I thought I almost wrote off my Z77..

[freeagent]

So.. I was playing with offset overclocks, and it was going well. Or so I thought. I recently swapped out one cpu cooler for another, and the one I am using now is much louder at load than my last one. Anyways, I went into the bios to adjust my fan curve, but the computer would lock up every time I spent more than a couple of seconds in there, this is after using that clock for a week and being in and out of the bios a number of times. So after a few minutes of that, I bent down to do the clear cmos routine with that tiny jumper that I can barely see. Once I got the system back up and running, I entered the bios to set my oc again, but found the multiplier selection, as well as the igpu were gone and I couldn't run the ram over 800mhz. I tried flashing using the asus utility as well as the bios flashback button and that was just an exercise in futility. I was pretty choked. Some searching led me to a post on another site that lead me to the AMI site to their flash tool for windows. Once I got that running, I opened the latest bios release for my board, and flashed in windows. I wasn't sure if it was going to work or not when I restarted the computer.. When I got into the bios I was genuinely excited to see the turbo multiplier, and igpu restored, and I can run my mems back up to 1100

I really thought this thing was done for.. Glad to have my oc back! And the igpu just because I use it to drive my tv so I don't have to run my coal burning gtx 580 for that task lol. Stock clocks are "ok", but the oc just makes things so much snappier!

 

[Johan45]

So no idea what corrupted your BIOS? It's odd that flashback wouldn't help. I have had instances like that before and reverting back (via flashback) to the original BIOS the board was shipped with has straightened it out. Not sure WHY that works but it seems to.

 

[freeagent]

No idea whatsoever, I was just guessing. I loaded up the bios that shipped with the board, and it wouldn't take it through flashback, tho I have not tried with ami update.. It actually happened again today, I had to reflash. Except this time the freezing in bios continued afterwards. I have switched out my ram so I am not running two mixed pairs, and I am running the cpu at 4400. I chose that speed using an offset vcore setting, mainly because I don't have to adjust anything else. To run 4500 and above, I have to change some things Im not sure about to max. It worked for a few months, but now I am having issues, so I will run with these milder settings. I also am starting to think my P8Z77-V is not an enthusiast class board heh.

 

[Johan45]

Mixed ram isn't ideal and hopefully, that sorts things out. Time will tell. That board may not be top of the class butit should do fine for mile overclocks. I took a P8Z77-V LK to 6 GHz with a 3570K for the CC. The price was right and the board still works fine when I need it.

 

[freeagent]

Mixed ram isn't ideal and hopefully, that sorts things out. Time will tell. That board may not be top of the class butit should do fine for mile overclocks. I took a P8Z77-V LK to 6 GHz with a 3570K for the CC. The price was right and the board still works fine when I need it.

View attachment 197706

Man, that's sweet. Maybe I am being a little hard on this board, it really doesn't seem that bad. We shall see if it was the ram, hopefully the problem is gone. Thanks for checking in

 

[wingman99]

Can system memory corrupt BIOS file or CMOS? In my experience it seem like it does. Since the BIOS initializes the CPU & memory and the BIOS firmware in ROM writes to CMOS, so it must be processed by the CPU and memory, then when running out of tolerances there is a chance of error during writing? I have had to flash to a older versions of BIOS than back to most resent to fix the problems caused by BIOS.

 

[EarthDog]

Corrupts the cmos, yes. Only flashing programs can write to bios. When 'bios' corruption happens its in the cmos.

The BIOS program on the BIOS chip reads information from the CMOS chip when the computer is starting up, during the boot up process. You may notice on the initial start up screen, called the screen, an option is available to enter the . When you enter this setup area, you are entering the CMOS setup, not the BIOS setup. The BIOS chip and program cannot be updated directly by a user. The only way to update the BIOS is using a BIOS flash program called a , which updates the BIOS to a different version. These updates usually are provided by either the motherboard manufacturer or the computer manufacturer.

The CMOS setup lets you change the time and date and settings for how devices are loaded at start up, like hard drives, disc drives, and floppy drives. The CMOS setup lets you enable and disable various hardware devices, including USB ports, the onboard video card and sound card (if present), parallel and serial ports, and other devices.

Source : Google

 

[Mr.Scott]

Corrupts the cmos, yes. Only flashing programs can write to bios. When 'bios' corruption happens its in the cmos.

If that were true, then a simple CMOS clear should fix it.
This is not always the case.
When a bios chip gets corrupted, it is usually the checksum that gets scrambled. Bios checksum gets checked on boot before CMOS is loaded. That is why you have to reflash it.

So.....yes, system memory can disrupt the bios outside of the CMOS.

 

[EarthDog]

I think cmos and bios and how they work are being confused.

How can it be corrupted when its only read from?

 

[Mr.Scott]

Same way your OS can be corrupted. Some of those files are read only also.
Ever screw with your memory and BSOD? Reboot and your OS is wiped out? Nothing was written there either.

 

[EarthDog]

Weird how these links say otherwise... what am i missing here?

Bootloader is editable, plenty of os files are editable amd not read only. A bios is read inly without the right tools.

 

[Mr.Scott]

I can only cite what I know from experience and as a bios modder.
I have boards that I can re-create bios chip failure on at will, even as far as making the bios chip not even flashable anymore. Don't know how it happens, but it does.

 

[EarthDog]

Likely cmos gets wanked. Because we use tje words so interchangeably, i can see why there is confusion.

 

[freeagent]

Well, right now I am putting my money on the memory being a problem. Since installing 2x4gb I haven't had any niggles or glitches whatsoever.. I was playing around with catzilla last night, running my cpu pretty hard, but left the ram alone, and it appears my old rig is still no competition for newer ones lol. As for my mixed sets that I was using, I was not using xmp, so maybe the subs were a tad on the snug side.. My tridents have looser subs than the perfect storms, so those were in the A slots, so all 4 wouldn't be too tight. So in the end, Im not pushing the same bandwidth, the latency isn't quite as low (but still lower than my x58), but I have clean, unadulterated stability.. for now..

 

[trents]

Likely cmos gets wanked. Because we use tje words so interchangeably, i can see why there is confusion.

And then you throw in UEFI which makes it even more confusing. And UEFI can be on a chip or just a drive partition or a combination of both I understand.

 

[wingman99]

I think cmos and bios and how they work are being confused.

How can it be corrupted when its only read from?

From what I know the protected BIOS file address can be scrambled by the unstable processor or possibly system memory if the BIOS and processor is using system memory because of the limited space that the cache can provide thus causing corrupted data to be written to wrong address when saving the BIOS settings. Just like if you flash from windows on a unstable PC then have a possible corrupted BIOS. The same thing happens with the HD. The Logical block addressing and NTFS is loaded with other things with the bootstrap into memory and if the processor or memory has a error in the address it can corrupt the protected memory address on the HD when writing anything.

This explains how the processor works with UEFI or BIOS firmware to initialize the processor and memory.

Upon starting, an IBM-compatible personal computer's x86 CPU executes, in real mode, the instruction located at reset vector (the physical memory address FFFF0h on 16-bit x86 processors[31] and FFFFFFF0h on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors[32][33]), usually pointing to the firmware (UEFI or BIOS) entry point inside the ROM. This memory location typically contains a jump instruction that transfers execution to the location of the firmware (UEFI or BIOS) start-up program. This program runs a power-on self-test (POST) to check and initialize required devices such as DRAM and the PCI bus (including running embedded ROMs). The most complicated step is setting up DRAM over SPI, made more difficult by the fact that at this point memory is very limited.

After initializing required hardware, the firmware (UEFI or BIOS) goes through a pre-configured list of non-volatile storage devices ("boot device sequence") until it finds one that is bootable. A bootable MBR device is defined as one that can be read from, and where the last two bytes of the first sector contain the little-endian word AA55h, found as byte sequence 55h, AAh on disk (also known as the MBR boot signature), or where it is otherwise established that the code inside the sector is executable on x86 PCs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting#BOOT-LOADER

 

[freeagent]

Well, after numerous daily beatings, morale has improved

I have added more vdimm and that seems to have solved my problems, from 1.65v to 1.675. This board seems to sag a little in that voltage dept. For good measure I gave the mem controller a small bump from .925v to .935, even tho I am sure its not needed. So far so good!

 

[freeagent]

Mixed ram isn't ideal and hopefully, that sorts things out. Time will tell. That board may not be top of the class butit should do fine for mile overclocks. I took a P8Z77-V LK to 6 GHz with a 3570K for the CC. The price was right and the board still works fine when I need it.

View attachment 197706

Its not easy keeping up with 6ghz