PC builders please help: new build, endless power cycling, no POST.

[kitekrazy1]

2 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

Motherboards have protective coatings.

This coating technically doesn't prevent ESD damage.

Modern components are a bit more resilient... but not immune to ESD.

 

I've worked on hundreds of machines over the past 30 years.

Never had an issue with ESD.

 Did you ever build an Athlon system?  I damaged 2 boards trying to install a CPU cooler.  I fried another board in assembly which was the ECS brand which I stopped buying.  I built a P4 Prescott system and ruined that board because of a drop of sweat.  Lucky for me I bought the parts from a local shop and Intel sent a board the next day and he let me build it in his shop.   There use to be an onine place you bought components and they assembled and  tested for $20.

 I moved where there is no humidity and I don't have carpet.  I've built all of my systems since the turn of the century and I still have this paranoia pressing that power button.

 I guess there is potential of shorting out a system when blowing the dust  out and the fans can create static charge of spnning too fast.   I use an air compressor instead of those air cans.      

[Jim Roseberry]

Built many original Athlons... then Athlon-II

When the Pentium 4 came out, Intel started pummeling AMD in Floating Point performance.

Didn't build many AMD machines after that... until Ryzen 5xxx series.

Now, we have AMD and Intel leap-frogging each other with each release.

 

After so many builds, you encounter a certain percentage (small) of bad components.

I've had a PS that (when first powered-up) gave a loud POP and was immediately toast.  Rare exception.

Occasionally, I'll see a bad motherboard or more often a bad stick of RAM.

I've worked on so many machines over the years, the anxiety about parts/build is long gone.

I guess it's like the musician who's played live for 50 years.  He/she just doesn't get nervous the same way.

 

 

[Grem]

Well... let's see the facts. 

Two different mobo.

Two different psu.

Two different cpu. 

With ram and with out ram.

 

Seems the only common denominator is the operator!!? 

 

LOL!! Couldn't pass that up!!

[abacab]

It's probably the Noctua cooler. Try a stock Intel cooler, they are cheap, and if you buy it from a place that has a no hassle return policy, it's free if it doesn't work.

I've been building my own systems for over 20 years. And I've run into a few occurrences where the system wouldn't POST due to an issue with the CPU fan failing to start properly (particularly if you allow a stray cable to dangle on the fan blade where it cannot spin up).

[Starship Krupa]

Okay, believe it or not, even though I've set up a return on eBay, I haven't had a chance to box up the Gigabyte for shipping.

Since I was feeling kind of bummed and frustrated about this, I was poking around to see what kind of performance gains I would even get from an i7-6950X vs. the i7 6700 system I'm running now. It'll be nice once I get it running. Many cores and greater overclockin' range are good for my uses.

But along the way I stumbled across the fact that when X99-based motherboards first shipped, a lot of them didn't yet support the i7-6950X and i7-6800K that I have been trying to get work. And since they were selling to "enthusiasts" who were likely to want to upgrade to the latest, they made it really easy to update the BIOS, you can do it without having anything but a power supply and a USB stick.

Aha says I, since that Gigabyte hails from the earlier days of X99, maybe it's barfing on the CPU's I've been sticking in it. Wouldn't explain the power cycling I see without the CPU installed, but what they hey, let's try it.

I prepared my thumb drive and stuck it in the correct port and turned on the power and....ugh, power cycling AGAIN. But, and but, and but, I decided to just leave it on and do its thing for a while. And lo and behold, after about half a dozen power cycles, the Q-Flash LED lit up, then it started blinking, which is the sign that it's flashing, and then after a couple of minutes, solid Q-Flash LED, which means it's finished flashing!

Turned it off, stuck in a CPU and the tower cooler, and tried again and....whoa, the power came on and stayed on! No video from the GT 730, and there's no onboard video of course because it's a Haswell-E. So now it seems to start up and stay that way, but no video. I left it on for a while and the CPU is even getting a little warm, I mean you can feel the Noctua tower cooler fins getting warm, but it's not full operating i7-6950X 140W heat. The Corsair PSU, bless its heart, since it's not delivering much current, it spun its fan down. Quiet.

So now the issue is why no video? The card has worked in other systems. It's piddly enough that it doesn't need anything other than bus power. Its fan is spinning. The keyboard even comes up with NumLock enabled, and I can switch NumLock on and off with the key. That's always been my test for a totally hung system, and it's passing it, so WTF no video! I did find that the CMOS battery was completely stone dead, and put a new one in. Nada.

If I ever do get a system working with an X99 chipset, I'm going to name the computer Sisyphus.

(edit)

Okay, saga over for now. I stand Geek Triumphant. I pulled the GT730 and put in my trusty GTX550Ti and....boots right inta Windas! I had forgotten that the 500G C: drive had been in my notebook briefly. Yes, the computer is running and I could be typing this on it if it weren't in the middle of the Microsoft Update Dance.

Now to try the same trick on the ASRock....

Edited February 21, 2023 by Starship Krupa

[Starship Krupa]

OMG, I've never seen anything like this. Maybe because the HD was a transfer from another system. But after Windows updated itself to its satisfaction, I looked at the "Optional Updates" to see what drivers it had, and there were 81 for all of the Intel X99 chipset drivers. That was a lot of clicking, but those drivers really soup up a system once they're installed.

BTW, I'm not going to name it Sisyphus. I don't want to be reminded of the work and headscratching it took to get it functional.

[Xoo]

Lazarus maybe?

[abacab]

11 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

But along the way I stumbled across the fact that when X99-based motherboards first shipped, a lot of them didn't yet support the i7-6950X and i7-6800K that I have been trying to get work. And since they were selling to "enthusiasts" who were likely to want to upgrade to the latest, they made it really easy to update the BIOS, you can do it without having anything but a power supply and a USB stick.

Aha says I, since that Gigabyte hails from the earlier days of X99, maybe it's barfing on the CPU's I've been sticking in it. Wouldn't explain the power cycling I see without the CPU installed, but what they hey, let's try it.

I had long forgotten about something similar that I ran into with an Intel Pentium 4 socket-478 motherboard nearly 20 years ago. There were a few different D865 motherboard revs around and some had an older BIOS loaded from the factory with variations in CPU support for that particular socket (that I was initially unaware of).

At the time I was building my 3rd machine based on that motherboard, and was stepping up from the Prescott 2.4GHz CPU to a Prescott 3.0GHz CPU. However after tearing my hair out trying to figure out why the Prescott 3.0 CPU wouldn't boot, but the Prescott 2.4 CPU would boot, I discovered the answer!

After some research, it turned out that my latest motherboard was an older rev board with an older BIOS that lacked the proper support for my new CPU. So I powered it up OK using the Prescott 2.4 CPU, and then flashed the new BIOS. After swapped in the newer CPU all was good!

Your story just jogged my memory, LOL. For the record, it's surely interesting that can still be an issue!

[Starship Krupa]

9 hours ago, abacab said:

For the record, it's surely interesting that can still be an issue!

I suppose that as long as Intel introduce new sockets and chipsets before releasing all of the compatible processors, it will be an issue.

This is a clever way to address it, but it's not as well-known as it should be. I found so many posts about "brand new motherboard endless power cycling" that were (surprise) only solved by getting a replacement board from the manufacturer (which of course had the latest BIOS).

There are multiple LGA2011-v3 boards on eBay that are "for parts only" that I now wonder about, whether they suffered the same issue as my Gigabyte.

Well, if I get the ASRock working, I'll pick the one I like best for the i7-6950X and put the i7-6800 in the other one. Maybe peddle it.

This series of processors is known for being a power hog, but even under load, the 650W Corsair barely ever works hard enough to spin up its fan. Once I replace the GTX550Ti with my GT 1030 I will have a truly quiet PC. Even my current system, which has an EVGA PSU with lesser fan control, I walked into my studio space the other day and wondered if my system had powered down, which it hadn't. That's the dream of the quiet PC builder, to not even know it's on.

[Starship Krupa]

Also, as a note to anyone who was puzzled as to why I would sink so much time, money (not that much, actually, I had all of the other parts except for a case), and effort into a gen 6 processor especially when I built a nice i7-6700 system less than a year ago: this thing hauls a55 in comparison to that one.

In Cakewalk, at first I wasn't sure whether the Performance module was working, because it wasn't displaying any activity bars.

Spec advantages this system has over my last one: 10 cores instead of 4, unlocked core and cache freqs, and support for DDR4 RAM (yes, the earlier one, despite the i7-6700 supporting DDR4, can use only DDR3, I guess it was made to accommodate people who wanted to reuse their old RAM sticks). I'm not overclocking it by very much, just bumped the max turbo up to 4.2GHz. My indie adventure/puzzle games run fine on my 2 core i5 notebook, and of course Portal 2 runs great at full graphic quality on this one, even with the GTX550Ti.

Looking forward to seeing the render times in Cakewalk and Vegas.

[Starship Krupa]

On 2/21/2023 at 6:36 PM, Starship Krupa said:

There are multiple LGA2011-v3 boards on eBay that are "for parts only"

Odd coda to this tale: I just sold the ASRock motherboard on eBay for $43 plus shipping. After I gave up on it I tossed it on the pile, where it somehow got a few bent CPU socket pins, but then I remembered the "for parts only" sales on eBay and put it up there.

Cuts into the cost of the replacement motherboard by almost 50%. When the i7-6800K also sells on eBay, I'll be back in the "free motherboard with CPU" zone.?

The build is cruising right along with the  Gigabyte board. I have to say, though, after getting used to the excellent tuning and fan control utilities on my ASUS motherboard, the stuff that comes with the Gigabyte is kinda poop. The ASUS doesn't even have an unlocked CPU in it. The Gigabyte won't let me spin the case fan down to zero, which the ASUS did.

Speaking of fans, even with a passively-cooled GPU and a notoriously hot CPU, I'm running with a single case fan and the CPU and GPU temps never get above 65C when running games or benchmarks or anything. I think it's that mid tower case. I was going to put a couple of fans in it, but one seems to be more than enough.