MSI Big Bang

[jonathonball]

Just built a computer for a friend with this board and was fairly impressed.

We got it into the case and wired enough to POST and it wasn't booting. Lots of fans spinning and pretty lights but that was it.

He had purchased 24GB of G.Skill 1333 DDR3, I figured maybe he was having some kind of addressing issue since it was at the boards theoretical maximum RAM capacity. Took it all the way down to one stick and it still wouldn't boot. Tried several of his six sticks and got the same result, they can't ALL be bad.

Finally noticed that the board had a little LED display that said D4.. the manual said that was memory initialization. I swapped his RAM for 6GB of Corsair I had laying around and it booted right up.

Damn board probably saved me an hour or more of swapping RAM sticks and troubleshooting trying to make incompatible RAM work.

He brought me the motherboard box to start cleaning up and I had my very own random [H] sighting...

Kyle's power is growing...

 

[JCNiest5]

That board should have MEM OK button, too!

 

[qdemn7]

One thing about MSI is they have great tech support, and keep the Beta BIOS coming. Official BIOS is 1.6. Latest Beta BIOS is 1.73.

Go to the MSI Forums and join. Beta BIOS will then show up under Overclockers & Undervolting & Modding Corner sub-forum.

Use the MSI Forum HQ USB Flashing Tool to update your BIOS. I've been doing this ever since I bought my XPower I back in 2010.

Probably going to buy an XPower II just because MSI support is so great.