Faulty board, or PSU?

DoubleCheese · 12 Apr 2012 at 15:14

I've got an Aus P8Z68-V Pro, i7 2600K CPU, 8Gb G-Skill DDR3 RAM and 8Gb Corsair Vengeance RAM. All these were bought new.

The board has been RMA'd back to the etailer 3 times now an they can't replicate the fault I'm having with it. I've just received it back now and will be installing it tonight. They've updated the BIOS and noted that they tested with an i3 CPU and 4 x 4Gb DIMM's to try and replicate the fault I'm having and can't.

The bard has 4 DIMM Slots, lets call them 1,2,3 and 4 with 1 being closest to the CPU socket. The manual says the ideal memory config for 2 modules is slots 2 and 4. The board will ONLY boot with 1 memory module (any of the 4 sticks) ONLY in DIMM 3. It will ONLY boot with 2 modules ONLY in DIMM's 3 and 4. Any other configuration and it won't even get to the BIOS screen. The LED by the DIMM's lights and even if I use the memory tune button it wont work.

The only thing I haven't changed is the PSU, Its a 550W modular unit from here a couple of years ago. Its worked flawlessly throughout and boots the board absolutely fine when the memory is in the slots mentioned above. When it runs, there is no instability to suggest its struggling. Could it be the problem?

Any ideas?

mp260767 · 12 Apr 2012 at 15:18

what graphics card do you have in the system ?

and any idea what else they used to test the mobo, graphics card, psu etc ?

what sort of timings/voltages do you memory have ?

DoubleCheese · 12 Apr 2012 at 15:24

Everything is at stock settings and I'm using the onboard Intel graphics. All I'm testing it with is a Crucial M4 SSD and DVD-RW, so the load on the PSU is quite low.

mp260767 · 12 Apr 2012 at 15:51

have you tried manually setting the voltage/timings for the memory dimms ?

and have you confirmed that the memory is compatible with the motherboard.

DoubleCheese · 12 Apr 2012 at 17:10

The G-Skill modules are not on the Asus compatibility list, but they worked absolutely fine in the first board I had. It was RMA'd as it became unstable and was randomly rebooting and starting up on its own, and found to be faulty so they sent this one out.

Same problem with the new one, so I bought the Corsair Vengeance, which is on the compatibility list, and they don't work either.

Good call! I haven't tried manually setting the timings but will give this a try tonight.