Gigabyte Z68 Motherboard disaster

[you2]

Well given that it runs as hot as you indicated either you've misconfigured the bios (overclocking) or the heat sink is not seated correct. Did you try a full bios reset ?
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which mb/ssd/hd did you end up buying? If it is not an intel ssd; I would try to do a simple install on a hd connected to the intel sata2 port (drop raid; drop the ssd for initial testing). Start with bios reset to default settings. If your idle temp is above 40C you are either overclocking or have the cpu heatsink mounted incorrectly. It is very hard to say much more given the information provided.
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[TJones2]

Well given that it runs as hot as you indicated either you've misconfigured the bios (overclocking) or the heat sink is not seated correct. Did you try a full bios reset ?
-
which mb/ssd/hd did you end up buying? If it is not an intel ssd; I would try to do a simple install on a hd connected to the intel sata2 port (drop raid; drop the ssd for initial testing). Start with bios reset to default settings. If your idle temp is above 40C you are either overclocking or have the cpu heatsink mounted incorrectly. It is very hard to say much more given the information provided.
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All memory and cpu settings are at default (ie:Auto). There is no SSD. Just a Seagate 1tb hd that was in the previous system. If I "drop" RAID I (again) suspect Windows won't boot since it was setup with RAID, or does it not work in the reverse direction (ie: you can't setup RAID after setting up Windows). The CPU has been mounted and remounted four times, each with differing amounts of thermal compound. The results are within a couple degrees of each other. IMO, the cpu is crapola, and is responsible for the heat. I, however, don't think its the cause of the bsod, that I'm betting is the fault of the motherboard.

 

[TJones2]

Configuration:
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H
i5-2500k
G.SKILL Ripjaws X F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL 8GB 2X4GB DDR3-1600
Seasonic 800w ps
Seagate 1tb hard drive
no name DVD drive SATA
Windows 7 Premium 64 bit
Bios F4
Setting in bios at default except for:
1. Drives set to RAID
2. Marvel SATA ports disabled.
3. Parallel and Serial ports disabled.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Configuration:
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H
i5-2500k
G.SKILL Ripjaws X F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL 8GB 2X4GB DDR3-1600
Seasonic 800w ps
Seagate 1tb hard drive
no name DVD drive SATA
Windows 7 Premium 64 bit
Bios F4
Setting in bios at default except for:
1. Drives set to RAID
2. Marvel SATA ports disabled.
3. Parallel and Serial ports disabled.

I can't remember everything that has been said here. You say you have BSODs. You say your processor is running hot -- just for the "auto" settings and no over-clock. There can be several reasons, some working together, for these problems.

Check to see if the board has BIOS revisions. Put it on a Flash drive. power down, reset the CMOS.

Get MEMTEST86+ and put it on a self-booting CD according to the instructions. Test your RAM for three iterations or so.

Keep the SSD disconnected for the moment if you are going to do "ISRT HDD acceleration." Set the Intel controller (all drives shown in main BIOS, and leave Marvel or whatever disabled) -- to RAID. IF new BIOS, then update the BIOS on the motherboard.

Reinstall Windows to the HDD after going through your BIOS settings to arrange for any other hardware you've added. [No need to do anything with the disconnected SDD.]

Load all your drivers for the mobo, the software for ISRT, the VGA drivers from the gfx card or the chipset maker, your diagnostics, monitoring etc.

Shutdown. Connect the SSD. Boot up to Windows. Run the ISRT program to create the caching. If desired, partition and format the remainder of the SSD left over as part of the RAID0 after the caching is defined.

Sometimes, BIOS is responsible for sensors reporting wrong temperatures. BSOD's -- could be memory, could be some mistake in configuring and/or reconfiguring the hard disk. Just follow the clear and simple path which I may have suggested here, and see if there is light where there had been darkness.. .

 

[TJones2]

I can't remember everything that has been said here. You say you have BSODs. You say your processor is running hot -- just for the "auto" settings and no over-clock. There can be several reasons, some working together, for these problems.

Check to see if the board has BIOS revisions. Put it on a Flash drive. power down, reset the CMOS.

Has most recent bios.

Get MEMTEST86+ and put it on a self-booting CD according to the instructions. Test your RAM for three iterations or so.

Ran Memtest86+ 22 passes and again, 18 passes, no errors. But Memtest86 (not "+", most recent version) won't even load.

Keep the SSD disconnected for the moment if you are going to do "ISRT HDD acceleration." Set the Intel controller (all drives shown in main BIOS, and leave Marvel or whatever disabled) -- to RAID. IF new BIOS, then update the BIOS on the motherboard.

No SSD. RAID is only enabled so I can add one later to have SRT.

Reinstall Windows to the HDD after going through your BIOS settings to arrange for any other hardware you've added. [No need to do anything with the disconnected SDD.]

Load all your drivers for the mobo, the software for ISRT, the VGA drivers from the gfx card or the chipset maker, your diagnostics, monitoring etc.

All this was done with the first Windows install.

Shutdown. Connect the SSD.

Boot up to Windows. Run the ISRT program to create the caching. If desired, partition and format the remainder of the SSD left over as part of the RAID0 after the caching is defined.

Sometimes, BIOS is responsible for sensors reporting wrong temperatures. BSOD's -- could be memory, could be some mistake in configuring and/or reconfiguring the hard disk. Just follow the clear and simple path which I may have suggested here, and see if there is light where there had been darkness.. .

I'm only seeing darkness. Here's another BSOD:

http://i.imgur.com/7XQ2i.jpg

Then there's this thing the tech support person where I bought it had me run:

http://i.imgur.com/vQnX7.jpg

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Has most recent bios.



Ran Memtest86+ 22 passes and again, 18 passes, no errors. But Memtest86 (not "+", most recent version) won't even load.



No SSD. RAID is only enabled so I can add one later to have SRT.



All this was done with the first Windows install.



I'm only seeing darkness. Here's another BSOD:

http://i.imgur.com/7XQ2i.jpg

These days, I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed with a sense of stupidity about this stuff. Even so . . . .

First, I'm not going to "Dis" your Gigabyte board. Enough people have got all these boards to work -- ASUS, Giga-, AsRock, MSI -- the various Z68 flavors taste the same.

Second, it is a naive assumption in our culture that things only have a single cause behind them. They don't.

Third, I wouldn't fret about what your reseller might "think," because if you exercise the disciplined "honesty" of a typical criminal defense attorney, he won't, shouldn't, can't really know. Giga and the others make these boards for people to d*** around with. It's that simple. And if you have trouble with the reseller, Giga should be able to accept and RMA and replace it.

Fourth, back to multiple or uncertain causation. I've been all over the web these last several weeks about Z68 and the i7-2600K or similar processors. Within the last three days, I've encountered:
--Another Anandtech member who seems befuddled and frustrated about temperatures that seem too high;
--someone on another motherboard site -- maybe ASUS -- who reported the same thing;
--a member of the INTEL forum who . . . reported . . . the same thing. . . .

If you have patience, you could try RMA'ing the processor first. Given Intel retail-box QC, the chances that a second one would be a problem is fairly slim, so thinking of that probability, if the replacement CPU behaves exactly the same way, you then go forward requesting RMA for the motherboard. But if you socket a new CPU in the one you have, make sure and CLR-CMOS and reset the BIOS to default.

Fifth. And last. As someone else may have said earlier on another thread, a lot of us feel a bit daunted by the Z68 and the "flavors of BIOS." We're all trying to get a better grip on it, and just by looking around on the Cyber-plain, I'm not sure that all the "Intel" is "in" on this thing. It looks . . . pretty good . . . . and there will . . . be more BIOS revisions.

. . . And as a postscript, experiences such as yours are not pleasant. We've been through this misery . . . . each and every one . . . . at one time or another . . . So you're not alone . . .

 

[TJones2]

I'd go through the one component at a time approach but I want to get these dealt with before the 30 day return period ends. I don't want to inherit someone else's issues (ie: get a refurbed part), which is most likely with a motherboard based on past experience. CPU's and RAM are normally new parts.

BTW, why does the tech guy keep pushing the memory angle? I wouldn't think memory would give me error messages from the bios.

 

[stahlhart]

Stop 0x00000024 appears to be a file system failure.

I think that you're just going to have to set the system up with the drive you have as non-RAID, then reconfigure/reinstall the drives later (the way that you're trying to now) when you get the SSD. It just reads to me that you're trying to do something with your hardware that you don't have the necessary hardware to accomplish.

 

[TJones2]

Stop 0x00000024 appears to be a file system failure.

I think that you're just going to have to set the system up with the drive you have as non-RAID, then reconfigure/reinstall the drives later (the way that you're trying to now) when you get the SSD. It just reads to me that you're trying to do something with your hardware that you don't have the necessary hardware to accomplish.

If I already have the RAID driver installed, I'm guessing I'd have to do a reinstall to replace it with AHCI?

 

[stahlhart]

If I already have the RAID driver installed, I'm guessing I'd have to do a reinstall to replace it with AHCI?

At this point I would do that just to see if attempting to set up RAID with only one disk is what's causing your BSOD.

Just set it up old school with the spindle drive with the bare minimum of OS and hardware drivers, and run your stability testing from there.

I'm not sure if this would make it possible for you to do something like making an image backup of the boot drive, reconfiguring the drives for SRT (adding the SSD), and then restoring the backup over it -- but worst case, it's just one operating system reinstallation.

But I don't think that Storage Manager accepts IOUs when you're setting up RAID volumes -- at least it never has for me. I had a bear of a time with this for my wife's PC -- it had a pair of 250Gb drives set up as RAID1. It refused to allow me to grow the volume to 1Tb one drive at a time; ended up taking three drives to get the job done, because I had to completely destroy the original volume and recreate it from scratch, with the third holding the image to restore once the 1Tb volume was created. I think it's a similar situation for you, where you get one shot at setting up the volume, and need all of the components to do it -- Storage Manager won't let you go in and make changes after the fact (unless this is a later version of it that supports that -- the version I was working with didn't).

 

[TJones2]

Quick question. When I setup this RAID with the single hd, ALL I did was set the Onboard SATA Controller to RAID, I didn't setup a RAID configuration in the bios. Should I have?

 

[stahlhart]

I don't think that it's going to allow you to with only one disk. You can set up RAID to be available for use, given sufficient hardware resources to build volumes. But you can't concatenate/stripe/mirror (or, I'm guessing, implement SRT) with only one drive to work with.

That was the problem I had here -- the motherboard only had four SATA ports. One was used by the optical drive, two were being used by the RAID1 volume. I only had one left, which wasn't enough to build a 1Tb volume to transfer the boot disk image over to. I would have had to set it up as a non-RAID disk, which I would not be able to convert to RAID later without destroying the data.

So we got Acronis, imaged the volume, removed the old disks, intalled the new ones, built a 1Tb RAID1 volume, then restored the boot image -- Acronis resized the restore on the fly to grow it from 250Gb to 1Tb.

 

[TJones2]

No, I mean I have it setup with one disk now, if setting bios Onboard SATA to "RAID" sets up RAID? Was just wondering if I do that if I have to go in and setup RAID in the bios? I've never used RAID before, don't really know how it works, other than its useless without more than one drive. The reason Why? can be found in the middle of post #30.

 

[stahlhart]

I think your answer's in here: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1587/4/

 

[bankster55]

When asking for help here on a situation like this you have to list ALL your system - like vidcard, HDD(s) case, PSU

First of all, the "IRQ less than equal" BSOD is the oldest and well known errors in Windows - going back to Win 98.
It means some device does not play nice and insert itself in the right order during the handing out of the IRQ interrupts for correct order during boot.
A HW assigned interrupt #6 must be initialized AFTER a HW assigned IRQ #5, or alongside a HW also assigned IRQ #6. This has been sorted out mostly by this timeframe, and am quite surprised to see it. I believe even now tho, Gigabyte still has old timey bios where you can assign IRQ's manually. I hope you didnt mess with them. Could be some wireless mouse or KB.

You will also have to set XMP profile in bios for your RAM

Never use the Intel stock cooler - ever.

You are trying too hard to make a top notch PC, the Z68 SB does just fine all by itself without the fancy stuff. Do not use any of the add on features - like Virtu, SRT or RAID of any kind. Do not use a SSD.

Use only a Win 7 SP1 integrated ISO that has been MD5 checked

You may have also created a GPT drive with X64 without knowing it.

You have picked a very bad time to jump back in to build a PC, these mobo have hundreds of issues. Your best bet is Alienware, whereby it has to work out the door, or an AMD system - just find a mobo theat gets a 5 egg rating with hundreds of comments.
http://www.alienware.com/

Alternately, you could give your son up for adoption.

 

[stahlhart]

Do not use a SSD.

Your best bet is Alienware, whereby it has to work out the door, or an AMD system

Alternately, you could give your son up for adoption.

 

[you2]

Ignore the advice to not use intel stock cooler. The desing while a bit funky to install works fine if you install it correctly. At stock speed both of sb builds run arond 34c and peak around 55c. Yes third party cooler will work bsetter and several of them are easier to seat correctly. I also used stock cooler on bothmy older dual core boxes. I will admit that i prefer amd design ande heat sink with copper pipes.

 

[TJones2]

When asking for help here on a situation like this you have to list ALL your system - like vidcard, HDD(s) case, PSU

HD4850, Seagate 1tb, generic, Seasonic M12D 850w.

First of all, the "IRQ less than equal" BSOD is the oldest and well known errors in Windows - going back to Win 98.
It means some device does not play nice and insert itself in the right order during the handing out of the IRQ interrupts for correct order during boot.
A HW assigned interrupt #6 must be initialized AFTER a HW assigned IRQ #5, or alongside a HW also assigned IRQ #6. This has been sorted out mostly by this timeframe, and am quite surprised to see it. I believe even now tho, Gigabyte still has old timey bios where you can assign IRQ's manually. I hope you didnt mess with them.

Nope. Its almost entirely setup on default.

Could be some wireless mouse or KB.

Have an old Logitech MX Duo, but I actually setup Windows with a wired keyboard because the setup didn't see the kbm.

You will also have to set XMP profile in bios for your RAM

It was on whatever the default was, but have recently (after the BSOD) changed to its stated specifications. Was 11-11-11-28, changed to 9-9-9-24 as per the G. Skill spec.

Never use the Intel stock cooler - ever.

Just bought a Coolmaster Hyper212+

You are trying too hard to make a top notch PC, the Z68 SB does just fine all by itself without the fancy stuff. Do not use any of the add on features - like Virtu, SRT or RAID of any kind. Do not use a SSD.

Why? I use an SSD on my system, works great!

Use only a Win 7 SP1 integrated ISO that has been MD5 checked

Made the disk when SP1 came out. Its on my current system without problems.

You may have also created a GPT drive with X64 without knowing it.

What'z a GPT?

You have picked a very bad time to jump back in to build a PC, these mobo have hundreds of issues.

I noticed that.

Your best bet is Alienware, whereby it has to work out the door, or an AMD system - just find a mobo theat gets a 5 egg rating with hundreds of comments.
http://www.alienware.com/

Dude, next time I'll get a Dell!

Alternately, you could give your son up for adoption.

Really, not his fault. I pushed it on him. Now I don't want to leave him without a system.

 

[TJones2]

I think your answer's in here: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1587/4/

I don't see this menu when the system boots:

http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1587/intel-raid.jpg

but my single disk does show up in RST.

 

[stahlhart]

I don't see this menu when the system boots:

http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1587/intel-raid.jpg

but my single disk does show up in RST.

Don't you have to hit something like CTRL-I during the initial boot process to reach it? I think that's how it was here.

 

[TJones2]

So what's the consensus here? Its it A) Ram, B) motherboard, C) CPU, D) Configuration?

As for the heat issue, could it be caused by a slightly malformed cpu backplate? Here's a pic of mine

http://i.imgur.com/OJVFy.jpg

 

[stahlhart]

As far as I can see, it's D) until you give us further information.

Are you still trying to set up RAID with one drive?

 

[TJones2]

As far as I can see, it's D) until you give us further information.

Are you still trying to set up RAID with one drive?

Of course. That link you provided backed that up.

 

[you2]

Use ahcpi instead of raid. As a bios option raid would normally be fine but you seem really confused.

Does the 212 and stock cooler both result in 50c idle??

 

[TJones2]

Don't have the 212 installed yet. Result is from stock. BTW, no bsod since Wed, and my son's been on it every day almost all day. The vendor suggested I up the voltage from 1.5v to 1.56v on Wed. Figured that is it...but today I dropped it back to 1.5v to see if it would bluescreen again...it hasn't. Baffled.