GA-Z97X-SLI beeps continuously then turns off and restarts?

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NormAtHome

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May 15, 2017
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A friend gave me his son's gaming rig to try and fix, it's a couple years old and suddenly when powered on it beeps continuously for 10-15 seconds and then turns off and restarts.

A Google search seemed to indicate that this problem is most often associated with a ram problem so I bought a new pair of Corsair Vengeance ram compatible with this system and tried that (the system has a pair of AData AX3U1866W4G10-BGV 4gb moduls) and I had exactly the same problem. I tested the PSU with an Antec PSU tester (the system has a Corsair CX600M) and all voltages appear to be in acceptable range.

I tried resetting the CMos and moving the ram from one pair of dimm slots to another but still the same problem. A little more Googling and I found a suggestion to try ram singly rather than the pair and the system appears to be able to boot with either of the AData modules in any slot but add the second module and the problem happens again.

I checked the bios (while booting with a single module) and the motherboard had an older F8 bios so I flashed to the latest F10b and tried again but still the same problem, either dimm is fine by itself and if you put in the pair the system won't boot.

I also removed the standalone video card and wireless card to see if that was causing the problem but still the exact same issue.

Has anyone seen a problem like this, any idea's how to fix it?
 
Check the ram voltage, could be set wrong causing failure with two sticks.
 
Check each stick of ram by itself in each ram slot. Also try using memtest to check each ram stick.
 
If none of the above works, try replacing the CMOS battery. Let us know what you find out so others may be helped in the future. BTW, welcome to the [H}ardForms!
 
Nebulous said:
Check each stick of ram by itself in each ram slot. Also try using memtest to check each ram stick.
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I'll give that a try but I bought a brand new set of Corsair Vengeance ram compatible with this system and it caused the exact same problem, I really doubt that it's possible for a brand new set of ram to be bad. I'm pretty sure that each stick will test good by itself.
 
Chuklr said:
If none of the above works, try replacing the CMOS battery. Let us know what you find out so others may be helped in the future. BTW, welcome to the [H}ardForms!
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I've unplugged the system and took the cmos battery out and left it for twenty minutes before putting it back in; I'll give it a try but usually if the cmos battery is bad you'll get a warning that the battery voltage is low; I've also loaded "Optimized defaults" several times and it doesn't seem to make a difference.
 
I understand that you reset the CMOS and ram voltage is at 1.5v, but it is very possible that the corsair or the adata ram sticks need more voltage to function properly.
My motherboards ram voltage defaults to 1.5v also, but i have to manually set them to 1.6 in order for them to work correctly.
 
IKV1476 said:
I understand that you reset the CMOS and ram voltage is at 1.5v, but it is very possible that the corsair or the adata ram sticks need more voltage to function properly.
My motherboards ram voltage defaults to 1.5v also, but i have to manually set them to 1.6 in order for them to work correctly.
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I'm running Memtest+ on each stick, as far as I can tell neither stick will work in what is labeled in the manual slot 1 however both sticks appear to work in what is labeled as slot 2. The first stick passed 10 passes in slot 2 and so far the second stick is up to 4 passes but the problem is that neither stick will work in slot 1 and likewise neither stick will work in what is labeled as slot 3 (the first black slot). so either stick works fine in slots 2 or 4 but neither in 1 or 3.

Does this seem like the motherboard could be bad? Should I try manually bumping the voltage up to 1.6V? I checked the datasheet for this ram on AData's site and it clearly states that this ram should work at 1.5V.
 
You can try upping the ram voltage manually to 1.6-1.65v and see if that will help, but it looks like the board's ramslots are faulty. If the voltage boost doesn't help, you'll have to do the RMA dance.
 
Do both sticks work together in slots 2 and 4, at the same time?

My 1.6 volts is for my ram in my motherboard. My motherboards default is 1.5, but my ram requires 1.6. Yours appears to be 1.5v, from your post.
You could increase the voltage a little bit to see if it helps.

It could be the board is defective too.

(Just typing out loud here) but check the cpu temp in the bios too, and is the bios reporting the cpu correctly? Maybe the cpu got damaged somehow and the memory controller is what was damaged?
 
IKV1476 said:
Do both sticks work together in slots 2 and 4, at the same time?

My 1.6 volts is for my ram in my motherboard. My motherboards default is 1.5, but my ram requires 1.6. Yours appears to be 1.5v, from your post.
You could increase the voltage a little bit to see if it helps.

It could be the board is defective too.

(Just typing out loud here) but check the cpu temp in the bios too, and is the bios reporting the cpu correctly? Maybe the cpu got damaged somehow and the memory controller is what was damaged?
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Yes, both sticks work in slots 2 and 4 and the system will boot like that and show 8gigs of ram; this system worked fine for a little less than 2 years and it's hard to understand why the ram is good but slots 1 and 3 appear to have suddenly gone bad? Honestly it's not the strangest thing I've ever seen but it's up there.
 
IKV1476 said:
Do both sticks work together in slots 2 and 4, at the same time?

My 1.6 volts is for my ram in my motherboard. My motherboards default is 1.5, but my ram requires 1.6. Yours appears to be 1.5v, from your post.
You could increase the voltage a little bit to see if it helps.

It could be the board is defective too.

(Just typing out loud here) but check the cpu temp in the bios too, and is the bios reporting the cpu correctly? Maybe the cpu got damaged somehow and the memory controller is what was damaged?
Click to expand...
I bought a replacement motherboard and swapped it and it looks like it worse than before, it does the same thing with a single stick of ram in any slot so perhaps it is the cpu.
 
yeah sounds like they let the cpu overheat and the memory controller took the brunt of the heat damage.. pretty rare to see happen unless he was trying to fix it himself and maybe took the heatsink off and put it back on without cleaning and re-applying new thermal paste. only thing i can think of since the motherboard should of saved the processor long before any normal overheating would of damaged it.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
yeah sounds like they let the cpu overheat and the memory controller took the brunt of the heat damage.. pretty rare to see happen unless he was trying to fix it himself and maybe took the heatsink off and put it back on without cleaning and re-applying new thermal paste. only thing i can think of since the motherboard should of saved the processor long before any normal overheating would of damaged it.
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I ordered a replacement cpu so I guess we'll see, one thing that I'm a little puzzled about though is when you (and IKV1476) say there could be heat damage to the cpu, it's been my impression that since after the Pentium 4 Prescott cpu that Intel included thermal protection into the cpu where it was supposed to throttle itself down in case of overheating to keep this kind of thing from happening? I'm asking because when I finally get this working and return it, I'm going to have to warn the kid to watch the temperature so that this doesn't happen again? Does Gigabyte include software that monitors and warns about temperature problems?
 
Not an expert but if the component that detects temperatures fails I would think any cpu could potentially have a chance to overheat and become damaged.
For all you know this cpu was overclocked or maybe overvolted too far and was damaged.
 
NormAtHome said:
it's been my impression that since after the Pentium 4 Prescott cpu that Intel included thermal protection into the cpu where it was supposed to throttle itself down in case of overheating to keep this kind of thing from happening?
Click to expand...

Intel has had thermal throttling since the late PGA370 PIIIs, I think Coppermines had it and I know Tualatin cores had it. But just because a CPU has thermal throttling, doesn't mean it will get away without any damage, it's to prevent a situation like with the classic Athlons which got up to 700F and forcibly detonated in some cases.

NormAtHome said:
I'm asking because when I finally get this working and return it, I'm going to have to warn the kid to watch the temperature so that this doesn't happen again? Does Gigabyte include software that monitors and warns about temperature problems?
Click to expand...

Motherboards since the mid 90s have had thermal warning and sometimes shutdown options in the BIOS, but they're disabled by default and require the user to set the temperature threshold. There's a problem using this feature these days though: the lack of a PC speaker for you to actually hear the warning tone.

The PC speaker was a standard item in desktop PCs up until about a decade ago when computer cases stopped including them or providing mounts for them. Motherboards then started including those dinky little piezo buzzers on a short length of wire and a connector, but now you don't even get that. Sometimes you'll rarely get one soldered somewhere on the motherboard itself if you're lucky. The speaker header is usually always present, but finding an old 8 ohm speaker and somewhere to mount it can be annoying.
 
IKV1476 said:
Not an expert but if the component that detects temperatures fails I would think any cpu could potentially have a chance to overheat and become damaged.
For all you know this cpu was overclocked or maybe overvolted too far and was damaged.
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Honestly, if this were my computer I'd throw it out the window; new motherboard and new (used) cpu and still the same problem. My only thought left is that somethings grounding or shorting out so I'm going to take the motherboard out and try and get it to work outside the case on a test bed and see what happens.
 
Ok, I've taken the motherboard out and it's safely on a non-conducting surface: I took the battery out ( leaving the PSU off clearing the CMos) and removed the video and wifi cards and I'm still getting the exact same thing.

I took out the ram and tried a suggestion that I try starting the motherboard without ram and then power off and try it with one stick; that seemed to work and I was able to boot with a single stick in slot 1. This new motherboard had an even older bios that the previous motherboard: F7 so I'm flashing to the latest F10b.

When I put two sticks of ram into slots 1 and 2 I'm again back to the exact same problem: The system beeps repeatedly for 10-15 seconds, shuts down and restarts and repeats that over and over. I took out the stick in slot 2 and managed to get the board to boot, I shut down and took the stick from slot 1 and put it in slot 2 and tried to start and I have the exact same problem.

Does this make sense to anyone? This is a completely different motherboard and cpu from what was originally in the system and I can't get this to work properly, does anyone have an idea other than to ditch this motherboard and get a different board?
 
Didn't read all the comments... Did you try a different power supply?
 
DrLobotomy said:
Didn't read all the comments... Did you try a different power supply?
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Yes, when I took the motherboard out and tested on the testbed I used my own spare power supply 700watts and it did exactly the same thing. I just don't understand this, are these Gigabyte motherboards chronically faulty? Am I doing something wrong?
 
It is possible you knocked off some little capacitor or diode or something, or the PCB had a weak spot and a trace broke.

Did you smell the board up close trying to sniff out a burnt part? Sounds kinda retarded but it has helped me find a toasted part on a board before. Actually several times.
 
DrLobotomy said:
It is possible you knocked off some little capacitor or diode or something, or the PCB had a weak spot and a trace broke.

Did you smell the board up close trying to sniff out a burnt part? Sounds kinda retarded but it has helped me find a toasted part on a board before. Actually several times.
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No, I visually inspected bother motherboards; the original one and the replacement; they are bother doing exactly the same thing with the original cpu and the replacement although I didn't try the replacement CPU on the old motherboard.
 
Well. the only thing I can say is maybe the BIOS isnt up to date on the replacement board and it has issues with the CPU. Maybe it has a 1st gen BIOS that doesnt detect that CPU proper. Can u flash it without a CPU? Im not familiar with that boards' BIOS.
 
DrLobotomy said:
Well. the only thing I can say is maybe the BIOS isnt up to date on the replacement board and it has issues with the CPU. Maybe it has a 1st gen BIOS that doesnt detect that CPU proper. Can u flash it without a CPU? Im not familiar with that boards' BIOS.
Click to expand...
No, in the case of both motherboards: the original had F8 bios and I was able to boot with 1 stick of ram and update to F10b the latest which had no effect on the problem; the replacement motherboard has F7 bios and I was also able to boot with a single stick of ram and update to F10b and still the same problem so it's not a bios problem.
 
Bent pins on the socket? Or whatever you want to call those contacts. I have done that before but was able to bend them back up.

Maybe you made some deity angry? I'm about out of ideas unless incidental damage or 2 bad parts in a row. It can happen especially if dealing with amazon or ebay or some shit like that.
 
DrLobotomy said:
Bent pins on the socket? Or whatever you want to call those contacts. I have done that before but was able to bend them back up.

Maybe you made some deity angry? I'm about out of ideas unless incidental damage or 2 bad parts in a row. It can happen especially if dealing with amazon or ebay or some shit like that.
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Honestly I don't know how. I know you said you didn't read the prior comments but this computer was working for slightly less than 2 years; then suddenly this problem started; the kid who owns it didn't take the motherboard out and bend any pins and then put it all back. The individual sticks of ram work fine singly (and test fine with Memtest86+ 5.01) but once you put two in together this problem happens; I tried brand new Corsair Vengeance ram same problem; I bought a used but guaranteed working replacement of this same motherboard from ebay and the first thing I did was take a magnifying glass and inspect it front and back with extra inspection of the socket since the seller didn't put in the cpu shield before shipping it and it seemed fine; the replacement motherboard and original cpu together had this same problem; I bought a replacement cpu again used but guaranteed working and put that on the new motherboard (bios already updated to F10b) and put it back in the case, same problem; took the motherboard out of the case without the video card or wifi card (this board has on-board video) and tried it on a test bed with a different psu and still the same problem.

I'm seriously considering that this Gigabyte motherboard GA-Z97X-SLI has a chronic defect and I'm looking for a Z97 motherboard from Asus to replace it, that's pretty much my last option.
 
I received the new motherboard today, an Asus Z97-A/USB 3.1 and after putting the CPU/Heatsink and ram on I started it on my testbed and it works fine; no beeps, no problem.

I can only conclude that the Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SLI has some kind of chronic fault or is chronically defective.
 
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