Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD5 + 2600K - DEFECTIVEx2

[nickdouglas]

This is a story of mega-fail by Gigabyte...

My friend, Chris, and I ordered parts from Newegg last Sunday (9th) to build new Intel Sandy Bridge LGA 1155 systems.

We ordered the same parts except for memory...

-Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80623I72600K
-GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD5 LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
-G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBSR (Nick)
-G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL (Chris)
-CORSAIR HX Series CMPSU-850HX 850W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 80 PLUS SILVER Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
-Thermalright Venomous X - RT 120mm CPU Cooler
-Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - OEM

...and we both of us received DEFECTIVE Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD5 boards. 🙁

By defective I mean, both boards boot, but there is NO DISPLAY if you plug a video card into the 1st PCIe (x16) slot. Both work if you plug the video card into the 2nd PCIe (x8) slot or even the 3rd PCIe (x4) slot. Additionally, on Chris's board, only the 4th DIMM slot works. Plugging RAM into any of the other three DIMM slots on Chris's board makes it unbootable.

The trouble LEDs (awesome feature) on the GA-P67A-UD5 board confirm these problems. When a video card is plugged into the 1st PCIe (x16) slot, the PCIe trouble LED light comes on. When RAM is plugged into the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd DIMM slot of Chris's mobo, the DIMM trouble LED comes on.

Answers to questions you probably have:

Yes, we called Gigabyte Tech Support (626-854-9338) and went through hours of troubleshooting. Gigabyte confirmed that these boards are both defective and should be exchanged. The Gigabyte tech suspects that there is a bad controller chip on this batch of boards. How big is a "batch" I wonder?

Yes, we tried booting them outside of any case. They are resting on the anti-static bags they came in, which are resting on firm antistatic foam sleeves. In or out of a case makes no difference, both boards boot with the same PCIe and DIMM slot defects listed above.

Yes, we tried multiple video cards. We tried two different XFX Radeon 5870 cards, an EVGA GeForce 8800 GT, and an EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX. All these video cards work in these systems (and in our old Core2Quad systems), BUT NOT in the 1st PCIe (x16) slot on our GA-P67A-UD5 boards.

Yes, we tried the DDR3 RAM individually in both boards and in every slot. All the RAM (Sniper and Ripjaws) boots in my GA-P67A-UD5 in any DIMM slot, and all the RAM boots in Chris's 4th DIMM slot. None of the RAM will boot if placed in Chris's 1st, 2nd, or 3rd DIMM slot.

Yes, we tried new firmware. They came with F2, we upgraded to F3, F5 and beta F6a. No change.

No, I don't think we are newbs. We both work in IT as system admins, building and maintaining servers and desktop systems and we have been building our own systems for 10+ years.

No, I'm not here to deride Gigabyte. We like Gigabyte. We both have Intel Core2Quad systems with Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R boards that we built 3.5 years ago. Those systems have been overclocked to 3.6GHz and have been rock solid for 3.5 years. No problems at all.

We have ordered new Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD5 boards from Newegg and opened return RMA's for these defective boards. I'll update after the new boards are installed on Monday night.

Has anyone else had good or bad experiences with a Gigabyte LGA 1155 board?

Nick

 

[kishandb]

I have been unsuccessful at getting my memory to run at 1600MHz even if I set it manually. It detects and boots at 1333MHz and is stable, but if I increase to the rated 1600MHz, Windows crashes. It sucks that 1.5v RAM that is rated for 1600MHz won't run at 1600MHz. I may exchange it as well. At least if I get the "P67" version then they can't use that as an excuse for it not running at 1600MHz.

I would definitely try the beta BIOS version F6a (or whatever is current). If it doesn't work, you can always go back to F5. Don't worry too much about crashing during the upgrade, that's what the dual-BIOS is for. It should boot from the backup if the main BIOS is corrupted. Of course, it is definitely safer to flash your BIOS with the Q-BIOS boot option. You just need the new BIOS on a USB stick formatted with FAT/FAT32. I try not to use the @BIOS application in Windows.

When Windows crashes, what is the error message? If you don't see an error on a blue-screen, then look for it in Computer Management-->System Tools-->Event Viewer-->Windows Logs-->System. It will have a red "!" and Error / BugCheck / Event ID 1001. Open that error and see what the first string of numbers is, like 0x00000124, or 0x0000003b, etc.

Nick

Hi Nick,

These are the error messages that I kept getting when the system crashed.

0x0000001E, 0x0000001A, 0x00000101, 0x00000116, 0x00000124, 0x0000009C, 0x00000050

What do they mean?

Is it really the memory or is motherboard failing? I wrote to Gigabyte and they asked me to try with memory from their compatibility list.

Perhaps I should just get rid of G.Skill all together and for for Kingston and see if that works.

Also, for some reason even when I loaded the default setting, when the PC starts up it says that it's running at 3.5GHz, but I've got a 3.4GHz processor. That doesn't make sense.

Besides, the 1st set of non Ripjaw X (F3-12800CL9Q-8GBRL) memory that I had worked very well on the 1st motherboard which mysteriously stopped working a day after and the retail shop that I bought it said it had burnt !

If the motherboard wasn't this expensive, I would have bought a new board and started from the beginning.

Don.

 

[de Vlieg]

Gigabyte still hasn't changed! LOL!

Gigabyte did the same thing on the UD3R's; I had to RMA 10 defective GA MOBO's in a row - batches can be in the thousands!

IMO exchange for ASUS P8P67 PRO, or ASUS P8P67 EVO ; otherwise hold on for either the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme or EVGA P67 Classified.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007627%20600093976&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&CompareItemList=280|13-131-695^13-131-695-TS,13-157-225^13-157-225-TS,13-128-464^13-128-464-TS,13-131-682^13-131-682-TS

Gigabyte still hasn't changed! LOL!

Gigabyte did the same thing on the UD3R's; I had to RMA 10 defective GA MOBO's in a row - batches can be in the thousands!

IMO exchange for ASUS P8P67 PRO, or ASUS P8P67 EVO ; otherwise hold on for either the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme or EVGA P67 Classified.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007627%20600093976&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&CompareItemList=280|13-131-695^13-131-695-TS,13-157-225^13-157-225-TS,13-128-464^13-128-464-TS,13-131-682^13-131-682-TS

Personally, I am waiting for GA...UD7. Batches CAN be in the thousands. Also, many mfrs make short runs or have minimal beta runs when trying to make shipment deadlines or nose-out competition. Frequently, these can be very buggy. Often they are identifiable by solder boogers and transistors glued in some weird place, front or back. Used Gigabyte for kermit (not easy being green ). It's rock solid, as is OC. UD7 has dizzying array of features in a board built w/mil-spec components and more than x or z, this is more important to me. I don't need it all, but what they do have I need some of and can't find elsewhere in the right quantities.
- de Vlieg READY to UPGRADE
Thermaltake V9 BlacX, Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R , Intel core i7-930, EVGA GeForce 240/1GB, Coolermaster GX Series 750W, coolermaster 212+ cooling, Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, 6 GB DDR3 2000 Corsair, 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM SATA 3Gb/s, 2x Samsung 22x DVD+/-RW w/lightscribe, 1TB My Book essential, LG (Lucky-Goldstar) E2250-SN 22" LED Backlight HD-LCD Display 😗

 

[Crashman]

Hi Nick,

These are the error messages that I kept getting when the system crashed.

0x0000001E, 0x0000001A, 0x00000101, 0x00000116, 0x00000124, 0x0000009C, 0x00000050

What do they mean?

Is it really the memory or is motherboard failing? I wrote to Gigabyte and they asked me to try with memory from their compatibility list.

Perhaps I should just get rid of G.Skill all together and for for Kingston and see if that works.

Also, for some reason even when I loaded the default setting, when the PC starts up it says that it's running at 3.5GHz, but I've got a 3.4GHz processor. That doesn't make sense.

Besides, the 1st set of non Ripjaw X (F3-12800CL9Q-8GBRL) memory that I had worked very well on the 1st motherboard which mysteriously stopped working a day after and the retail shop that I bought it said it had burnt !

If the motherboard wasn't this expensive, I would have bought a new board and started from the beginning.

Don.

Those are all memory addresses. If I'm not mistaken, they're all on the same module. Heck, they might even be on the same memory chip!

 

[bilbat]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750081.aspx

 

[kishandb]

Thanks mate.

I got a refund on the UD5 and bought a ASUS P8P67 EVO. This kept dumping memory as well. So it's definitely the Ripjaws X 8GB modules. I'll be returning them as well and getting my money back. I'll also be returning the ASUS motherboard as my Gigabye 5450 PCI card doesn't work with it. For some unknown reason I get the red LED light next to the card come on. But the card works on my Pentium D !!!.. Huh??? And the Saphire 215Mb card that I have on the Pentium D works on the Asus motherboard.

It's come to a point I've, just decided enough is enough. I'm returning the Asus as well.

Will wait for the new P67 boards to come out in April or May and then go to this one shop that I know quite well by now and get them to build the PC for me.

I'm not wasting anymore of my time doing QA for Gigabyte, ASUS and GSkill... I've been on GSkills forum and a lot of people seem to have problems getting the 1600MHz RAM working.

There are people who do it for a living at the PC parts shop. Will leave it to their expertise. Since I'll be buying all the parts from them, the installation of these are all free.

Thanks heaps guys for all your help and suggestions.

Have a wonderful day.

Cheers.
Don.

 

[kishandb]

Hi Nick,

I finally got the P67GA-UD5-B3 motherboard last weekend. I got the retailer to install the motherboard and also decided to use a different brand of RAM this time.

I got them to install Cosair 1600MHz 8GB.

They had to set the speed manually to 1600, but they didn't use the XMP as they said they have had problem with burn out CPU as it seem to run the memory at a higher voltage than recommended. They said they had to change voltage values, but I think they only changed the SPD to 16.

It ran quite well for a few hours or so, 'till I managed to lock the BIOS by sitting on the F12 key 'cause I wanted to re-install the OS. After the BIOS crashed, it reset the memory frequency to 1333MHz. This was disastrous, as I couldn't even install the OS 'cause it kept crashing so many time, I lost count of it.

'Cause I didn't know what exactly the PC install guys had done, I went into the BIOS and changed the SPD to run at 16 making the memory run at 1600GHz.

This sorted out the crashing issue and ran quite stable for some time. But it still does crash occasionally.

I know if I change the memory to run at XMP, it'll automatically detect the memory modules at 1600 instead of having to change the SPD. What is the advantage of XMP? And is it still unsafe to run XMP?

Final resort is to change the memory modules to 1333 ones so it should definitely work as Intel's speed is capped at 1333.

For the hours that I did manage to get the PC working, it was BLOODY AWESOME !!!! Compared to a Pentium D which is a huge leap for me 🙂

Regards,
Don.

 

[Crashman]

Hi Nick,

I finally got the P67GA-UD5-B3 motherboard last weekend. I got the retailer to install the motherboard and also decided to use a different brand of RAM this time.

I got them to install Cosair 1600MHz 8GB.

They had to set the speed manually to 1600, but they didn't use the XMP as they said they have had problem with burn out CPU as it seem to run the memory at a higher voltage than recommended. They said they had to change voltage values, but I think they only changed the SPD to 16.

It ran quite well for a few hours or so, 'till I managed to lock the BIOS by sitting on the F12 key 'cause I wanted to re-install the OS. After the BIOS crashed, it reset the memory frequency to 1333MHz. This was disastrous, as I couldn't even install the OS 'cause it kept crashing so many time, I lost count of it.

'Cause I didn't know what exactly the PC install guys had done, I went into the BIOS and changed the SPD to run at 16 making the memory run at 1600GHz.

This sorted out the crashing issue and ran quite stable for some time. But it still does crash occasionally.

I know if I change the memory to run at XMP, it'll automatically detect the memory modules at 1600 instead of having to change the SPD. What is the advantage of XMP? And is it still unsafe to run XMP?

Final resort is to change the memory modules to 1333 ones so it should definitely work as Intel's speed is capped at 1333.

For the hours that I did manage to get the PC working, it was BLOODY AWESOME !!!! Compared to a Pentium D which is a huge leap for me 🙂

Regards,
Don.

Most likely cause is that they may have put the memory in the wrong slots. This is particularly a problem with "experienced" builders who refuse to believe that anything has changed. Look inside, the first slot next to the CPU should be empty, the next slot filled, the next slot empty, and the next slot filled. That's backwards from traditional systems.