So about a month ago I made a purchase of:
GA-MA770-UD3 (rev1.0) AM2+/AM3 Mobo
AMD PhenomII X2 550 BE AM3 CPU
4GB Kingston HyperX 1066Mhz (5-5-5-17) DDR2
Gainward GeForce GTX260 Golden Sample
And for the last month everything has been working fine. No issues.
However in the last few days I started to get hanging in 3D based applications, starting with World of Warcraft then happening in other 3D apps and within several hours it was happening solely on the desktop with any application.
The mouse pointer was still moveable and sound was still being transmitted through voice apps, but the system was entirely unresponsive.
At first I could just restart and have a couple of hours before it happened again, then it started to become very frequent, literally the moment I got back into the OS.
I then purchased a new hard drive in hopes of remedying this fault since prior to these lockups there would be a clunking from my old hard drive (which, for reference is almost 7 years old). I got the new hard drive and upon first boot, it would not POST. A few restarts later it POSTed and I was able to install the OS without any issues.
The machine proceeded to work fine for about 4-5 hours, then it started locking up again, first in a 3D app, then in normal apps. On restart it now would struggle to POST, sometimes it would not POST beyond the GTX260 spinning up at max duty cycle for 5-6 seconds, and sometimes it would not POST even after the duty cycle had returned to normal.
Another few issues that have happened once include a BSOD from Windows Vista, didnt get time to jot down the code. The other was HARD DISK BOOT FAILURE after POST. Both of the above issues have only happened once.
Those are all of the symptoms it is currently showing, here is what I've tried so far:
Updating Vista (as much as I could before it would lock up again),
Updating my BIOS from F6a to F6, rolling it back to earlier versions as well,
Reseating all of the hardware, checking cable connections for faults,
Setting the memory clock to 800Mhz(400DDR) instead of 1066Mhz,
Setting the GPU clocks to "Safe Mode" (Reference clocks instead of Gainward's pre-supplied clocks),
Other Hard drive (which was my old hard drive which is working fine in another PC atm),
Disconnecting IDE devices,
Using latest drivers, and previous drivers, and drivers supplied with the hardware.
That's pretty much everything that I've tried, Specs are below;
PSU: Hiper TypeR 580W
CPU: AMD PhenomII X2 550 BE
GPU: Gainward GeForce GTX260 GS
Mem: Kingston HyperX 1066Mhz 2x2048MB
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 rev1.0
HDD: WD Green 750GB SATA-II
Any thoughts?
---------------
Update
The PC seemed like normal this morning, it had been off for most of the night (10 or so hours) and it behaved as normal too. No lockups, no bad behaviour bar one boot failing (Stuck on Windows loading bar) and the machine worked fine.
Every now and then it had a tiny little hiccup when loading some data (RAW FRAPS video files) but otherwise was alright. for a while.
I got open Sony Vegas and sat down to some video editing for a while, see if the problem does not occur until I use an actual 3D app. A couple hours of video editing later, it starts to jutter. Everything is smooth bar whilst previewing it would process anything between 20 and 30 frames then stop for ~1 second, and repeat that process.
Sometimes it would stop jittering and go back to normal for a few minutes. This only started happening after a couple hours of use, right about the same length of time from the previous night before it started to fail even after the new hard drive. Some 15-20 minutes later and the issues returned, applications would lock up, for example in the case of Sony Vegas the sound was still working, mouse input etc still working, obviously the CPU and GPU still working, memory still working otherwise BSOD would have been "hi2u!" but the video preview window was not working, so obviously it wasnt able to access the video.
The application would then lock up entirely, I took a screenshot and managed to save it to the hard drive before even MS Paint locked up entirely (Who would've thought) and at this point it became the same as last night; everything hung, OS couldnt do a thing.
Then along came a BSOD - probably the same as the one that occured the other night, the dump was so small I didnt have chance to even read it. Now it will not boot, will not POST, etc. Basically the same as last night, if I leave it for 3-4 hours it'll probably be working fine again.
Now, all in all, what this says to me is:
Whatever is housing the S-ATA controller, is failing - in this case, the SB770 SouthBridge chipset. The problem is though that the SB770 houses the onboard sound, which does not fail when everything is locking up.
I think it may be more the actual S-ATA controller than the SouthBridge entirely but I could be mistaken, I have had sound glitching since I first got the hardware but that was rare and simply the audio would stutter for less than a second and be normal again.
I have tried using different S-ATA ports, and tried to get the BIOS to use the S-ATA chip for RAID but that resulted in a BSOD with Vista whilst starting up.
Any further thoughts? comments from anyone? similar experiences be it with this mobo or other motherboards?
--------------
Further Update
After taking over a minute to POST (of which the GPU was locked at 100% duty cycle, as they do while POSTing) and managing to change the S-ATA type to AHCI instead of Native IDE all I get is "HARD DISK BOOT FAILURE", awesome.
Now I'll see what happens to the system while I'm trying to using the Vista Repair toolkit.
--------------
Final update
So after that was completely unsuccessful, I decided to actually take a look at the southbridge and inspect it for signs of burning. It has a tint to it, but the interesting thing is the positioning of the SB passive heatsink. What's that? It's directly underneath the graphics card?
Congratulations to Gigabyte on being one of the most short sighted motherboard manufacturers I have ever known.
I have the Rev1 board and looking at the Rev2 board it has a different SB heatsink, it's in the same place, but is a different colour so I'd make the assumption that they made it "NOT TERRIBLE" which is all I can say about the first one.
Hoping to hear something from OCuk via webnotes sometime today so I can organise to have this piece of junk sent back and maybe get a motherboard that isnt a hot steaming pile of you know what!
GA-MA770-UD3 (rev1.0) AM2+/AM3 Mobo
AMD PhenomII X2 550 BE AM3 CPU
4GB Kingston HyperX 1066Mhz (5-5-5-17) DDR2
Gainward GeForce GTX260 Golden Sample
And for the last month everything has been working fine. No issues.
However in the last few days I started to get hanging in 3D based applications, starting with World of Warcraft then happening in other 3D apps and within several hours it was happening solely on the desktop with any application.
The mouse pointer was still moveable and sound was still being transmitted through voice apps, but the system was entirely unresponsive.
At first I could just restart and have a couple of hours before it happened again, then it started to become very frequent, literally the moment I got back into the OS.
I then purchased a new hard drive in hopes of remedying this fault since prior to these lockups there would be a clunking from my old hard drive (which, for reference is almost 7 years old). I got the new hard drive and upon first boot, it would not POST. A few restarts later it POSTed and I was able to install the OS without any issues.
The machine proceeded to work fine for about 4-5 hours, then it started locking up again, first in a 3D app, then in normal apps. On restart it now would struggle to POST, sometimes it would not POST beyond the GTX260 spinning up at max duty cycle for 5-6 seconds, and sometimes it would not POST even after the duty cycle had returned to normal.
Another few issues that have happened once include a BSOD from Windows Vista, didnt get time to jot down the code. The other was HARD DISK BOOT FAILURE after POST. Both of the above issues have only happened once.
Those are all of the symptoms it is currently showing, here is what I've tried so far:
Updating Vista (as much as I could before it would lock up again),
Updating my BIOS from F6a to F6, rolling it back to earlier versions as well,
Reseating all of the hardware, checking cable connections for faults,
Setting the memory clock to 800Mhz(400DDR) instead of 1066Mhz,
Setting the GPU clocks to "Safe Mode" (Reference clocks instead of Gainward's pre-supplied clocks),
Other Hard drive (which was my old hard drive which is working fine in another PC atm),
Disconnecting IDE devices,
Using latest drivers, and previous drivers, and drivers supplied with the hardware.
That's pretty much everything that I've tried, Specs are below;
PSU: Hiper TypeR 580W
CPU: AMD PhenomII X2 550 BE
GPU: Gainward GeForce GTX260 GS
Mem: Kingston HyperX 1066Mhz 2x2048MB
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 rev1.0
HDD: WD Green 750GB SATA-II
Any thoughts?
---------------
Update
The PC seemed like normal this morning, it had been off for most of the night (10 or so hours) and it behaved as normal too. No lockups, no bad behaviour bar one boot failing (Stuck on Windows loading bar) and the machine worked fine.
Every now and then it had a tiny little hiccup when loading some data (RAW FRAPS video files) but otherwise was alright. for a while.
I got open Sony Vegas and sat down to some video editing for a while, see if the problem does not occur until I use an actual 3D app. A couple hours of video editing later, it starts to jutter. Everything is smooth bar whilst previewing it would process anything between 20 and 30 frames then stop for ~1 second, and repeat that process.
Sometimes it would stop jittering and go back to normal for a few minutes. This only started happening after a couple hours of use, right about the same length of time from the previous night before it started to fail even after the new hard drive. Some 15-20 minutes later and the issues returned, applications would lock up, for example in the case of Sony Vegas the sound was still working, mouse input etc still working, obviously the CPU and GPU still working, memory still working otherwise BSOD would have been "hi2u!" but the video preview window was not working, so obviously it wasnt able to access the video.
The application would then lock up entirely, I took a screenshot and managed to save it to the hard drive before even MS Paint locked up entirely (Who would've thought) and at this point it became the same as last night; everything hung, OS couldnt do a thing.
Then along came a BSOD - probably the same as the one that occured the other night, the dump was so small I didnt have chance to even read it. Now it will not boot, will not POST, etc. Basically the same as last night, if I leave it for 3-4 hours it'll probably be working fine again.
Now, all in all, what this says to me is:
Whatever is housing the S-ATA controller, is failing - in this case, the SB770 SouthBridge chipset. The problem is though that the SB770 houses the onboard sound, which does not fail when everything is locking up.
I think it may be more the actual S-ATA controller than the SouthBridge entirely but I could be mistaken, I have had sound glitching since I first got the hardware but that was rare and simply the audio would stutter for less than a second and be normal again.
I have tried using different S-ATA ports, and tried to get the BIOS to use the S-ATA chip for RAID but that resulted in a BSOD with Vista whilst starting up.
Any further thoughts? comments from anyone? similar experiences be it with this mobo or other motherboards?
--------------
Further Update
After taking over a minute to POST (of which the GPU was locked at 100% duty cycle, as they do while POSTing) and managing to change the S-ATA type to AHCI instead of Native IDE all I get is "HARD DISK BOOT FAILURE", awesome.
Now I'll see what happens to the system while I'm trying to using the Vista Repair toolkit.
--------------
Final update
So after that was completely unsuccessful, I decided to actually take a look at the southbridge and inspect it for signs of burning. It has a tint to it, but the interesting thing is the positioning of the SB passive heatsink. What's that? It's directly underneath the graphics card?
Congratulations to Gigabyte on being one of the most short sighted motherboard manufacturers I have ever known.
I have the Rev1 board and looking at the Rev2 board it has a different SB heatsink, it's in the same place, but is a different colour so I'd make the assumption that they made it "NOT TERRIBLE" which is all I can say about the first one.
Hoping to hear something from OCuk via webnotes sometime today so I can organise to have this piece of junk sent back and maybe get a motherboard that isnt a hot steaming pile of you know what!
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