GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

[RedDwarf]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

The strange thing is, I have now managed to install Windows on it using the same settings and CD. So there is something very strange with this motheboard. But being so unreliable is no use to me so I will return it for a replacement as I will not spend any further time on it. I have given it far more chance than I should of done and my persistence has cost me money.

I would still like to know about how long a RMA request is valid for as it will help me deal with the company who sold it to me when I phone them tomorrow (they are closed now).

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

The RMA would likely not be valid with the retailer after that long, but all you would need to do is call them and tell them you had a emergency and had to leave town and just request a new RMA number.

Was it newegg? If so you shouldn't have any issues as long as you are still within their RMA time period, if not you will have to do the RMA with GA and as you know that will take much longer

[RedDwarf]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

I have tested the new memory with memtest86 and in almost 11 hours it completed 32 passes with no errors so the memory should be okay.

I believe the company I purchased the board from, had to arrange the RMA with Gigabyte themselves. That is what they told me before they issued it as they could not tell me how long it would take them to arrange it. They did get it done faster than I was expecting. I would of thought that the RMA if it was with Gigabyte would still be valid as I would of thought they would be valid for 1 month. Do you know how long the Gigabyte RMA's remain valid after they issue them to users wanting to return boards? I would of thought that it would be the same length with the company. It is not newegg, I don't think the DS5 is available in the States.

As you said, if I have to deal with Gigabyte that would mean having to return my board and then wait for them to test it which would mean me being without it for quite a while. The company I purchased from sends out a new board and then arranges to pick up the old one which would be far better for me as I am sure you can understand.

The thing is they have already done it once, I did not know they were going to do it but they contacted me and told me that a new board would be with me the next day. I unfortunately thought I was going to get this one working so returned the new board (Duh Duh Duh!!!!!!!) I really wished I had not persisted in trying to get it working as I would not of gone through all this aggravation.

The new install had been stable for quite some hours but I had only been installing software and idling most of the time and had not pushed it at all.

But I have tried the old test of Firefox with 40_ tabs and prime95 and it blue screened on the 2nd tab reload. If you think about it my motherboard will not run with the default memory timings on Gigabyte validated memory so that alone means it is not working to specification and should for that alone be cause for RMA. If you then take into account the blue screening on brand new windows installs then I don't think anyone could rightfully disagree with the board being faulty.

I will phone later today. But I would like to know about the valid length of RMA's, that would be helpful as it might help me persuade them to replace the board again without me returning the replacement this time.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

Says RMA #'s are valid for 30 days here
RMA

What is up with 30-40 tabs? Im kinda joking, but only halfway! I use 20 sometimes but you have said 30 so many times just sounded like you have 30 pages set as your homepage! I have 8 so I do see where you are coming from.... Just sounds funny, Imagine GA supports response to that!

Good luck, I would let the retailer know what you have read there as well and explain all of this to them as well.

[RedDwarf]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

I have phoned the retailer and they said they will try and get it completed as fast as possible but as it is outside the DOA period it will take time as the board will have to be tested :( If I had accepted the first board they sent as replacement rather than keep the one I have I would of been far better off. Their website does say that they can send a replacement out straight away in some cases but that the person will be charged if they do not receive the faulty item and that the item is indeed faulty. So there is a small risk.

I have had a look over that RMA policy and it does state that the motherboard can be repaired or replaced. The motherboard has been faulty from new and has not developed a fault in warranty so a new replacement is the only acceptable option to me. That is in my local legal rights, I am not in the USA, I am in the UK. The companies RMA form does state they can only offer a replacement and not a refund as it is outside the time limit. That is fine by me as I only want a working motherboard so a replacement suits me fine. But I have still pointed out that I require a new replacement and not a repair or used item in my RMA request. It seems unlikely that they would attempt a repair as it would be too costly and time consuming for a fault such as this.

I did have one more idea about it and that was it might possibly of been the hard drive, unlikely but I wanted to rule it out as the person I spoke to did state that the more complete the RMA request was the faster it might get finished. I installed windows (how much I dislike doing this is beyond explanation) onto another hard drive which I had not used with this system before as it is a new drive. But after installing and doing the same large tab reload in firefox resulted in the same blue screen, although the first attempt did take 4 tab reloads before blue screening. The second try after restart blued in 2 reloads. So it does seem to happen faster after it has warmed up as I began testing from a cold boot/cold system which had only been on a few minutes.

What is up with 30-40 tabs? Im kinda joking, but only halfway! I use 20 sometimes but you have said 30 so many times just sounded like you have 30 pages set as your homepage! I have 8 so I do see where you are coming from.... Just sounds funny, Imagine GA supports response to that!

lol I always have loads of tabs open in Firefox which load when I start it. 30 to 40 is fairly common but it is sometimes much worse. I visit lots of forums and lots of pages at Doom9 etc, they mount up pretty quickly. You know the king of thing, theinquirer.net and other such sites. lol So I do have more than 30 tabs as my homepages. lol

Good luck, I would let the retailer know what you have read there as well and explain all of this to them as well.

Thanks for that and all the help and support you have given up to now, it's been highly appreciated.
It's been a bit of a nightmare and I have never had this amount of problems with a build before. These motherboard troubles cannot be over soon enough for me.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

Well I wish you luck, and am sorry I could not be of more help

[Fahim]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

Hello,

I bought Q9450, GA-X48T-DQ6 and 2 x 1GB DDR3 1333 last week, and ran through the exact problem. I sent mine back but I did fix it before I sent it back. Flash your board with this bios:

GIGABYTE GA-X48-DS5


Should fix your problem....

[RedDwarf]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

Hello,

I bought Q9450, GA-X48T-DQ6 and 2 x 1GB DDR3 1333 last week, and ran through the exact problem. I sent mine back but I did fix it before I sent it back. Flash your board with this bios:

GIGABYTE GA-X48-DS5


Should fix your problem....

I have not been monitoring this thread as it was open in my 2nd PC.

Thanks for posting. What Bioses are they? Are they just mirrors of the offical Gigabyte Bioses or have they been modified by none Gigabyte people?

There are a number of Bioses on that site for the other DQ6 X48 motherboards, some of which are not on the Gigabyte website but the two Bioses on that site for the DS5 look the same as the ones on the Gigabyte website. I have not checked the files to confirm that they are identical.

Do you have any more information on this?

There is a new official Gigabyte Bios which was released today which makes the DES Advanced work with these motherboards. Whether that will improve anything though is open to question.

[RedDwarf]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

Well after testing, I have flashed back to the previous Bios as the newest Bios was causing very high CPU usage when my PC was doing nothing. This was the same in two windows installs, one with the original DES installed and the other with the new DES Advanced. Un-installing the DES software made no difference.

So it looks like the Bios is doing something with the CPU, maybe it is running something on an interrupt to maintain the DES feature.

If anyone tries the new Bioses I would suggest to check the CPU usage in windows and maybe do some testing to see what performance you get before and after flashing to see if the performance is affected,

I have flashed to the beta Bios and that seems okay, with normal CPU usage, so I will continue with that as it is meant to fix a few issues.

[simk02]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

According to Gigabyte memory QVL, 1066 Mhz Ram has to overcloked to 1200.

Follow this link to the QVL

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/MemorySupport/motherboard_memory_ga-x48-ds5.pdf

[RedDwarf]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

According to Gigabyte memory QVL, 1066 Mhz Ram has to overcloked to 1200.

Follow this link to the QVL
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/...ga-x48-ds5.pdf

I don't think that is strictly true. Those memory modules are rated as overclockable to 1200MHz. Gigabyte didn't test many 1066MHz modules at standard speed. The Bios does support 1066 memory running at 1066 with a 333MHz CPU and that is how I have ran it.

However the stability did seem okay but recently it has become very poor again. With the DES Advanced software running, the CPU voltage, shown by CPU-z, was dropping to 1.05V and running only slightly higher with the frequency at full speed. This has caused regular system freezes and lock ups with a few reboots. Lock ups are the most common. I don't know what is causing it but this system is just not reliable enough as it is.

Uninstalling DES has helped a bit, the CPU voltage is better now, without dropping very much, down to about 1.184V on a 1.2125V VID CPU. But it has not stopped the system freezing/lock ups. The 3.3V reported by Easy Tune 5 is sometimes below spec and below the manufacturers voltage tolerance. Dropping to about 3.18V when my system is overclocked to 3.5GHz. My PC froze on Saturday evening and again on Monday evening at about the same time. I will also say that my PC is powered by an APC 1500 Smart UPS but has also froze when powered from the wall socket.

Bios settings:

http://i44.tinypic.com/2wfk7kh.jpg
http://i43.tinypic.com/fbe0ir.jpg
http://i39.tinypic.com/24exl53.jpg
http://i41.tinypic.com/2gtbwbb.jpg
http://i39.tinypic.com/2mg2jj7.jpg
http://i39.tinypic.com/264ke1z.jpg

So I need some advice on what I need to do to make my system stable. What tests to perform to check it etc.

[simk02]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

Suggest you pull out one memory module and let it run with 2 GB and see what happens.
This is to make sure that the board has enough power to run the ram.
I'm using the same board and can only run 2x1GB of 1200 ram because the board hasn't got enough power to run 4.
I've tried 4 before but the system becomes unstable even after i up the voltage. After pulling 2 out of 4, suddenly the system becomes stable regardless of the memory slot that i used.
Never hang since then.

If it still unstable, test you ram with memtest86.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

If your 3.3V rail is falling out of spec you can RMA the PSU as it is failing, this is not the board doing that. Not sure this would cause your issues though, but if that is correct you can RMA the PSU.


If your Vcore is to low, just try raising it a few notches.

Set Performance Enhance to Standard instead of Turbo, set +0.2 MCH. Then set +0.2-0.3 DDR2 Voltage, this is 2.0-2.1V, not sure what your specs are but Auto generally will only give you 1.8-1.9V

[RedDwarf]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

Suggest you pull out one memory module and let it run with 2 GB and see what happens.
This is to make sure that the board has enough power to run the ram.
I'm using the same board and can only run 2x1GB of 1200 ram because the board hasn't got enough power to run 4.
I've tried 4 before but the system becomes unstable even after i up the voltage. After pulling 2 out of 4, suddenly the system becomes stable regardless of the memory slot that i used.
Never hang since then.

If it still unstable, test you ram with memtest86.

I'm only running 2 Dimms, not 4. 2x2GB. I do have two other 1GB Dimms which are lower speed PC6400 I think they might be. Those I purchased when I was having stability problems after I first re-built with Core2 & X48-DS5. I have seen other people saying they have had problems with this board when overclocking memory but not when trying to run it at standard/default speeds.

If your 3.3V rail is falling out of spec you can RMA the PSU as it is failing, this is not the board doing that. Not sure this would cause your issues though, but if that is correct you can RMA the PSU.

The 3.3Volt line is a difficult one to measure and I don't know what it is used for on this board. Under default conditions it reads 3.26-3.28 according to Gigabyte Easy Tune 5 which is the only thing I have that reports it. I only noticed it dropping when overclocked to 3.5GHz. Very few parts use 3.3 volts to my knowledge, certainly not the Gfx card, CPU, hard drives, optical drives. It's only delivered on the ATX connector.

If your Vcore is to low, just try raising it a few notches.

It was only low when I had DES enabled, since I uninstalled that the VCore has been within the range for my CPU.

Set Performance Enhance to Standard instead of Turbo,

I have already tried that but it made no difference.

set +0.2 MCH.

I have only tried raising that when overclocked. Why should that be necessary when running at defaults?

Then set +0.2-0.3 DDR2 Voltage, this is 2.0-2.1V, not sure what your specs are but Auto generally will only give you 1.8-1.9V

The memory is rated at 2.1V@1066MHz but OCZ say it can run at 2V. I have always kept it at 2V and recently in an attempt to improve stability 2.1V. I don't usually leave the Bios settings at Auto, I prefer to set them to what they are meant to be, specific voltages and timings, all except for some of the more advanced timings which I don't alter, but Refresh to ACT delay I have increased to 72 from 54 with no improvement.

My PC locked up while I was typing the previous reply, it locks while my system is doing next to nothing and seems most stable when stressed. It also froze/locked up early this morning and on Saturday evening and I keep losing work because of it which is really beginning to annoy me.
I did run memtestx86 v4 after it locked up this morning, I left it going for 8 passes which completed without error. I wanted to use the PC so had to stop it.

Is there a reliable way to monitor the voltages? To check whether the PSU is delivering voltages within specification? I think this could be a voltage problem. The 12V voltage reported by Easy Tune 5 is always over 12V so that should not be a problem but it does not report the 5V line for some reason.

There is also another problem with this motherboard. It keeps trashing my Bios settings after a system crash/freeze. If the reset button is pressed and the PC reboots it used to almost always say that there was a Bios checksum error and it would then copy the backup over the main and wipe all saved settings. I re-built the PC and even put in a minimum build but could not get it to re-create the problem. But it did later do it again but it is less common now. When it does happen it is infuriating as it means re-setting up the whole Bios and profiles. I don't know what could be causing this.

There are so many big and small problems with this board, the clock is terribly unreliable, losing minutes a week, even after replacing the mobo battery. It seems like a board with many gremlins that passed the quality control but doesn't work correctly.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-X48-DS5 totally unstable - need some help

+0.2 or above MCH is often needed for 4GB or more, this is perfectly normal and expected with all motherboards from any manufacturer.

You may need to use the full 2.1V, some boards need it or some specific sticks out of a series may not be as good as others so it may be needed in those instances as well. The 2.1V rating only allows you to use that much under warranty, it does not always mean you will need it all, but all sticks in a series should work with that 1.8V through that amount (2.1V). So it is there for your use, if you need it, which you would have to determine by testing.

I use Everest Ultimate to monitor voltages, you can get a trial version here

http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/latest-overclocking-programs-system-info-benchmarking-stability-tools-30530/

Also in that thread is a free tool from the maker of CPU-z called HWMonitor, you can get it above or at the CPU-z site.

I think you just need correct settings is all, it's not really a power issue at all. If you want optimal suggested settings from me please give me your current exact BIOS settings in a template and I will advise back.

BIOS checkum errors are caused by unstable system settings, you need to get your BIOS settings correct and this wont happen.

Clock is unreliable? You mean in your BIOS the clock looses time? If so this could also cause the above Checksum issues, this is caused by a faulty or dying CMOS Battery.

Odd to hear a new one did not help, was it used or new? If you need a cheap place to by new ones let me know, if you are in the US, and I can link you to where I buy them.

You may also want to update to the latest BIOS, F8c
GA-X48-DS5 - GIGABYTE - Support&Download - Motherboard - BIOS

If you do update, please DO NOT USE @BIOS!! Use Qflash or DOS