Is this B450 Tomahawk Max broken?

cimurray

cimurray

cimurray

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Joined
3 Feb 2008
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136
My son bought the above from O/C last April and it worked perfectly until he decided to add to the memory recently and move from the 1600 to 3600 CPU. The processor is fine but the board will not post with 4 sticks of RAM. Previously the board ran at 2933MHz with 2x8GB of Corsair RAM. He recently bought 2 more sticks of identical RAM plus the R5 3600.
* All sticks of memory work properly and post on their own;
* A2 and B2 slots work perfectly in dual channel mode;
* A1 and B1 slots work properly in dual channel mode as well;
* When all four slots are populated the board will not post;
* When memory is in slots A2, B2 and B1 the board posts in dual memory mode with 24GB showing.

All of the above is at both default settings and at 3200MHz using XMP. The BIOS has also been flashed to the most current from the MSI website as at last night.

Is he missing something or is the board broken? Any thoughts or suggestions welcomed.
 
Maybe reseat the CPU or at the least maybe loosen the haetsink screws maybe a quarter or half a turn. Sometimes oddly it can be down to the CPU not making great contact in the socket, I;ve heard in the poast an overly tightened heatsink can cause memory issues with all slots filled as the memory controller is on the CPU.

Might be worth a try, as it sounds like you;ve checked a lot already.
 
It's the ram. Not all sets & sticks are equal. Tomahawk B450 is just fussy with 4 sticks. I had 4 sticks of corsair lpx 3200. 2 worked 4 no. Changed to a cheaper set of team group 3200 4x8. Worked perfectly with xmp. Go figure.

Additional. All 4 sticks of corsair are perfect and run in my other boards no issues (Inc the original tomahawk b450 non max) Different bois revisions didn't make any difference BTW.
Different Cpu's however did make a difference, ie 3900x fine but not the 2600 or 2700 in the 450 tomahawk max
 
It sounds like a memory controller issiue but if the ram is not on the qvl list its not guaranteed to work.

Could Send the new stuff back and get 2x16gb and sell the other.
 
Well bugg** me! VaderDSL was right on the money with his suggestion about loosening off the heatsink screws by half- a turn. I just did that a few minutes ago, stuck in the fourth stick of RAM and it booted straight into windows first pop with all 32GB of RAM showing and at DDR3200.
Thanks for your help and to everyone else for their suggestions.
 
cimurray said:
Well bugg** me! VaderDSL was right on the money with his suggestion about loosening off the heatsink screws by half- a turn. I just did that a few minutes ago, stuck in the fourth stick of RAM and it booted straight into windows first pop with all 32GB of RAM showing and at DDR3200.
Thanks for your help and to everyone else for their suggestions.
Click to expand...

Np :) Glad it worked.
 
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