Upgrade Rant (Sabertooth 990FX 2.0 & FX8350 Issues)

[Dooms]

As some of you know (from the Battlefield 4 Thread) I decided to spend my 290X money on a Sabertooth 990FX, FX8250, a 2nd 7950 and some Noctua fans...

Well I had a crappy Saturday getting it all sorted and I do want to rant and maybe help out someone else who might end up having the same problems and searches for Sabertooth & 8350


8:20: I get a e-mail saying my Delivery from DPD will be between 8:30-9:30 - Awesome, I love DPD.
8:35: 7950 Delivered
9:00: 2 Amazon packages containing Mobo, CPU, Fans Delivered

Still waiting on Thermal paste.

Decide I will start doing to swap over so replace case fans with Noctua, replace the 2x Corsair fans on the H100i with 4x Noctua fans, replace mobo/CPU and fit the 2nd 7950... do some fancy cable tidying as I had nothing better to do.

16:30: Still no Thermal paste, call Amazon, Oh its with Royal Mail... No chance of delivery (even though I ordered with Guaranteed Saturday).
16:45: F**K it! Pull out the H100i and stick the dirty stock cooler in there just so I can get everything up and running and install a fresh copy of Windows 8.1

Now here is where things got angry.

Turn it on... No boot, no beeps, no display.

"Ah maybe its a XFire issue"
Pull one card, still the same. Swap cards. Still the same.

Unplug everything other than 1 GPU, 1 Stick of Ram, Power & Power switch cable. Still the same.

Swap the ram... still the same.

Start Googling... Oh it seems that the Sabertooth 990FX 2.0 ONLY SUPPORTS FX CHIPS AFTER A CERTAIN BIOS VERSION - WHAT THE F**K?! With the majority of the internet saying "oh stick in an older AMD chip, boot, update BIOS" or "Send it back to the supplier and demand a working one" which are both fixes but are retarded I started getting angry.

Turns out you can use a USB Stick & BIOS Flashback to flash a new bios without booting however all the offical asus documentation on the Flashback feature don't include the Sabertooth 990FX on the listing which means you can't find out what to name the bios file for the flashback feature to pick it up.

More google and plenty of forums later you have the following procedure:

1. Format a USB stick to FAT16 or FAT32
2. Download the latest BIOS from the Asus website, extract the zip onto the USB Drive
3. Rename the BIOS file to ST990R20.CAP
4. Put the USB drive into the Flashback USB port (dedicated port, next to the button on the back of the board).
5. Without turning the system on, push and hold the Flashback button for 3ish seconds until it starts blinking blue.
6. Wait for it to stop blinking, 1-2 minutes.
7. Remove USB and start up as usual.

After getting it to boot into BIOS I then plugged everything back in and everything else was fine but man what a mission!

/rant

Got some thermal paste of a work mate today and will get the H100i back in my machine tonight and then can see what this chip will clock to.

[herulach]

Just to rub salt into the wound, I put a sabertooth in last wednesday, and it booted first time with an fx 6300. Are you sure its an R2.0? Maybe just old stock?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

What a fail on the part of Asus. The R2.0 boards were released months after Piledriver came out.

Edit!!

Make sure you have an R2.0 board though!!

[cptwhite_uk]

Ahh the joys of home PC building. I bet you were doubting which were the dead components. I'm in a similarly frustrating situation after a CPU burnt out (I know, I couldn't believe the CPU had gone, never had that happen). After trying another motherboard I finally narrowed it down to the CPU. Borrowed a working CPU and motherboard (just in case) back from a good internet friend's. Tested my mobo with basic celeron, it booted. Yep confirms it's the CPU. Ordered a new CPU (wrong socket), ordered a 2nd CPU, DOA (tested in both motherboard, both of which worked fine with the celeron). Now I wasn't sure if the PSU was killing the higher rated CPU due to increased wattage, so I'm binning the motherboard and PSU and ordering a new setup AMD quad core as it's just not worth the stress for such old cheap hardware! (it was core2duo stuff and a cheapo gigabyte board).

[Dooms]

Defiantly a R2.0 and the box even had Windows 8 & FX 9xxx compatible stickers over it! Guessing it was old stock board which they then reboxed/stuck stickers on. Very annoying.

Ah well its done now and I've got some spare thermal paste in my hand to get the H100i back in tonight so I can test the OC.

[Dooms]

So last night I got the H100i back in last night and started playing with overclocking...

I started by just sticking the FX8350 straight upto 5Ghz @ 1.5v just to see what happens. Seemed quite stable but within 3rd pass on PRIME95 the temps were up in the high 80's so I killed that off and decided to have a proper go and getting something usable.

Went for 4.8Ghz @v 1.4 and seemed to be fine in about 30min of PRIME with temps maxing out at 49C - Great!

Now for the GPU's...

1150 Core / 1350 Memory / 1.19v - Crash
1150 Core / 1350 Memory / 2.25v - Crash
1150 Core / 1250 Memory / 1.19v - Crash

Sigh. The issue is that I'm xFire but can't be arsed to test the individual cards at the moment so I'm just throwing things around in linked mode to see if there is something both cards are happy with.

Dropped CPU down to 4.4Ghz @ Stock Voltage and stuck GPU's at 1050 Core / 1250 Memory / Stock Voltage.

Testing time!

[Dooms]

So spec of my machine now:

AMD FX 8350
Corsair H100i with 2x 120mm Noctua
Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0
16Gb (2x 8Gb) Corsair Vengeance LP
256GB Samsung 840 SSD
2x HIS IceQ 7950 BOOST 3GB
Fractal R4 - 3x 140mm & 2x 120mm Noctua case fans

3DMark Demo:
CPU - Stock
GPU - Stock (Single GPU)
Score: 5897

CPU - Stock
GPUs - Stock (xFire)
Score: 8828

CPU - 4.4Ghz @ Stock Voltage
GPUs - 1050 Core / 1250 Memory / Stock Voltage (xFire)
Score: 9906



Quickly stuck BF4 on Ultra everything @ 1440p last night and it was doing fine but yet to test it when s**t hits the fan!