• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD5 + 2600K - DEFECTIVEx2

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

NickDouglas

New Member
Joined
Jan 15, 2011
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. :D 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
 
Update...

Replacement boards are NOT defective x2! Hooray! :)

We both received our replacement GA-P67A-UD5 boards and installed them. All PCIe and DIMM slots are working.

My i7-2600K (Batch#: L040B208) was stuck at 4.5GHz on stock F2 BIOS and was still stuck at 4.5GHz on the F5 BIOS. Upgrading to beta F6a BIOS finally allowed me to achieve 4.8GHz so far. At 4.8GHz with Prime95 running 8 threads the CPU temp only reaches 56C so heat doesn't seem to be the limiting factor. I'm hoping for 5.0GHz with a little more tweaking.

As for the GA-P67A-UD5 board, overall I'm quite happy now that I have a working copy. Only minor complaint is that after a crash it tends to declare the main BIOS corrupt too often and ends up reloading from the backup BIOS, which is still the stock F2 version. This was very annoying until I figured out that I could copy the main BIOS to the backup BIOS. I wish the ALT+F12 boot option to do that wasn't hidden and didn't require a PS/2 keyboard.

Nick
 
My i7-2600K (Batch#: L040B208) was stuck at 4.5GHz on stock F2 BIOS and was still stuck at 4.5GHz on the F5 BIOS. Upgrading to beta F6a BIOS finally allowed me to achieve 4.8GHz so far.

This sounds similar to the results Asus reported. They tested 100 CPUs and found ~50% of them to be in the 4.4-4.5 range. After a bios update many of them moved to the 4.7-4.8 range. I assume they changed the same thing as gigabyte.
 
124 BCCodefaults

Hi - newbie to doing desktop builds. Mucked about with computers for years tho. Just bought the gigabyte GA-P67A-UD5 fitted with an overclocked i7 to 4.8Ghz; and installed into my old tower which also added a new Power extreme 780W power supply and runninga Corsair liquid cooler fitted by the motherboard supplier.
Had the blue screen fault so changed the video card for an XFX HD5770 1GB DDR5. I just read about the problems with the motherboard so have my 2 hard discs connected to the 2 ok sockets and the DVD on the 3rd socket.
Still getting sudden blue screen crashes (124) - the computer seems ok for a couple of hours then crashes. Might this be a fault on the motherboard like the posts above where the pci socket is faulty?
I bought the board from a UK supplier at the end of January 2011.
(Thing carshed again whilst typing this post!!)
 
Blue screens, especially onces with error code 124, usually mean that your overclock is unstable. You either need to lower the multiplier or raise your voltage to try and get it stable.
 
lol yea i was stuck at 4.4 ghz till i put on the f7b and am now more stable with the f8b bios
 
Back