Well I can atest to the EZ Flash Utility for the Asus mobos, I downloaded the 0903 BIOS update onto a USB Thumb drive and flashed right through the BIOS utility. Way easy, it was painless. I am still not getting the POST to say that I have a Extreme Edition proc, not that I care if it says it, just that it is working! It still says it in the CPUZ though and not on the My Computer properties. I have Vista Ultimate sitting next me, I am just afraid to install it, anyone have any common issues to report?

Thats good news, well done. I wouldnt worry about the recognition problems.

Vista currently isnt really worth the performance hit imo. By all means install it and have a look around, its nice too look at and all that but im going straight back to XP when i need to reformat.

Thanks, I am going hold off until later on when they are confident on the drivers and overall stability, I just installed the new hard drives and put most of my stuff back on so I will wait until next time I reformat as well.

OK< I installed the 2nd set of ram, I am now successfully running 4 gig of Kingston HyperX ram on my setup. No crashing, seems to be stable.

Sweet. What does you OS read it as?

You know I hadn't checked until I read this and it only says 3 gig. What the hell is up with that? 3 Gig?! CPU-Z reads it right at 4096 but the XP Pro says 3 gig. I am soo confused.

You know I hadn't checked until I read this and it only says 3 gig. What the hell is up with that? 3 Gig?! CPU-Z reads it right at 4096 but the XP Pro says 3 gig. I am soo confused.

Yep unfortunately that's all that XP can make use of :(

Oh, so windows XP can only deal with 3 gig of RAM? Wow. Guess that extra Gig will just sit there then, will it injure the stick that isn't being used by the OS to sit in the slot?

Any X86 32bit systems can only make use of "below 4gb" meaning about 3.5gb

OK, so I am not having some kind of system problem it is just an OS limitation and the fact that it says 3 gig is related to that issue. I understand. Thank you. After so many different problems with putting this together, it is almost assumed that when something doesn't look right it is going to be some kind of huge problem.

I recently purchased a shed load of SLi hardware for my latest build and chose the P5N32-E SLi asus motherboard with a 2Gb matched pair of OCZ Reaper Series 1066Mhz ram,it was my most troublesome build ive had from the off,i ended up putting it down to a possible of either partion magic 8.0 or driver issues,so after a fresh install of my xp again i didnt put PM8.0 on or do any partitions,and also dowloaded newest nvidia chipset and display drivers,all seemed well up until early sunday morning when i went back for more high end jaw dropping graphics and general performance gaming fun,when i then discovered it was displaying nothing,reading no drives,and generally behaving dead,after a couple of attempts with doing the cmos jumper reset,and then popping out the lithium battery,all to no avail,thankfully i have a freind who does this kind of malarky for a living :worship: ,and after some bench time he pinpointed the problem down to a dead 1gb ram stick,basically when he removed one of my ram chips and fired it up again,voila,instant boot up logo and off to windows,take the working one out,and put the suspected duffer in and the same old black screen nothing,so just now i am on 1Gb of ram,i cant think what would have caused this other than a factory defect,ram voltage settings in bios were at auto,and im not interested in overclocking in anyway,so no overclock menus were even looked at in bios,so looks like i will be back on my old slow vintage pc again while this 2Gb pair gets replaced,i was going to flash my bios update but now i just read here about it possibly frizzing things im even more scared to do it,any input on this strange headache inducing situation much appreciated.

(my m8 put 3DMark06 on my system when it was back working with just 1Gb of ram in and it got 10037 score and generally impressed him very much)