Troubles with Threadripper 2950/ ASRock Fatal1ty Installing WIndows

[rkoenn]

I am building a high end workstation for a rocket scientist buddy. Yesterday I received the CPU, MB, and NVME SSD. I assembled them very carefully and used 2 4GB sticks of Corsair DDR4 from my machine to fire it up. (I have 128GB of "certified" HyperX DDR4 coming tomorrow) It fired up fine although it did this quirky thing where it would start for about 5 seconds with the problem number panel changing but shutdown and then restart and then run to BIOS screen. So it looked good and no smoke. However I then tried to install windows and numerous times it goes through the pre-load and hits the screen "Starting WIndows" and then the machine completely reboots. I've tried various BIOS settings and turned off IOMMU because I read it can cause problems with no luck. I've tried two different memory sticks of memory from my machine and a different video card as well as removing the SSD and trying a HDD. It still does this. I will withhold judgement until the new memory arrives tomorrow but I am getting concerned of possibly a MB problem. One other thing to consider is when I changed out the memory this morning for two of the same types of sticks it does seem to have ended that start/stop/start thing so I am thinking it could be memory. Thoughts are greatly appreciated.

 

[rkoenn]

I got the new certified memory and used two sticks and just after the Starting Windows appeared on the screen the machine hard booted. I then took the CPU out and looked at everything. I was thinking possibly a pin had not connected that still allowed it to fun until that lead was needed. Taking the CPU out of the slide in frame I kind of thought it might not have been in exactly correctly so was hoping that was the problem. However after putting everything back together very carefully and firing up again I still have the Windows startup reboot happening. I am beginning to suspect the MB but it is very difficult to diagnose so I may just have to go back to Newegg and request a replacement. I'll see if ASRock offers any assistance first but from what I know they aren't the greatest.

 

[rkoenn]

I got the new certified memory and used two sticks and just after the Starting Windows appeared on the screen the machine hard booted. I then took the CPU out and looked at everything. I was thinking possibly a pin had not connected that still allowed it to fun until that lead was needed. Taking the CPU out of the slide in frame I kind of thought it might not have been in exactly correctly so was hoping that was the problem. However after putting everything back together very carefully and firing up again I still have the Windows startup reboot happening. I am beginning to suspect the MB but it is very difficult to diagnose so I may just have to go back to Newegg and request a replacement. I'll see if ASRock offers any assistance first but from what I know they aren't the greatest.

 

[rkoenn]

I was about ready to resign I had a MB problem but decided that because I didn't have any other options before the return I would flash the BIOS from 3.30 to 3.50. I didn't expect this to correct my problems and was a bit hesitant because I have had flash failures before. So I prepared the USB with the BIOS and carefully did the flash. All went well and because of the size took much longer than I am accustomed to. It fired right up after and I watched as it loaded the Windows installation files. When it hit the "Starting Windows" message I held my breath but it went right through and I was ready to go. Then I found that my keyboard and mouse were useless as I was doing Win 7 and it doesn't support USB 3 OOB. My buddy wanted 7 but when I told him AMD Threadripper did not have native Win 7 support he agreed on 10. SInce this is a dedicated number crunching machine I will remove any other windows crap he does not need for that job. I also in increments installed all 128GB of HyperX and that looks good too which I was fearful might cause problems. Now we have to wait for the Quadro RTX 2080 card and a 2TB NVME drive and the machine should be ready to go. He told me he currently has his older Intel machine running turbo charger turbine simulations and it takes over 36 hours so far. We're hoping we cut that time significantly with this machine.