3XS Cyclone RAM Fault

[Thorbog]

This morning it's back to 6GB. I have restarted 3 or 4 times and still 6GB. I'll keeping monitoring to see if it happens again.

Are you sure you didn't double boot it for some reason this morning? It only has to shut down for a second and it will reboot with the full quota?


By the way I wasn't sent those new BIOS drivers. No idea why I am always missed off the distribution for these things given that I was the thread starter of all people

Anyway PM sent...

[PeteG@Scan]

Sorry, it appears we didn't have a ticket open for you. I've added you to my support folder now so you'll be notified in future.

Also Ben is sending out a round of bioses so you should receive one later today in your mail.

[B.E.A.N]

Thorbog,


No did not double boot it, had my normal 8hrs game time turned it off at three restarted at half four and it was still showing 6GB as it is this morning. I received the beta bios Ben sent so I will keep monitoring today as will be on and off a few times (leaf clearing day garden and house gutters) and if it plays up again I will try the Beta bios.

[Winterlove]

Bad news, I'm afraid.

My fixed system is simply not stable. It stayed up all yesterday (it was mostly idle, once it had copied some stuff from the RAID stuff to an external HDD, something which took some hours). When I got back from work it was as I left it.

However, this morning I fired it up for a bit before work. I experienced some random crashes in Firefox and the window manager, and two BSODs (both reporting a page fault in a non-paged area). What I plan to do is put all the overclock settings, etc, back to default values (I've taken photos of the overclocked BIOS setup) and see if that is stable. I've also made sure that power connectors are firmly attached, etc.

I'll let you know how I get on.

[Thorbog]

Thorbog,


No did not double boot it, had my normal 8hrs game time turned it off at three restarted at half four and it was still showing 6GB as it is this morning. I received the beta bios Ben sent so I will keep monitoring today as will be on and off a few times (leaf clearing day garden and house gutters) and if it plays up again I will try the Beta bios.

I installed that new BIOS last night.

Firstly it does fix the problem with the last two BIOS versions that seem to cause the system to hang for ages on a cold boot and take a long time for anything to appear on the screen.

It now boots up at full speed again!

I shut down at 10pm last night and turned it on at 7am this morning...

2GB of RAM.

So that didn't work

I then loaded the standard profile which is claimed to have a 100% success rate when using defaults. Of course by then it was warm so I shut it down and came to work.

When I get home tonight I will cold boot it and see if it detects all my RAM at stock.

[PeteG@Scan]

The boot up time issue was fixed I was told by ASUS by adjustments to the ram detection algerthyem.

Let us know how you get on with stock settings this evening.

[Thorbog]

Booted up when I got home in stock settings and........

2GB!!!

Oh well make that 99% and not 100%

So what about my OC settings? Are these correct or would you suggest some changes? Below are what I was told to use with the first beta BIOS I was given and in brackets are what the settings were for the OC profile when I got it out of the box.

AI Tweaker:

CPU Overclock Tuner - Manual
CPU Ratio Setting – 20.0
Intel Speedstep Tech - Disabled
Xtreme Phase Full Power Mode – Enabled (Mine was originally set to Auto)
BCLK Freq - 200
PCIE Freq - 100
DRAM Freq – DDR3-1603MHz
UCLK Freq – 3408MHz
QPI Link Data Rate - Auto

CPU Voltage Control - Manual
CPU Voltage – 1.33750
CPU PLL Voltage – Auto (Mine was originally 1.80)
QPI/DRAM Core Voltage – 1.30000
IOH Voltage - Auto
IOH PCIE Voltage - Auto
ICH Voltage - Auto
ICH PCIE Voltage - Auto
DRAM Bus Voltage - 1.64v (Mine was originally 1.65v)

Loadline Calibration: Enabled
CPU Differential Amplitude: 800mV (Mine was originally 700mV)
CPU Clock Screw – Normal (Mine was auto)
CPU Spread Spectrum - Disabled
IOH Clock Screw – Normal (Mine was on auto)
PCIE Spread Spectrum - Disabled

DRAM Timing Control:

DRAM CAS Latency – 9 (Was on Auto)
DRAM RAS to CAS Delay – 9 (Was on Auto)
DRAM RAS PRE Time – 9 (Was on Auto)
DRAM RAS ACT Time – 24 (Was on Auto)
DRAM Timing Mode - 2T (Was on Auto)

Advanced -> CPU Configuration:

CPU Ratio Setting – 2.0
C1E Support - Disabled
Hardware Prefetcher - Enabled
Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch - Enabled
Intel Virtualization Tech - Disabled
CPU TM Function - Disabled
Execute Disable Bit - Enabled
Intel HT Technologhy - Enabled
Active Processor Cores - All
A20M - Disabled

Intel PPM Configuration:

Intel Speedstep - Disabled
Intel C-STATE Tech - Disabled

[PeteG@Scan]

That all looks pretty much in the ballpark that'd I would expect for an overclocked Asus.

[Thorbog]

Just a further note for anyone like BEAN considering using this BIOS.

I have discovered over the past few days that it is actually less reliable when it comes to booting whilst overclocked.

On previous versions I could turn on the PC, let it reach the Windows logon screen, shut down, turn on immediately and it would boot up with my full 6GB of RAM. That process was 100% reliable.

However since installing this latest BIOS on all but the first day the PC has booted the second time with 4GB instead of the 6.

So it solves the problem of the booting speed but makes warm booting less reliable often requiring two or three attempts. So it is less reliable than the BIOS which came with my machine which booted fast and had a 100% reliable RAM detection on warm boot!

Unfortunately I can't remember the version number and don't have a copy anyway otherwise I'd roll it back.


Edit: checked my invoice - 0402. Anyone got a copy?

[Winterlove]

Right, just to keep anyone interested up to date, it seems my problems have been sorted. It took a while, because the new RAM that was put into my new motherboard (original RAM went back to Asus, along with the old motherboard and CPU) turned out to have a faulty stick in it. Once the replacement RAM had been re-replaced, the machine works fine. Sees all 12Gb and is a very nippy and responsive machine. Just what I ordered, in fact

It's taken longer than it should have done to get to this point, but I cannot fault 3XS's attitude towards this problem and their responsiveness in getting to the bottom of it. Thanks, guys.

[PeteG@Scan]

Thorbog - I've just sent you through the 0402 bios as requested as well as the 0503 bios that we just received moments ago (as I sent the first one). Give them a try and see what you think. The previous offer still stands as Winterlove's proved to be an unrelated memory fail and not one caused by this issue and we now have it resolved for him.

Pete.

[B.E.A.N]

PeteG@Scan,

Received the 0503 thanks, not sure if I should use it as apart from blip for a couple of days it is still showing the full 6GB, so I am not sure if my slight problem was the same as Thorbog and Winterlove.

Winterlove,

Glad to hear that you are now up and running at last and I hope that the 0503 Bios works for Thorbog.

[Thorbog]

DON’T INSTALL THE 503!!!!!!!!!!!!

I installed it last night and logged off with unlocked settings.

Cold booted this morning and it blue screened when Windows started to load saying disk errors and running disk checks blah blah. First time I have ever seen that happen!

Then it rebooted and basically just went into a blue screen loop every time windows started loading.

So when it rebooted again I went into the BIOS and loaded the OC profile, which when you save and exit causes the machine to shut down properly (the fans stop for a second) and then warm boot.

That time it loaded but wanted to check the disk for errors and Windows reported it had recovered from a serious error blah blah.

So looks like I will roll it back to the older BIOS tonight, just hope it was misreporting the disk error.

My patience has expired. I think ASUS have a hardware issue with their mobos and it will never be fixed with BIOS updates.

[PeteG@Scan]

Unsure what's happened there but you may wish to lay off it B.E.A.N until further feed back is gathered. I suspect it's something in the bios that has been changed as a new default and it's looking for driver support that's not there (ACPI change maybe for instance: ) but until I can get some feedback to the ASUS guys I obviously can't say.

We're arranging to get Thorbogs system back now so I'll check that over on arrival and if I can't narrow down the problem with the update we'll look at passing it back to ASUS to look over.

[Thomas_Asus]

Hi Thorbog,

I am sorry to hear your experience with the 0503 BIOS. May I please ask what the error message was saying when you was loading up Windows? Also, did you clear the CMOS after upgrading the BIOS? If the CMOS is not reset our new core Kernel will in many cases not operate correctly as we have made a lot of changes to it.

Best regards,
Thomas.

[Thorbog]

Ok here is a description of how the fault occurred and I have attached links to screenshots of the error message.

Firstly in a month of constant usage and BIOS updates I haven’t had this problem before. In fact I even commented to PeteG by PM before this happened that I was reluctant to send back the PC as it is so stable and never reports errors or blue screens.

I installed the new BIOS early yesterday evening.

When the BIOS had installed it said it would shut down the machine. When it shut down I turned off the PC at the mains. I then pressed the CMOS reset button a few times and also held it down for over 10 seconds for good measure.

I turned on the machine and went through the usual process of running setup, saving a standard profile and creating the OC profile (my settings are listed in a previous posting) etc. The machine booted fine at this point but of course it was warm booting…

I benchmarked it and it performed exactly as expected. I then went on a Warcraft raid for a few hours with no issues. I did not install anything or do anything unusual that evening.

It was time for bed so I decided to load the standard profile as I figured that would have the best chance of a successful cold boot when I woke up. So I restarted and went into the BIOS and selected the standard profile.

On selecting Save + Exit the machine as per normal shut down fully with the fans switching off for a couple of seconds and then booted up from afresh (but still “warm”). The machine booted into Windows perfectly fine with no errors. It was still reporting 6GB or RAM and now showing 2.8Ghz when I looked in System. So I shut down.

I must emphasise that part because I basically booted the machine from it being completely turned off, it loaded up with absolutely no errors. I then did absolutely nothing to it aside from going to control panel/system and observing the numbers and shutting down.

The next time I touched it was when I turned it on some 6 hours later when I woke up. At that point I got the error messages which must be related to this cold boot issue given what I said above.

Needless to say after turning the machine off and on again I was able to get it to boot up on a warm boot.

I came home tonight and again it refused to boot up and just went into a BSOD cycle of blue screen – reboot – blue screen – reboot etc. After turning the machine off (as opposed to rebooting) it then loaded up fine from a warm fresh boot.

Error screenies, sorry about the flash:

http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/2599/85271540.jpg

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/3815/48575276.jpg

http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/197/33386929.jpg