Ausus M5A97 non evo bit the dust

[trents]

I noticed I was only getting 4 gigs out of 8 gigs of ram showing up on post and in CPU-z. Did some testing on the ram and the slots and it turns out that I have 3 bad ram slots. I guess I'll find out how good Asus tech support is. Hope it's better than Gigabyte's. Fortunately, I have a spare system set up with that exact same board to fall back on in the meantime. I hope I can just move the hard drive over into the spare computer which has a different CPU and video card. Hope Windows 8 lets me do it.

 

[Ajay57]

Sorry to hear the my friend about the motherboard there!! Hope you are getting better as well, just sold a few parts of my PC on Ebay. Have to box them up on Monday to send them out. Then will start to think about the new build project, still waiting for some items. The rest should be here soon, can not wait to start you know the feeling you get when your itching to go!!! Best regards, Phil.

 

[trents]

Yeah, I know the upgrade itch very well. Physically and medically I'm much better now. Things are pretty much up to snuff. I appreciate your concern. There are some great folks here in the forum community.

 

[Hicksimus]

That sucks man. Is there any chance that lowering the reference clock changes anything? With my M5A97 I found that 280+ always limited it to detecting 1 stick of RAM. Not that I think you're using 280+.

 

[caddi daddi]

bad news about the board trents but, good news about you I am glad to see you back.

asus is pretty good about the rma thing, I just got mine back from repair of the nic, it was not overly painful and took a total of ten days out of the case.
I am how ever going to have to pull it out again and send it back, again because I have lost the cpu fan headers today.
with asus rma we pay freight one way and that kind of sucks.
I just use the post office regular freight, it's cheap, it's fast and the insurance is cheap.
Rgone and I have been shipping things back and forth this way with no issues.

 

[trents]

That sucks man. Is there any chance that lowering the reference clock changes anything? With my M5A97 I found that 280+ always limited it to detecting 1 stick of RAM. Not that I think you're using 280+.

I was using under 250 fsb but even when I reset the cmos so that everything was at stock the bad ram light and alarm were going crazy. I tried both sticks of ram in all the slots. At some point I smelled that burned electrical smell and could no longer get any of the slots to work.

RGone, remember back this summer when I was getting that mysterious occasional instability at idle, like during the middle of the night when the PC wasn't even being used? Never ran that down but I'm betting the ram slot electronics were getting flaky even then.

 

[trents]

Well, I removed the board from the case and it was immediately obvious what the problem was. One of the electrical traces leading to the memory bank area on the back side of the board was fried. Can't imagine Asus will send this one back saying, "We checked it out and found nothing wrong." I marked the spot for them.

 

[RGone]

Crap "trents". I expected that and in fact in one of the phone conversations today (Sun) with C_D, I told him that there was a memory trace broken. Now you have found it even; since it is fully apparent.

I am going to tell a story that affected how I do things. I bought a computer case probably 9 years ago now and what was with the case changed my whole outlook on motherboard to tray mounting.

That case came with a rubber-like pad that had sticky on one side to mount to the motherboard tray under the cpu/ram area. I looked at that and after knowing in my mind that forcing these heavy cpu coolers and pushing the ram into the sockets, that the rubber pad was an elegant idea. All my boards have been installed with a pad I made up that takes up the force of mounting cpus and now the force needed to mount the ram in these crazy-azz ram slots that don't have but one end that will unlock. I am going to guess that even if we never know it...those one end unlock ram slots may disappear or only those of us who tinker will have issues. No way to know for sure since the issue will never be revealed in fullness except in company channels.

When the trace begins to open which it did first...the voltage burns the rest into. And I do "trents" believe you are probably right about the mystery failings months ago. That was the beginnings of this end in all likelihood. At least now you know what your problem is and another board will surely fix it.
RGone...

 

[trents]

Yeah, I was thinking to myself that I'm going to slide something under the replacement board for support in the area around the memory slots and the 24-pin power plug which also gets a lot of stress. A chunk of hard rubber or wood the right thikness should do the job. The manufacturers should build in something like that on the boards anyway IMOP.