i3 530 bundle problems

forteh

forteh

forteh

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18 Jan 2010
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Got my i3 530 bundle on friday and finally got it put together on saturday, on the whole very impressed and all seems good apart from a couple of niggles.....

The acrtic freezer cooler had one of the black pushpins missing from the installation kit bag, not a major problem, cut a ziptie down to a stub and used that instead; worked just as well as the OE pins.

The fan will not start spinning on its own, when I power on it jumps a tiny amount and then stalls, it will start up if you give it a push/flick. Assuming there arent any bios settings that I should change, I guess Ill have to RMA the cooler :(

I cant seem to get the powering on and off of the motherboard to work as expected, Ive plugged all the front panel cables (power, reset, HDD light, speaker) into the respectively labeled positions on the socket. When I restart the machine (either from windows or exiting bios) it just shuts down and I need to do a hard power on again. The reset switch doesnt reset the board, instead turns it all off and the power button wont turn it off either; need to turn off the psu.

Occasionally after having to restart, the board will hang on post and never beep (indicating 100% cpu load according to the leds on the motherboard), need to pull the plug (as the reset button doesnt work). Usually if this happens the bios posts an overclocking/voltage failure and resets the clock, I then have to go into bios and set the clock back to 4ghz. Because it doesnt restart from save & exit bios this error quite often re-occurrs :(

Any thoughts? Its quite annoying having to leave my case open in order to manually start the cpu fan and constantly reset the overclock in bios.

Specs are: -
i3 530 @4ghz
Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H
Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2
Zotac GTX260 216
2x 150Gb sata hdd
Cheiftec dragon case
2x80mm front intake, 2x80mm rear exhaust
 
Oh yeah I forgot the psu in the specs:o

Its an ocz modxstream 550w, pretty old now but has always been solid; it held voltages fine on my old 110w a64x2 whilst overclocking, got less load on it now in theory. Its an ocuk bundle, I wasnt sure if it was likely a problem with the board or settings, not behaving like any motherboard Ive had before. Ill drop a copy of this thread in the tecnical forum :)
 
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The voltages were always fine and stable before now, the psu needs to be 321w according to one of the calculators in your link. I seem to recall the psu is 550w with 650w peak load. Ive never suffered voltage instability when overclocking at much higher voltages (up to 1.6v) than its supplying now. Ill do some testing to see if its all stable later :)

I got it from ocuk about 4 years ago now.
 
With regards to the cooler not starting up...

Is it possible that the cpu needs to be at a certain temperature before the voltage increases and fan starts? Never used any of this 'green' energy saving automatic fan control before as always wanted better cooling than reduced power consumption.

This has crossed my mind as my machine was booted up this morning after I had gone to work (by a friend who visited for the weekend), I went home at lunchtime and the cpu fan was spinning normally. He wouldnt have known that the fan needs to be flicked to start it running. Could it be that because the system is cold the voltage is lowered until it reaches a threshold temperature at which point it ramps up the voltage?
 
The bios should have a minimum speed setting for the cpu fan, which can be "off", and yes when its off it will still normally twitch, but you would expect the flick not to work.. Its probably just trying to start up at a speed which is too slow for the fan. However as the CPU heats up, the bios will increase the fanspeed and it will start spinning anyway, so its probably not an issue. Either set the minimum speed to a higher number, or enjoy the fact that while the cpu is cold its quiet :P.

My bios has options for Off / Low / Med / Full for the cpu fans minimum speed. This option only works reliably if the cooler has a 4 pin fan header with all 4 wires connected, when using a 3 pin fan I had to use minimum speed "Full" or the motherboard complained.

PS CPU fan speed isnt a "green" option, its an attempt to make the PC less noisy, for example a HTPC, the last thing you want to hear in a quiet scene of a movie is a PC's fans running flat out. Whiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrr. Quiet is good :)
 
Well the fan now appears to be waiting till its beeped on the post to start up (it still jumps on power up) but it is running under its own power now. Ive set the bios to alarm if the fan fails. The powering on and off is still a bit iffy but I guess I can get used to it :D

Got another question about temperatures but will put that elsewhere :)

I hardly ever watch films on my pc and if I do its with headphones so the sound doesnt bother me, my old cpu cooler had a monstrous 120mm fan on that sounded like an A380 taking off, this one is silly quiet in comparison :D
 
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