Little help here

So my 955 be ive been running at 4.0ghz for a year on water. Temps never got over 55c.

Had psu power cabled melt into motherboard 4 pin. Dead mobo dead psu.

So i bought a am3 board gigabyte 990fxa ud3, and two sticks of corsair vengeance 1866 ram.

Put it all back together booted up didnt reformat, i had previously used a gigabyte 770 chipset board.

Ran fine until i ran prime at stock settings. Fails blend test not overclocked at all.

So these boards have bios issues. updated to newest beta bios. Problem is i cant get the ram or prime blend to pass at stock settings. doesnt matter if its set at 1333 or 1600mhz, timings, or cpunb volts. bumped ram voltage no luck.

Is it possible the power supply damaged the cpus imc, the mem test failures happen at multiple addresses. Tried switching slots no luck there either. plays games fine all but not as smooth as before, and bootups are a lot slower.

cant tell its the boards crapppy unstable bios or the imc or the memory any suggestions?

Did you uninstall the old mobo drivers and install the proper ones? Does it fail bootable memtest or just some in-Windows test?

Yeah, you really need to do a clean OS reinstall. You can't draw any conclusions about the hardware until you do that. If you have a spare hard drive just do a Windows install for testing purposes without messing with all the data backup on you main disk. If it doesn't help the problem you haven't lost anything.

Ya i guess thats an option. however i ran tests in safemode still had errors, wouldnt that eliminate the driver conflict, as i already uninstalled and reinstalled new ones prior. Running bootable mem test 86 i used it in windows before.

Yeah, that sounds alike a reasonable assumption but you neglected to mention in your original post that you uninstalled the drivers and then installed the correct ones.

Ok another monkey wrench here....

Ran boot loaded memtest 86 passed two full runs at diff speeds. Also passed windows mem diagnostic. I'm gonna go ahead and re install windows. See if that fixes the issues.

So let me tell you how little fun the 990fxa ud3 is... I almost rma ed the whole setup for a refund.

The bios es are crap. The beta is better then the default f2 which is shipped with it, but still barely lets u in the boot menu straight slammin the delete key in time trying to catch it.. lol

After reformatiing and everything it was still unstable, but i realized the board likes to undervolt on default settings. I re adjusted the voltages and finally was able to get a decent oc stable for 6 hours prime.

If your looking for a board that doesnt take two days to get the kinks out of driver wise, bios wise, this isnt the one for your. I am however pleased that my cpu survived the meltdown from the old psu.

this 955 is a champ, can't wait for bulldozer! however the board is another story first time gigabyte has let me down on stability and drivers and overall experience.

Gigabyte seems to have more than their share of buggy bios problems both in my experience and in my observation here on the forum of others' experience. The 990 chipset is still relatively new, however, and one would hope Gigabyte gets things ironed out soon and we can say the chipset has matured.

I remember back when Phoenix/Award dropped motherboard bios support as we knew it. Some used Award for a while after Phoenix dropped out of the motherboard bios business. They still make bioses for servers and mobile systems, but according to their site that is about it. Oh yes, imbedded systems.

In fact just checking they have removed the year or so old references to the Award 6.xxx series of bios.

Little update here on my unstable system fun. Weeks later i cant get rid of the instability. I get random kernel power crashes, other assorted errors, Wont pass prime blend.

Tried ram sticks separately didnt matter. All my voltages look ok. No fluctuaions more then enough power from the psu for a single gpu setup. Im hedging my bets at this point that the processor is damaged, since its the only piece of hardware that isnt brand new, and since mem test and single ram stick tests, yielded no clues. It fails prime blend no matter the stick. I get random raid error messages, allication hang and lag randomly, not related to temps im idleing at 27 full load is 35. I ordered a 1090t off newegg for 159, even though i was trying to hold out for bulldozer, but i want to run two 6950s in crossfire and i really like this board and the dual x16 pcie lanes for crossfire.

My logic is that since the 12v rail to the cpu is the one that melted onto the board it must be the cpu. I also did notice some degredation it seemed while playing black ops before the meltdown occured.
Ive reassembled, re seated, everything, different slots etc, and its such a odd instability. Sometimes ill make it in blend to the third test sometimes ill fail within seconds. Ive updated bioses multiple times, cleared cmos and left battery out for hours. Random ethernet issues, too. Ive checked all my drivers many times.

My temps were fine after i got my wc ing loop but before that on air i didn push it to its limits. Not to mention i ran it @ 1.5v 24/7 for a while. When i was ocing on the stock heatsink i did hit 63 a few times on the core. But it seemed ok for a good long while aftyer i got my temps in order.

All in all, i have no complaints, i got two years outta the chip with a nice overclock, im still using it as i wait for the 1090t to play with while i get rdy to see if i just go sandy or dozer. Its the first time ive ever damaged, or killed a cpu, but i guess well see when i get the 1090t here.

I reinstalled many times, updated all drivers, and i felt from the very first install of windows it was acting slower and less stable then it used to be. I just cant believe that both ram sticks are bad, and its only logic that its the only piece of hardware that was directly connected to the meltdown that i didnt replace. Not to mention my 955 always seemed to have a flaky imc.

Going for a 4.4 on my 1090 if it is stable at stock! Hopefully bulldozer is decntly in sandybridge range! i love this board!

Also cpu usage in black ops pegs at 100 perc on all cores and i dont remeber it ever using that much playing the game.

considering your not suppose to go past 1.475 volts, and that you ran it at 1.5volts 24/7, i think its safe to say, your CPU has kicked it. I run the same cpu, on 3.8ghz no probs. on a gigabyte board, And no, it shouldnt use 100% on all cores playing black ops, i only ever reached 50% on all cores.

Madengineer said:

considering your not suppose to go past 1.475 volts, and that you ran it at 1.5volts 24/7, i think its safe to say, your CPU has kicked it. I run the same cpu, on 3.8ghz no probs. on a gigabyte board, And no, it shouldnt use 100% on all cores playing black ops, i only ever reached 50% on all cores.

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WEll anytime you over volt your degrading the lifespan. However isnt the top of amds safe range for the cpu 1.55v? either way im sure overclocking it did it in, but aside fromn the first month or two running on the stock cooler, my temps rarely went over 55c on the cores. Either way my fault, but it was fun as heck!

jamesbritt268 said:

WEll anytime you over volt your degrading the lifespan. However isnt the top of amds safe range for the cpu 1.55v? either way im sure overclocking it did it in, but aside fromn the first month or two running on the stock cooler, my temps rarely went over 55c on the cores. Either way my fault, but it was fun as heck!

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Some of the higher chips do allow for more volts, but the 955 does not. I know this because i have one, and found it generated an enormous amount of heat and was unstable over 1.5volts.