Motherboard RMA No Fault Found

[just4fun49]

Hello there,

I sent my motherboard and CPU in on Wednesday last week as per recommendation for the issues I was having.
On Thursday before I even woke up both of my parts have been tested with no fault found on the Return Tracking report which quite surprised me.
It's Tuesday today I haven't heard back and haven't got any notification either so far.

I've purchased my parts from Scan this month last year valued £1k minus the RAM.
For the first half of the year my computer has been running superb and almost every day I'd be surprised at how fast it would run/boot up/shut down.

For the second half of the year however I have been getting some strange trouble which eventually I have identified as my motherboard being the problem.

As I have described in my emails I have tested every other part: PSU reads nominal voltages, memtest RAM - no errors, chkdsk/smart/Seagate tools HDD - no errors, GPU switched with onboard GPU - same symptoms.

The symptoms I was getting - slow bootup (and once in Windows all the icons would turn into the white file icon and load back a few at a time), lag when browsing Firefox, freeze where not even the reset button would work (it would shut down instead and power back up), cursor would freeze for half a second intermittently, pops and crackles intermittently emitted into my headphones even when no sound would be played (very strange), these all leading me to believe my motherboard may have a buggy chipset.

Therefore I respectfully ask you to thoroughly retest my motherboard as I'm not very convinced and is clearly not "Working perfectly fine".
To aid with the replicating of faults - as soon as I'd boot up my computer after the Loading Windows screen my computer now sits 10-15 seconds on the Welcome screen and when it would finally load into Windows all my icons would turn into the white file icon and then load back a few at a time. Now this has never happened before as it would usually almost skip the Welcome screen altogether that's how fast it would boot up.
You could perhaps compare with another board.
Then when I would browse Firefox it would be laggy on scrolling - it never used to be that way and ever since February (since I first noticed this problem) Firefox had gone through quite a few updates which haven't fixed it at all.

I also noticed that having LAN Controller Enabled in BIOS would be why my cursor would freeze intermittently and the same with the pops and crackles. These 2 symptoms would not happen while having it disabled (I usually have it disabled because I'm using a WIFI stick anyway).

These are my specs:

ASUS Z87-A
Intel Core i5 4670k
EVGA GTX 770
Crucial Ballistix 8GB 1600
Seagate 1TB 7200RPM 64M
Corsair HX750 750W PSU

RMA: 335327

Thanks.

[smargh]

Did you try a different PSU? How old is your HX750?

Reading a good voltage doesn't necessarily indicate that it can properly support a given load, or it could have a "noisy" output etc leading to odd symptoms.

[just4fun49]

I'm afraid no.
The HX750 is as old as the rest of the system.
I purchased them all from Scan apart from the RAM on June 2013.

While I understand what you mean, it's certainly quite strange. Haven't BSODed once. Games run fine for the most part some of them split second freeze intermittently that haven't before like World of Tanks. Metro 2033 did that as well iirc.

The strange part is when I had the LAN Controller Enabled and I remember how my cursor would split second freeze every now and then. And the pops and crackles even though no sound is playing. The sound part hasn't come back since I recently reinstalled Windows in May but that's when I also switched the LAN Controller off and the cursor micro freezes also went. Now instead whenever I hover my cursor over something that makes it change quickly it glitches out for a split second like in 256 colours. It's like some sort of slowness from behind the scenes.
Plus the boot time that got permanently longer by 10-15 secs (on the Welcome screen) and the slow icon loading, lag in Firefox (laggy smooth scrolling - if I close it and reopen it it's alright for 5-10 seconds then it's starts being slow again) certainly makes you think that something's not in order.

Thanks for the reply.

[just4fun49]

Anyone?

It's been a whole week since I sent in my stuff. No notifications, no mail, no thread answer, no nothing.
I'm starting to lose my optimism.

I've checked the website return tracker yesterday night and I noticed the motherboard testing diagnosis changed from:

Working perfectly fine, no stability issues at all

which was like that until I posted this thread, to

Working perfectly fine, no stability issues at all, system would not boot at first, cleared the CMOS and afterwards booted perfectly fine. Left the system on for 1 hour no issues. Also stress tested the board and CPU using Prime95.

which is quite funny. It's been left vague until I posted a thread.

And "System would not boot at first" why not?
How is it working "perfectly fine" then. The board is faulty.
"Left system on for 1 hour", "stress tested the board and CPU using Prime95" are pointless.
I'm quite aware myself it doesn't BSOD, and the last freeze was one and a half month ago.
While the freeze's intermittent nature I'd have to be incredibly lucky for it to freeze while you're testing it I'd rather you test first the problems that are more common as I've described in my previous post.

I tried RMAing directly to ASUS first but unfortunately they won't deal with customers directly.
I'm hoping I won't be needing to request sending it directly to ASUS to get more reliable results as I've heard they take months to RMA and that wouldn't be ideal.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

[Mark@SCAN]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay.

To answer your questions as to why the system would not boot at first, this was resolved by clearing the CMOS, this normally suggests an an overclock has caused instability. As soon as the CMOS was reset it powered first time and was completely stable throughout our testing which is in contrast to your reported faults:

"Everything feels unstable, games stutter. Boot up is slow every startup. Sound pops ocasionally."

If as per your above post you have suggested the problem is intermittent as happening once every month or so then I am afraid that we are simply not going to be able to replicate that type of fault.

We can if you wish return the board on your behalf through the supply chain back to ASUS for further testing but as you have already alluded to this can take some considerable time and I appreciate that is not convenient.

Regards

[just4fun49]

Hi,

Yeah, no I haven't overclocked at all with my rig. I'm sure I stated that in my original query which unfortunately isn't available for me to prove because I've typed it into your website.

When I said "Everything feels unstable" I meant it more as what smargh said in the 2nd post of this thread "odd behaviours" therefor it doesn't mean "Everything IS unstable".
Which then means the leaving the system on for 1h and stress testing it with prime95 takes us nowhere.
And saying it powered on doesn't prove it has been checked whether it takes long to boot as I've described.

Please take a look at my initial post again in which I've described in detail how I stumbled upon my issues.
I've even posted my specs so you can perhaps stick it into a test rig of similar calibre, then when it powers on, you look at how long it takes to boot up windows 7 and whether it presents the same symptom as I've described as loading icons in a slow manner. You could also go onto firefox and see whether it lags when scrolling.

Thanks.

[just4fun49]

It's been 10 days now (working days), almost two whole weeks and the absolute lack of progress is upsetting to say the least.
I've requested a retest last week which shouldn't take more than 15-20 minutes of using it normally (without benchmarks or stress tests).
The initial tests were inconclusive and I've only realized that after the scan report got expanded last week (see 4th post). Leaving a computer on is hardly a test.
If it turns out once again that it doesn't have any fault which I wouldn't be surprised after seeing literally dozens of scan rma horror stories and complaints, it would be nothing but a massive waste of time.
I was also told it was going to take somewhere between 5 to 7 days.

I'm hopeful I'll be getting more progress soon.

[Mick@SCAN]

just4fun49,

I am sorry for the delay, I am chasing this up with our engineers for you.

Kind regards,

[just4fun49]

Thanks, I'm looking forward to hearing more from yourselves.

[just4fun49]

Any updates?

[Mick@SCAN]

just4fun49,

The engineer has just completed the additional testing and I have updated the RMA for you.

The full report is below:

Running boot traces it takes 32 seconds from BIOS to Desktop. Pre session initialisation takes 5 seconds, session.
Initialisation takes 4 seconds, win logon initialisation takes 12 seconds, explorer initialisation takes 11 seconds. 5+4+12+11=32.

Post boot activity (3rd party apps and drivers loaded) takes a further 18 seconds. On an un-optimised mechanical 1TB Seagate hard drive, this isn’t any slower than any other board that gets tested on this bench. Trace shows disk usage during boot to max out consistently, so this is the bottleneck in my particular test system.

Ran a variety of benchmarking software (PCMark8, BURNIN test) which ran stable for approximately 3 hours. No sound “popping” was heard through headphones either.

The Network controller was enabled throughout all testing, no freezing or lockups occurred within the BIOS with the Network controller enabled.

Windows was reset multiple times by pressing the reset button and by shutting down in Windows, on each occasion the system successfully rebooted and did not shut down.

Both Chrome and Firefox were tested for web browsing, both browsers were very responsive and did not show any lag during scrolling even on image heavy websites.

The engineer has also included a screen shot using Windows Performance Recorder.



I hope you find the report sufficient, our engineers are fully satisfied that the returned components have been tested to be in full working order.

Kind regards,

[just4fun49]

I'm not sure what to say really.
I'm dead convinced it ran relatively slower ever since February when the rest of the issues started popping up as well.

I well remember my system booting to desktop in 20 secs max usually skipping past the Welcome screen altogether with the specs listed above.
Obviously I wouldn't have RMA'd the board just because of a 10 second boot difference, until the other symptoms described above appeared.
Logically I think that the issues are linked together, no way my whole PC is faulty - RAM because it freezes, GPU because firefox lags and games microstutter/split-second freeze or HDD because it boots slowly. I tested them all with relevant tools and even switched parts that I had spares for GPU/HDD.

And in relation to the no-responding reset freeze here's some links I've dug up while researching about the issue that you may find informative:
http://superuser.com/questions/48027...button-takes-a
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answer...tton-work.html
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/s...d.php?t=732709

That being said I respect that you've carried out an in-depth retest as I've requested even though it took awfully long and too many posts in a support forum asking what's going on.
I suppose at this point I have no other choice but to ask to have the items returned back to me, and try and record proof if the issues I have been experiencing are going to reappear, which I feel that they most likely will.
Asap would be ideal as I will be heading off for 3 weeks from Tuesday.

Thanks.

[just4fun49]

Excellent.
I've received an email today saying that I'm expected to pay £20+vat in order to have the items returned to me which I've never even been notified about in the first place.
I find this to be quite unreasonable.
A friendly notice stating what I'm in for from the get go would've been useful to be honest.
Also when the price is 1 third of the culprit part it's no small amount either. I could just rather put that money together 3 times and have a new one altogether.

Basically I've been without my computer for quite a while now. I came to this forum to try and speed up the process after getting no progress from the start. Regardless it still took quite a substantial amount of time for a test which should've been carried out from the start. The issues have not been rectified and now I'm expected to pay money that I wasn't even expecting in the first place.

I've already paid £8 to have it delivered to you and now added with this essentially all it is is an expensive tour of England for my computer parts.

I'm disappointed.

[MrRockliffe]

Didn't realise this was in the after sales section - please remove.

[DavidM]

http://forums.hexus.net/scan-care-he...ease-read.html

[just4fun49]

That's pretty poor on scans behalf, in the sense that they didn't tell you cost before hand. I had no idea either. One question - did you install windows as a new install or transfer it over?

I use a seagate barracuda and don't personally encounter these errors. I have fixed a computer with similar issues however, and it turned out to be a virus. It was causing intermittent slow downs that were also quite frequent.

I always do it fresh whenever I reinstall my Windows, and every since February I have reinstalled numerous times.
I also use malwarebytes' and I scanned numerous times with it as well. It'd have to be one hell of a resilient virus haha but I took it into consideration as well.
I'm confident my system is virus free.
Ever since february I've been on the case of trying to find and solve these issues and after all that time I can say I'm confident it's the motherboard that is the culprit. But oh well, It's been tested and I respect that I can't outright tell them they're wrong.
It is beyond upsetting though that this fee has just popped up out of nowhere. If that was the case before raising an RMA I would've put more effort and perhaps try and record the faults I've been having before all.

Thanks for your reply.