SOLVED I think something is broken

[DanFraser]

Just bought some news bits and boy was it overdue. Unfortunately something is not working

I upgraded from:

Q6600 2.4GHz
Asus P5N-E SLI
8GB DDR2-800 (4x 2GB)
MSI 750 ti
750w no name PSU
60 + 120 SSD
1TB HDD

To this:

i5 4460
Gigabyte H81M-DS2
8GB DDR3-1333 (2x 4GB)
MSI 750 ti
Corsair CXM430W
60 + 120 SSD
1TB HDD

Firstly, it never restarts. It just shuts down and keeps the power on with a black screen, no start up beep, nothing.

Secondly it always crashes with the 750 ti at boot up, I just see a black screen, the one beep and then a mouse cursor at what seems like 640x480 res size and sometimes it's tail chopped in half.

I've bread boarded the setup to quickly swap things and first thing tested was the PSU. This works with the old setup as well, no crashes, booting into windows fine and throwing a stress test at the q6600. I then tested the 750 ti on the old setup as well and that worked fine, opened up a game and that was ok. Not even a hint of trouble there.

On bread boarding the new setup it beeps like mad with no ram as expected. I tried the no gpu of course but the CPU and the motherboard (I think?) have on board graphics so I don't know if it should beep or not without a gpu. I've swapped the two sticks around and used one at a time in either slot and the same things happen. Booting into windows is ok, but only on a true cold boot of switch off, unplug, plug in and switch on. Reboots never work, not even one time to give me hope. The reboot thing is so bad that installing windows does not work because something happens with the boot sector (error 0xc0000034 on starting to load the installation after first reboot).

Do I have a broken motherboard? Any ideas?

 

[ATMINSIDE]

So, I might have missed it, but did you boot with no GPU and the monitor plugged into the display connection on the motherboard?

 

[DanFraser]

Yeah I missed mentioning that I haven't got a VGA cable or adapter to use a DVI cable on a VGA port. But there's still no single beep anyway.

 

[Pierre3400]

I had a Gigabyte motherboard that did strange things.

Similar to what you are getting.

Have you tried to remove the bios battery?

My board would do just like yours, but i could get it to boot on the internal graphics. But it would not boot, just a black screen, no beep when GPU was installed, and i had many GPU's to test with, not a single one worked.

A bios reset fixed it right up, but i managed to get the issue again and again (i was messing with a 4 gpu mining setup)

Try the bios reset, if not, i think RMA is the answer.

I ended up RMA'ing it. They got it, tested it, saw the error, reset bios and claimed it was good. I got my money back for the board (since i bought a new one while it was away)

I cant promise you'll be as lucky. I spent a lot of time talking it all threw with a Gigabyte staff member on a Danish forum.

 

[DanFraser]

I'm going to try the bios flash, could be a possibility. I've reset the CMOS countless times though

Edit: apparently Gigabyte, MSI and a few others were a little naughty in stating that their motherboards supported refresh CPUs on current bios versions. It took a bit of hunting but updating from the FB bios to FC (at least) should resolve the restart issue.

I guess it's 50/50 about the 750 ti crash thing though. Could be bios version related or could be board related. Either way I've seen people on benchmarking lists use this combination so I know it can be done.

 

[trents]

Make sure the bios RAM speed isn't set to higher than 1333. That's pretty slow ram for current CPU/motherboard technology and the default frequency may be something higher than 1333 mhz.

Also, make sure the SATA mode in bios is configured to that which the drives are. If they are used drives make sure, for instance, the bios SATA mode is not AHCI if the drives were formatted in IDE in the previous machine.

Not being able to connect to a display is going to really hamper troubleshooting.

 

[DanFraser]

Yeah it is a pain not having a VGA cable or adapter.

The drives were previously done in ahci and with the 620 graphics card I have spare the bios definitely auto sets the right speeds.

I'm about to do a bios flash and update in a few hours and I'm going to see what happens with that first. It's quite likely that that will resolve the restart issue at which point things will be easier to continue with.

 

[DanFraser]

Good reason for a new post instead of editing.

BIOS flash worked a treat. It was the messing around to do it. Had to borrow a Windows 7 DVD to reinstall on the old hardware to get to a desktop to download the bios and then do it that way. Got a little scared when I had to do 4 reboot attempts after flashing but I'm now letting my ISP know I've just reinstalled with all the downloading I'm doing.

Now to just setup drivers etc and then run some benchmarks!

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Glad that worked! Makes me wonder what corrupted the BIOS though.

 

[DanFraser]

Don't think it was corrupted. It is the V2 of this motherboard and Gigabyte had it on their website (plus several reviewers using this combo) said it was compatible. Not even a hint of a BIOS update needed on those but it needed it to support the CPU which fixed the restart issue and also the GPU support as well.

Posting this from the PC!

 

[ATMINSIDE]

I didn't even catch that the 4460 was a Haswell Refresh chip until now, it makes perfect sense that it needed the BIOS update.
That update added the CPU's microcode to the BIOS, so the board can actually recognize it.

 

[trents]

I thought about the bios update issue because of the refresh CPU but on the Gigabyte web site CPU compatibility list there was no indication that particular chip needed a bios update to work with any of the revisions of that motherboard.

 

[DanFraser]

I thought about the bios update issue because of the refresh CPU but on the Gigabyte web site CPU compatibility list there was no indication that particular chip needed a bios update to work with any of the revisions of that motherboard.

This. It was sooooo much of this even on review sites.