power button.  Booted perfectly.

This evening after the computer had been off for about 5 1/2 hours, I hooked up 2 more hard drives and hit the power button.  Again booted perfectly.

All I have left to hook up are 3 more drives, some USB stuff, and the speakers.  The only USB things attached right now is a G19 keyboard and a wireless Logitech mouse.   I am being cautiously optomistic.  I hope I didn't just curse myself.

One thing I had not considered is the Bios version.  On the RMA board I had updated to 779 right after I set the system up.  The replacement board has 603 version Bios and I have not updated it yet.  Another thing that is curious is the serial#.  Assuming that Intel follows a logical sequence from lower to higher, the replacement board is slightly older than the RMA board.  In fact there is only a difference in the last 3 characters/digit or the serial#.  If the replacement board turns out to be ok, then I am thinking either the RMA board was a fluke or a bad batch that came out shortly after the batch from which the replacement board came from.

I will keep you posted.

bgolden,

     Glad to hear things are going well so far. The retailer I bought my board from, said they would arrange a replacement, so I took them up on thier offer. That was last friday, so with any luck we'll have another rma board to compare.

I didn't notice any difference between the different bios versions, except that I had to set an additional memory perameter manually to get it to boot after the upgrade. I think Swiss_Cheese mentioned this here somewhere.

Swiss, I have read that Intel get motherboards from Foxconn. I never found out how to trace the serial/hardware revision back to a particular batch, but I think it would reveal that our boards came from the same run.

I've been looking around for a replacement x58 board but due to the experiences here I am running scared. I had an Asus a few months ago that was unstable because a heatsink was not making contact with the chips. The whole board arrived with a bow in it, something that has turned me off Asus. My current Msi looks to be well made, so maybe an Msi Big-bang Xpower would do the job but how can you tell?