Both my brother and I bought the P5RD1-VM in early June.  I have a Pentium D 930, two 1-gb sticks of PNY DDR400 ram, and an ATI X1800 pci-express card.  He has a Pentium 4 630, two 1-gb sticks of Kingston DDR400 ram, and an ATI X1600 card.  We both use the onboard sound.  I have the latest (1003) bios, and I believe he does too.

The boards fit nicely into a mini case and overall I am satisfied.  Unfortunately, we're both having some odd slowdowns using Windows XP Pro.

Basically, after using the computer for an hour or so, one or more processes being taking a lonnng time to load, or are generally slow.  For example, I'll be listening to music, running one or two instances of Windows Explorer, Firefox, and TextPad.  Then Firefox will refuse to open another instance, or Textpad's scrolling through a document becomes choppy and annoying, or my music program (Winamp or MediaMonkey) has trouble finishing a song.

Games are particularly bad.  Loading sequences in Rome Total War almost always cause this kind of slowdown in-game, and almost all other games choke and spew out static at seemingly random intervals.  Or sometimes the game runs fine but the music is out-of-whack.

Everything will go from silky-smooth to excruciatingly choppy in about a second.

Nothing is exactly reproducible as is the problem shows up "randomly," and a reboot nearly always solves it.

My brother describes the behavior as if his machine is "running out of ram."  But system resources indicate only 20-30% of the 2gb used.

My only clue was that when Firefox would hang-up (one of the more common problems), system resources shows that it was using 50% of the cpu (one entire core on my Pentium D), and ballooning in ram usage.  I thought maybe the chip was overheating and causing it to throttle down, but ThrottleWatch 2.01 shows nothing like that.

Someone suggested that Windows XP doesn't handle dual-cores properly, but my brother has a single-core P4.

I've redone Windows.  I upgraded (and even tried downgrading!) the sound card, video card, and chipset drivers.  I changed the BIOS versions (now I'm on 1003).  Windows is fully updated on both machines, and there is NO spyware, viruses, etc etc.  The computers are also over 1000 miles apart, so there is not any local monkey-buisness either.

At this point, I'd be happy even to hear that someone else is having the same sort of problems, as well as what you've tried.  Recommendations would be great, too!

If you don't have any issues like mine, could you say what other hardware you have?

Thanks for any help!

I have the exact same problem as yours.

My computer become extremely sluggish after running after an hour or so.

At first, I thought there may be some program eating up my memory. But after closing all the programs and the windows process manager showing 99% idle, my computer still got very sluggish even just for browsing the file using the explorer.

I am very disappointed with this motherboard, I got the 2GB->1GB Ram issue, and then worked under a extremely noisy fan environment for months without knowing that it is actually a bug and I need to update my bios. And then since I don’t have a floopy drive, I tried to use the update program provide by the CD, but it just never work and I finally use my USB card reader to update my bios, which is never documented in the manual. And then now the mystery sluggish issue….

INTEL 805
RAM  2GB
GRAPHIC Geforce 7300GS