Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5 - Nothing but Issues!!!

crasherkid

crasherkid

crasherkid

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28 Sep 2014
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Hello, just want to share my nightmare with this horrific board I bought in August 2014.
So I built my X99 system consisting of 5930k/X99 Gaming 5 and Corsair LPX 16GB 2800MHz DDR4.

Ever since the day I built this rig, I've had nothing but problems with the board.
At first I left everything running at stock/default values, including ram which was set to 2133.
A few weeks down the line, I had a problem where I could not enter bios. No matter what I did, just couldn't get into the bios screen. I would get the Gigabyte logo and sometimes the small (loading) circle under the logo would freeze and PC would restart by itself or majority of time after the gigabyte screen I would come to a blank screen with a cursor on the top left corner and "A9" written in bottom right hand corner. This screen would stay here for as long as it could until I restarted the PC.

I tried several different ways, including unplugging all SATA devices one by one and the problem still wasn't cured.

I did a lot of reading and someone else had the same issue but they got around it by plugging in a USB stick and then trying to enter bios. This worked for me and as a result, I had no choice but to re-install windows.
On another note, whilst in bios sometimes the bios would just completely freeze allowing you to do nothing besides hitting the restart button. This happened quiet a few times where whilst in bios, it just became unresponsive to a point I had to hit the reset button to overcome it.
I have never ever seen a bios freeze or crash on any system before in my entire life - This is the first.
The bios was the latest F8 bios.

A week or two later, I thought I would overclock my chip for benchmarking purposes so set the vcore to 1.280 and my chip was kicking out 4.5GHz. and XMP enabled at 2800MHz (this just happens to be the stock speed of my ram)
This was fully stress-stressed using various programs like aida64, prime95, intel burn test and gaming with battlefield 4, crysis 3 and wolfenstein. All happily accepted the overclock for a few months.

Few days later I switched PC on and was greeted to a bios welcome screen, allowing me to select my preferred language. The Bios had reset itself almost like clearing cmos. WTF??

I set it up again and left everything back at defaults.
This time the Bios was F6 or F7 but upon starting windows through the app centre, I was prompted to update to the latest F8 bios.

One day I had the PC idle and came home switched the monitor on and there was no display. I restarted the PC only to find the same strange behaviour as above with the blank screen/A9 message and unable to enter bios for the life in me.

I did further reading up and read various posts about how fast boot enabled could cause this and also about switching around the sata connections on the board itself. I switched around all sata cables and only left plugged in the OS SSD and this still didn't work.

I then reverted to booting up with a USB stick inserted and re-installed Windows for the second time in 3 months!
I've left everything running at stock/default values.
So far its been running fine for a week, no hiccups (yet)

Anyone have any idea why this board is behaving like this?

I emailed gigabyte support about these problems and I have to say I actually laughed at their reply - this has to be the worst customer service I have received in as long as I can remember! The Gigabyte rep told me to "swap" my psu and ram - (HX850i/LPX 16GB)

I am not prepared to send the board to gigabyte and be without my PC for 2-3 weeks or however long it takes them to "repair" my board and probably send it back to me in the same state.

I rang up CCL where I bought it and they also said they would send it to gigabyte for repair or replacement.
Is that really my only option? Do we have a Gigabyte rep on this forum that may be able to help?
I made a big mistake cheaping out on this board. I knew should have paid the extra £70 or so and got an Asus board, never had any issues with any asus boards in the past.
Oh well, lesson learnt. Gigabyte will never get a penny off me or anyone I know, that's for sure.
 
And you think Asus support would be the answer? Hah

Gigabyte have some of the best support available and I'm pretty sure had you explained everything clearly and asked for an exchange or a temp stop gap/escalated to a manager then you might have made a big more progress.

As for swapping ram/psu, its a fairly common question to help identify the cause. Not everyone has access to spares but its a reasonable question.

Why you didn't RMA when you first found a fault is beyond me, just go back to gigabyte. Say you don't feel the response was helpful and you have done every reasonable check/test you can and ask for it to be passed onto a manager.
 
No, I know Asus support is pretty much as bad as Gigabyte, but what I meant is that at least with Asus boards in my experience, I've never had any issues.

I know, I should've RMA'd at the first issue but I just thought maybe it was a one-off software glitch or something.
 
Asus X99 boards seem to be having more than their fair share of issues and that's not a move I would make. Changing components is a standard method of trouble shooting although understandably most people can't afford to have the spare parts sitting around.
 
you might need more analogue/digi io voltage with 16gb of ram,that could be the cause of the lockups/freezing
 
In Gigabytes defense, everybody always blames the motherboard for everything and because it's nigh on impossible for the average man on the street to properly diagnose a problem, that's where they always end up.

I've had more than my fair share of issues with my own personal build. Being in the privileged position having access to a lot of spare hardware I swapped memory at least three times, swapped CPU twice, PSU and graphics too. So obviously I start to assume that the motherboard was the cause. I changed the board to an Asus....no improvement.

All I'll say is, don't always assume that the problem is the board, it turned out to be memory related and my third kit fixed the problem.
 
Gigabytes X99 offerings are generally very solid. I would be testing the RAM out first before assuming the board is the issue. These symptoms sound like mem issues to me. You using 125 strap for 2800 setting and SA at +0.25v or so?
 
Last edited:
8 Pack said:
Gigabytes X99 offerings are generally very solid. I would be testing the RAM out first before assuming the board is the issue. These symptoms sound like mem issues to me. You using 125 strap for 2800 setting and SA at +0.25v or so?
Click to expand...

Thanks for all your input guys.
The memory is running at default 100 strap (2133MHz) and it's been running fine for past few weeks.
Last time around it was also on default settings and that messed up so I'll see how this goes.
 
ScottiB said:
In Gigabytes defense, everybody always blames the motherboard for everything and because it's nigh on impossible for the average man on the street to properly diagnose a problem, that's where they always end up.

I've had more than my fair share of issues with my own personal build. Being in the privileged position having access to a lot of spare hardware I swapped memory at least three times, swapped CPU twice, PSU and graphics too. So obviously I start to assume that the motherboard was the cause. I changed the board to an Asus....no improvement.

All I'll say is, don't always assume that the problem is the board, it turned out to be memory related and my third kit fixed the problem.
Click to expand...

Which memory were you using and what sort of memory issues did you have?
 
These kinds of random problems can point to the PSU or memory. Try memtest86 to test all the ram. Simply booting to windows does not mean the ram is ok. When the system tries to access a faulty part of ram is when you get problems.

I've had problems such as failing to boot and freezing etc that were due to a dodgy psu which could have noisy voltage rails. Try with a spare psu if you have one.
 
Just a quick update on this:
I ran the windows memory diagnostics and on there everything came back passed with no errors.
I then ran memtest86 and after around 15 hours, I had 0 errors.
Even on the last test 13 hammer test this came back with 0 errors.
Is it safe to assume that my memory isn't at fault here???
 
Oh another thing - Whilst I was trying to boot the memtest86... I had a similar problem as mentioned in the OP where I just couldn't get into bios.
Tried for almost an hour, couldn't get into bios or couldn't access boot menu using F12 neither, it would just load straight into windows.
I had no choice but to unplug the OS SSD from the mobo and this time it booted off the USB in the first go!!!
What's the reason for this behaviour?
 
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