GGTS have now given me their final word on this misreported CPU temperature issue - they can't reproduce the problem, so therefore the problem doesn't exist!
This is a ludicrous attitude for them to strike, particularly as several of us with different P55s have sent them photos of the crazy temperature values in the BIOS. GGTS's conclusion defies all human logic.
I suspect that the reason for this is that they've realised that they'll only reproduce the problem if they spend more time investigating it, and with all the other bug reports on their various mobos flooding in from all over the world, I guess they need to give those other issues some attention instead. Let's face it, it takes time to set up a PC with a particular CPU, particular memory, etc. Frankly, I wish that they'd not spent as much time on the hardware with this particular issue and instead went straight to investigating the BIOS software instead, as the problem is most defintely BIOS-related. The sheer fact that we're able to turn the misreporting on and off using the BIOS's C3/C6/C7 setting is evidence of that.
It's very noticeable that GGTS avoids actually getting into any sort of discussion with you. They won't even answer very straightforward questions, like 'Is the Microsoft UAA driver required only for onboard sound?' Or, 'Here's the sumcheck value of the newly-flashed BIOS - is it correct?' Instead, they simply take your reported symptoms and try to reproduce them. The lack of any discussion is a huge barrier to solving problems, but it might simply be that they feel that time is better spent elsewhere.
As for the other problems I've been having with my new PC, well, they can be summarised thus:
1) Random FDD accesses.
2) Constant HDD accessing (no HDD idle periods).
3) Permanent PIO mode of one optical drive.
4) Highly-distorted third-party sound (but not always).
At first, I thought that these were also due to either a bad BIOS or a bad mobo driver but I'm not so sure now. I've made some headway with Problem 3, in that I appear to have cured it by uninstalling the controller of the affected optical drive in Device Manager and then rebooting. Mind you, a stuck PIO mode is usually a sign that the OS has detected many read errors from the drive, so I'm not holding my breath over it just yet. It might just be that that nice new drive is faulty.
1 and 2 remain unsolved.
2 could be due to a faulty HDD but that can now only be verified by sending it back to the manufacturer and getting a replacement. The reader will realise the loss of software and data involved, to say nothing of the time required to do it all and to return the PC to normal later on, so I'm reluctant to proceed without more compelling evidence.
The distorted sound happens only about 50% of the time, in that sometimes when I run a music file the sound is fine, right from the outset, but then if I stop the file running and re-run it later, it'll be grossly distorted. It's also noticeable that the constant HDD accesses have a regularity to them (1 - 2 accesses per second) and that regularity modulates the distorted sound to some degree. So, I'm fairly sure the two are linked in some way, eg. clashing on the PCI bus.
As is found with so many obscure problems that PC users discover with their PCs these days, if you google for them, you inevitably find a plethora of 'red herring' solutions from well-meaning but often misguided people. Honestly, you have to laugh at the sheer variety of them. Different respondents on forums offer their '100% guaranteed' solutions which invariably are not borne out when tried. Indeed, some of them are just plain daft and can, if you're not careful, get you into even deeper trouble or can cause corruption of the OS.
I'm of the view that certain problems can be caused by the order in which Windows Updates are applied, or not applied as the case may be, especially as is the case when you've done a reformat of the hard drive or have just finished building a new machine and you therefore need to download and install a great wadge of OS updates. Curiously, some updates from the WU website require subsequent manual changes in the Windows Registry, something you won't realise if you opt for automatic Windows updates each month. Even that I find really weird, in that surely the requisite Registry mods should be done as part and parcel of the automatic download/installs, shouldn't they? Apparently, not.
