Last ditch attempt on Gigbytes Aorus Xtreme x399

[Ploppy2k3]

well this is turning out to be fun....

My nice new Gigabyte X399 turns up and everything is good with the world..... for now.

First thing I noticed was the NVME stand off's were missing from the box..... OK fair enough this stuff happens. Its not the end of the world but a quick email to Gigabyte and provided I send them a SA.E. they will send me the spares. They should surely send me them as they were missing but hey.

So to the install.

all good everything fits as it should and the board starts to post... and fails... D2 PCH initialization error.

Hmm OK. Lets start pulling cards.... turns out with my TV Tuner (x1 card) in the X1 slot it wont post. so lets put it it the x8 then.

All going great guns now.. so lets update the BIOS from F3 (initial release) to F4C as the first release of any OEM's BIOS is usually not the best. hmmm wont boot in to Windows now. hmmm wont POST reliably now either.
OKnever mind, flick the Dual BIOS switch and we're running again on F3. All is good again.

Now I add my x4 NVME/SSD adapter card as its easier than getting in to those onboard slots. Again all looks good but wait.... no... my 2nd 1070 is now disabled for some reason. It shows in device manager but windows has disabled it as its causing problems. (the SLI bridge is on! been there, done that) if I remove it the 1070 works fine.

OK says I, (still being hopeful) maybe something died on the transfer from my old X99 to this rig. so lets rip out all the RAM (8x4 Corsair Dom Plats) 2x1070 on water (fun!), TV tuner, NVME card and throw it back the X99. Boom all works fine. RAM passes tests, drives are OK on the NVMe and SSD. TV works.

so back to the x399. Lets reseat the CPU (2950x) done. add back hardware as follows

Slot 1 x16 1070
Slot 2 x8 TV Tuner
Slot 3 x1 nothing
Slot 4 x16 1070
Slot 5 x8 NVMe

Same thing. 2nd 1070 doesn't work with the NVMe card present. And if i move the TV tuner in to the x1 slot it wont post. I know I can to to another BIOS as it wont work either.

Fundamentally the board works and all hardware tests are reposting fine.

So waddya think. IsIt seems to me to be a PITA BIOS but if so I cant wait for GB to fix it. Right now I am regretting the purchase of a gigbyte and am serioulsy tempted to RMA/return it. but this is hassle.

so has anyone found issues with this bord and hopefully a fix!

cheers

Andy

 

[Jamin280672]

I had a gigabyte motherboard, but the x470 gaming 7, the asthetics and heatsink grabbed me, I could resist, after 2 weeks of using it and trying to overclock on it, I couldn't wait to get rid of it the bios support and updates were the worst I've experienced, did just about manage to get my 2700x stable at 4.2ghz 1.4185v, but the next reboot it was unstable, then next boot it would be stable again, a vicious and frustrating circle, complete pile of junk.

Replaced it with an Asus x470 ch7, and that wouldn't get my chip to 4.2ghz at all, struggled for a week to even get the ram stable on that one, and too date, i still dont think they have released the latest agesa update for it, i fought with it right up until yesterday, when i finally gave up with it, its sitting on the side now in its box waiting to go back to the catalogue company I brought it from.

And brought an MSI x470 gaming m7, set the ram to the speed I've hitting for and left it testing overnight, started with memtestx64, woke up this morning after 7 hours of testing, no errors, so just for a quick run I blasted 2 hours of Google stress test through it, no errors, next onto the CPU, dialed straight to 4.2ghz, 1.4v and passed 50 passes of IBT standard, then 20 passes of IBT max ram, so rather than push the CPU more, I decided to lower the voltage, currently I'm down to 1.36v at 4.2ghz and 5 hours into prime95.

I think the moral of this story, is the asthetics say nothing, niether do people's comments on how rubbish the vrm may or may not be, I think it's tiny Tim on YouTube who after watching a review on the Asus ch7 yesterday said the MSI gaming m7 was the better board.

Get rid of yours, you'll be waiting forever for a fix or bios update, get an MSI.

 

[Ploppy2k3]

well the F4D BIOS didnt fix the issue, At least it posted and booted this time though!

another terrifying thing about this board is using AMD's Precision Boost thingy, this board claims to put 1.6+ volts on the vcore! Really 1.6!!! The boost to 4.3/434 are nice but not at 1.6v


I have email Gigabyte again about this and will see what they say. its not looking good though. I was torn between this board and th MSI MEG and went for this in the end for the built in 10G NIC. Oddly it seems the 10G NIC is the only bit that works correctly lol

 

[Jamin280672]

well the F4D BIOS didnt fix the issue, At least it posted and booted this time though!

another terrifying thing about this board is using AMD's Precision Boost thingy, this board claims to put 1.6+ volts on the vcore! Really 1.6!!! The boost to 4.3/434 are nice but not at 1.6v


I have email Gigabyte again about this and will see what they say. its not looking good though. I was torn between this board and th MSI MEG and went for this in the end for the built in 10G NIC. Oddly it seems the 10G NIC is the only bit that works correctly lol

Yup the ASUS board I had when using PBO was putting a minimum of 1.46v to 1.5v, to give me between 4.2ghz and 4.35ghz, ive just gone for an all core overclock of 4.2ghz @ 1.36v on my MSI board, just stopped prime95 after 8 and a half hours, with 8 pack Team 3200mhz ram at 3466 14-15-15-36, that's enough testing, im happy with that.

 

[nlel1975]

My old i5-2500k at 4.6ghz with a certain manually set voltage passed 12 hours of Prime95 but was unstable during games. I ended up leaving the CPU voltage set to auto but then it got really hot, had to knock it back down to 4.3ghz where it still reached temps of 79c but at least it was stable.

 

[orbitalwalsh]

well the F4D BIOS didnt fix the issue, At least it posted and booted this time though!

another terrifying thing about this board is using AMD's Precision Boost thingy, this board claims to put 1.6+ volts on the vcore! Really 1.6!!! The boost to 4.3/434 are nice but not at 1.6v


I have email Gigabyte again about this and will see what they say. its not looking good though. I was torn between this board and th MSI MEG and went for this in the end for the built in 10G NIC. Oddly it seems the 10G NIC is the only bit that works correctly lol

its miss reading in bios, board isn't putting any where near that .

see oc3d review here

https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/gigabyte_x399_aorus_extreme_review/4

Kitguru didnt encounter the same issue , but guide for their overclocking

https://www.kitguru.net/components/leo-waldock/gigabyte-x399-aorus-xtreme-review-w-amd-2990wx/5/

@Jamin280672 main reason why you couldn't get ram stable with asus board is due to AGESA from AMD.
MSI do release the quicker sometimes but here's the kicker.. for ANY VENDOR..

AMD do not state fully whats in the CODE.. Vendors copy the micro code into the BIOS and thats it. They hope for the Best , they try to hold on for as possible to test them fully but your talking hundreds of ram kits, tens over overclocking features and board features...
They can't discover every ram fault or bios fault after a Microcode update without user input .

Now if its a basic bios update and things stop working , then yes is a vendor issue

 

[Ploppy2k3]

well F4D, F4C and F3 all cause BSOD's when enabling SVM as well.

Jeez this board is like jelly. I should have looked at the issues people have had with the gamin 7 as they are all BIOS related. (and not fixed)

once I turn off SVM I get all sorts of device manager issues as well. I think a MSI MEG is about to be bough and this is going to fleabay

I think this board would run fine for most people with a single GPU and no other cards. But this isnt what I bought it for. Gigabyte gggrrrrr

 

[chrcoluk]

oh dear what is this from logan?

Usually, at this point, we'd tell you which award we're giving it, but awards exist to let the marketing department of companies shout loudly in their advertising about how well their product scored on a reputable review site. The Gigabyte marketing department didn't want to help us out by providing a review sample, preferring to send it to sites which might not point out any issues. Thus giving the X399 Aorus Extreme its deserved award would only help them out, and until they help us out it's pointless to do so.

Is he saying if he was granted a review sample it would have got an award even with the same issues?

 

[Ploppy2k3]

its more of a "if they had helped at all during the review process with any of the issues I would have given it some kind of aware, but as they totally ignored my why should I help advertise their product"

cant say I blame him really. They don't offer much help to consumers either.

 

[southy1978]

well F4D, F4C and F3 all cause BSOD's when enabling SVM as well.

Jeez this board is like jelly. I should have looked at the issues people have had with the gamin 7 as they are all BIOS related. (and not fixed)

once I turn off SVM I get all sorts of device manager issues as well. I think a MSI MEG is about to be bough and this is going to fleabay

I think this board would run fine for most people with a single GPU and no other cards. But this isnt what I bought it for. Gigabyte gggrrrrr

What kind of device manager issues have you been having? I've had a hell of a time getting SLI running properly with my 1080's, nvidia control panel shows my top card as number 2 and bottom card as number 1 (when i can get it running). Other times it will just show the one card and in device manager the other card has a code 43, It's been driving me mad. I thought one of my cards had died during the install as they were working fine in my previous build. It's almost like one of the pci-e slots is faulty.

I've always had gigabyte boards for all my builds and they've been rock solid, this one however has shaken my love for gigabyte.

 

[Ploppy2k3]

yup code 43. this depends on what other cards I have plugged in and where though. If I use the x1 slot with anything I have like tv card, USB 3 etc it wont even post.

 

[southy1978]

Oh seems like a very similar problem to me then! Are you using any of the m.2 slots also? I was going to try and remove my nvme drive and install windows on a normal sata ssd to try that next!

 

[Ploppy2k3]

I have a 970 EVO in the lowest socket. I haven't tried to move it as the 1070's are both water cooled and they will be a real PITA to take out just to move an m.2

 

[southy1978]

I have a 970 Evo in the socket by the 1x pci-e. I’m going to try and remove it at the weekend and try the SATA install. Wasn’t there a gigabyte rep on this forum, maybe he could help out?

 

[GIGA-Man]

Hello all,

I am sorry you are having these issues, I have reported this thread to my HQ team and asked if they can help support you.

 

[southy1978]

Hello all,

I am sorry you are having these issues, I have reported this thread to my HQ team and asked if they can help support you.

Much appreciated, thanks!

 

[Ploppy2k3]

Hello all,

I am sorry you are having these issues, I have reported this thread to my HQ team and asked if they can help support you.

Appreciate it

 

[Ploppy2k3]

just to add. I have move the NVMe from the bottom to the top and back again with the same BSOD when SVM is enabled.. I get the good old "inaccessible boot device"

Does anyone have this working on the MSI MEG? ie. NVMe + SVM? before I go binning the board and bying a MEG just to find out this is an X399 limitation or something daft.

 

[Jamin280672]

just to add. I have move the NVMe from the bottom to the top and back again with the same BSOD when SVM is enabled.. I get the good old "inaccessible boot device"

Does anyone have this working on the MSI MEG? ie. NVMe + SVM? before I go binning the board and bying a MEG just to find out this is an X399 limitation or something daft.

I don't see any issues over on the MSI forums relating to this, only issues I saw with the MEG was slow post with a 2950X, fail to wake from sleep and a bios smart fan control bug, but a beta bios posted for it seems to fix all those issues: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=307570.0

 

[Rroff]

You generally can't just plug things into PCIe ports with reckless abandon - even on AMD's X399 with the whole no dark ports thing, etc. with certain combinations of hardware - partly due to BIOS bugs/functionality that is beyond the vendor's control - in some cases you will find that certain controllers will result in a system being unable to boot if they are plugged in and/or only working in some slots depending if the PCIe lanes are supplied from the CPU or chipset, etc. and certain combinations of hardware will result in certain sockets or ports becoming unusable especially with an NVMe device present or M.2 slot populated you might find certain SATA ports, PCIe ports and/or certain devices like storage/USB cards will stop working in some or all PCIe sockets, etc. some boards will also have (usually but not always listed in the manual) slots that become disabled or won't function with certain devices when another slot is populated by a graphics card due to various resource allocation constraints and SLI/CF can cause additional headaches there.

Unfortunately it is the nature of the beast and can potentially be even worse on Intel systems with more limited PCIe allocations - though you generally find better compatibility with a range of device controllers on the Intel side - AMD still have some teething issues with less common devices.

EDIT: Long and short is you might return the board and change to another brand and it all works fine or you might run into the exact same limitations/issues or another combination of such.