Having build problems.

[Terbinator]

I created a thread on Aria as that's where i bought the stuff from but it can't help to post here as well. I've quoted my OP for ease of use:

Evening guys and gals.

As some of you may remember (most likely not) i bought some components a while back to build a PC for my brother. To cut a long story short its not quite been right from day one but due to various reasons i didn't have time to sort it out as, mainly, i was having a month out in Europe.

Any how, i think the board is knackered. It's an ASRock Z75 Pro 3 and has a multitude of issues in relation to booting/restarting and BSOD'ing.

Firstly i installed the Win 8 CP on it just to get it up and running and it wouldn't run at all after installing, it would get to the Windows loading screen then reboot - rinse and repeat. I've tried Win 7 on it and the same thing happens. Eventually i managed to get Windows 7 to be have itself but even now he gets BSOD's and reboots for no reason what so ever. Also, on a few of the files have magically disappeared from the desktop, i mean literally vanished. For instance, I've copied the driver folder for the board to the desktop, installed and a given driver, restarted, and the folder has decreased in size from say 300MB to 250MB.

Other issues with driver installations on a clean Win7 install include constant crashes with every new driver installation. To get a driver that you want to install you have to install the one you want, then another one on top of that, reboot, let it crash, reboot in safe mode then remove the latest driver install. another issues is that sometime it will just boot to the BIOS. The HDD shows up in the device management (Samsung F3) but the only way to boot into Windows is by ctrl+alt+del. Exiting with/without saving settings results in another boot to the BIOS until you ctrl+alt+del.

It appears I'm not the only one to experience these sort of issues with the board. ASRock did release a BIOS update specifically targeting Win 8 restart/shutdown issues but it made no difference whatsoever.

I'll try and get a video of when it happens/what occurs but i don't really want to get caught in a constant wrangling of RMA'ing back and forth so any advice is appreciated.

Edit: Should point out all the other components work fine:

Pentium Dual-Core 620.
2x4GB Excelleram
Radeon 5850
Samsung F3 500GB
Corsair VX550.

If you can read through the thread there are some pictures he managed to take whilst I've been away showing some BSODs and i ran Memtest86 last night and it came back fine yet one BSOD mentioned memory parity error.

I'm genuinely stumped.

[shaithis]

Sounds like a dry solder point on the mobo somewhere.

[Terbinator]

Sounds like a dry solder point on the mobo somewhere.

Sorry for being dense, but what would that do exactly? Is it something that i could look out for and then mention in a covering letter for an RMA?

I'm going to try his CPU/RAM/HDD in my build (to the left) and see if everything is still fine. It's annoying that i can't confirm its the board exactly due to the intermittent nature of the issue.

[oa786gunneruk]

I seem to think also it maybe an issue with the soldering on the motherboard.

[shaithis]

Very hard to spot a dry solder joint.....when people repair them they normally re-flow the entire board or area of the board.

The other possible thing would be a short on the back of the motherboard if a stand-off isn't aligned with a screw hole.....or the outside possibility that you have used washers on all the mobo screws stopping any ground return.

[Domestic_Ginger]

I would look to find a test that it repeatedly fails as to show the problem if you are looking to return the beast.

My first port of call would be the HDD; It seems to run okay except when you restart etc and you're losing files. Can you run a disc checker or boot from a USB and then run diagnostics? No dodgy bios settings I presume.

Prime may be worth while if you're checking memory too.

[Zak33]

Terbinator.. 2 things mate

ONE: download MemTest, burn it to a CD and boot from it. It runs in Linux, tests the ram and is worth doing. One stick or memory that's unhappy and you will never find the randomness of the problems. I have never used Excelram.. but it's worth knowing if it's dodgy.

SECOND: if the rams ok and the cpu is ok... then just get a new board and reinstall from new.
MSI uATX boards are cheap, and assuiming I have the right socket here
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/msi-h...oard-micro-atx

is £35 not worth it to get a proper job, done and dusted?

[Terbinator]

Terbinator.. 2 things mate

ONE: download MemTest, burn it to a CD and boot from it. It runs in Linux, tests the ram and is worth doing. One stick or memory that's unhappy and you will never find the randomness of the problems. I have never used Excelram.. but it's worth knowing if it's dodgy.

SECOND: if the rams ok and the cpu is ok... then just get a new board and reinstall from new.
MSI uATX boards are cheap, and assuiming I have the right socket here
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/msi-h...oard-micro-atx

is £35 not worth it to get a proper job, done and dusted?

Memtest comes back all fine, if you can't/don't want to see the thread on Aria here is Memtest results:


Now you can see my issue. One of the BSOD's claims a RAM issue, Memtest says its all good (as does windows own memory diagnostic thing). I don't really want to buy another board, move everything over and then get the same issues as it still leaves the CPU/HDD open to issue. Not only that, the various errors don't seem to be able to be forced on. As per my OP, originally i had tonnes of issues getting Windows to install, drivers would corrupt the installation and just plain weird behaviour - which led me to believe its motherboard/HDD related, mainly the former, as the HDD was fine in a previous build.

[Terbinator]

Update:

HDD isn't showing up under the 'Health' tab in HDTune but is under the error scan - which it passes 100%. It doesn't show up in SeaTools either, but the drive is there under Computer showing the partitions etc. When i ran SeaTools in my brothers PC it passed SMART but hung on the Long Generic and required a reboot. It wouldn't be so bad if the drive did fail SeaTools as its in warranty until March. As it stands, i can't get the drive to fail SeaTools and get an error code to send it off.

So it seems HDD and/or the motherboard are at fault, although that was my initial thoughts anyway

[TT1990]

Hey, i know i'm new to the Fourms and all but i'm gonna throw in my two cents.

I wouldn't trust that Your ram is 100% OK based off of that Memtest result. I think you should re-run the test on each of your 4GB DIMMs individually, as from my experience memtest86 is not 100% accurate when working on multiple DIMMS.

[technodean]

Be aware with memtest, running just one pass, doesn't mean its good, as you can see by my shot, this is what happened when I let it run into its second pass.

[maverick77_uk]

Hi there,

On my latest build (Asrock AM3), I had very similar problems to you. memory passed memtest, etc etc. but I had random stability issues. To cut a long story short, I was using generic memory (Ultimem, if I remember right), that seemed to be working fine. It was 1333 (666) Ram, anyway, I turned it down to 1066 (533), and my problems vanished. I've since got some branded (Corsair) RAM, that runs fine at the proper speed.

It's a long shot, but try turning your RAM down in BIOS and see what that does to stability. My cheapo Ultimem RAM runs fine in other computers - that particular motherboard just had some compatibility issue when running the RAM at full whack.

Cheers.