Gigabyte SLI board destroys itself!

A

asmielia

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 10, 2003
Messages
337
Wow, I can't believe how bad this new build has gone for me. It's been an absolute nightmare.

First of all, I had to RMA my MSI 6800GT because it had crazy graphical corruption in a bunch of games.

This morning I found that my Corsair PC4400 is hosed. One of the sticks won't do 275 without memtest errors within 5 minutes. I can't even run at 250 without getting some errors in dual channel. So I'm gonna have to RMA that.

Now, the worst news of all. I've been running my new Maxtor NCQ drive on the Silicon Image ports because it doesn't work on the Nvidia Nforce ones very well. So I had an old harddrive from my old system that I wanted to copy data from. Before shutting down to install the drive, I also installed Daemon tools, which is a useful program for mounting CD images. I turned off my computer, but didn't turn off the PSU. I go to plug in the old hard drive, and as soon as I plug it in, the computer turns itself on automatically. WTF? I shut it down, and continue installing. Power up the machine, the old hard drive is seen by the BIOS. Make it into Windows and my video card is all messed up. It's displaying 16 colours and 800x600 resolution. Check the device manager and apparently it doesn't have enough resources to run. I do a system restore and unplug the old hard drive. Eventually, I manage to get back to a normal Windows state, but I noticed that the Silicon Image is no longer being detected by the BIOS!

I tried turning it off and on again in the BIOS, resetting the CMOS and unplugging the battery. Nothing has worked. Not only that, but the screen that comes up right after POSTing, which shows all IRQ allocations, is noticeably shorter now. It's like half the board has fried itself.

What the hell? I think I'm gonna start crying now. I'm assuming Gigabyte's tech support is utterly terrible.

Adrian
 
So you worked on the pc with the power on? Please tell me you flipped the switch on the back of the psu. :(
 
u CANNOT switch in or out components on A64 systems without turning the PSU off, or else you risk damaging the mobo and/or the A64s mem controller
 
No, I didn't turn it off. I don't bother unless I'm doing major work. It's never been a problem before in about 10 years of working with computers. Even if you are supposed to shut it off, I don't see how plugging/unplugging a cable would damage a motherboard, even if it was powered on. Hell, SATA is hot-pluggable.

Anyway the board is well and truly f*cked now. I went to reboot and that was it, it wouldn't boot the first time, the second time it failed to provide power to the USB ports (keyboard, mouse), and kept complaining about a CMOS checksum error. I tried shorting the CMOS jumper, removing, replacing the battery, nothing helped. I tried a different power supply and got the same results. When I removed the DPS daughterboard, it would just give a black screen.

Time for yet another RMA. 3 defective items in an order of 6. That's what I call bad odds.
 
asmielia said:
No, I didn't turn it off. I don't bother unless I'm doing major work. It's never been a problem before in about 10 years of working with computers. Even if you are supposed to shut it off, I don't see how plugging/unplugging a cable would damage a motherboard, even if it was powered on. Hell, SATA is hot-pluggable.
Click to expand...

Guess it is time to start spending that extra 15 seconds and unplug it.
 
Yeah, I will from now on. But still, if that's what's actually happened I'm amazed at the fragility of this thing. I've never had a short circuit ever, and I've done much worse than this with the PSU still on.
 
asmielia said:
Yeah, I will from now on. But still, if that's what's actually happened I'm amazed at the fragility of this thing. I've never had a short circuit ever, and I've done much worse than this with the PSU still on.
Click to expand...


It only takes one time. You were lucky, count yourself lucky before, and realize you're learning a valuable lesson in life.

Turn off your power supply. Duh. Next you'll say you don't bother to use soap when you wash your hands ("Too much trouble") or don't bother to put the cap back on when you're done filling up your gas tank ("Too much trouble").

Heh.

15 seconds? That's overstating how long it takes to turn off the power on your PSU. Flipping a switch takes less than 3 seconds.
 
you grounded the psu somehow while plugging in drive. and then corrupted bios. if you have the resources, try hot swapping your bios chip. it could save you that rma.

very truly yours,
politenessman
 
blinky2183 said:
u CANNOT switch in or out components on A64 systems without turning the PSU off, or else you risk damaging the mobo and/or the A64s mem controller
Click to expand...

I've never had a problem doing this on my K8N Neo2. I want to have the system plugged in so I can ground myself on my case. I guess I could do that even if the PSU was switched off.
 
You can still ground yourself even if you PSU is turned off, it just needs to be plugged in. Personally, I unplug the whole thing, and use a remote grounding location with a wrist strap,
 
Umm, guys, if all he was doing was changing out a SATA drive, he could have done that with the power on and in windows. They are hot swappable. The only reason it wouldnt be wise is if you weren't using the sata power connector, then you could definatly fry something, but with the sata power, its designed to engage and disengage all the connectors at the same time, it wouldn't hurt anything.
 
It's been well reported that the NForce 4 boards are EXTREMELY sensitive to voltages, Oskar Wu stated damage will be done to any NF4 board if the PSU is not unplugged and the system allowed a minimum of 10 or 15 seconds before removing or connecting any cables or devices.

I'm not really sure as to why, older motherboards could take much more abuse. The newer ones are much more fragile.

Also, Gigabyte has relatively good tech support. Although it's a bit hard to understand them perfectly sometimes, they are one of the few producers left that will actually listen and respond in a timely matter.

However, do not tell them of what you did, as simple as it sounds to you and me, to them it defys the user warranty as technically, you damaged the board.

Just tell them it's defective and RMA it. They will quickly get you back up and running. Trust me, they've got solid support.

In the future, be sure to handle the NF4 boards with kid gloves, they really need the extra love. If you treat them right, the payoff is incredible performance.

I for one own this exact Gigabyte SLI board, along with my DFI SLI board. I love them both, the gigabyte has better performance at lower numbers then the DFI. It's a good solid board, but, as all NF4 boards, very touchy.

Good luck friend.
 
My AOpen AK89 Max mobo draws 8 watts even when it's shut down. That's a hell of a lot of juice for delicate ICs. I would NEVER consider changing out anything with the power on except if I had to hot-swap a BIOS chip. I hate to say, but you've learned a painful lesson.
 
And that is why I never have and will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVAR trust a Gigabyte product. DFI (or even better, genuine Intel) all the way!
 
asmielia said:
Yeah, I will from now on. But still, if that's what's actually happened I'm amazed at the fragility of this thing. I've never had a short circuit ever, and I've done much worse than this with the PSU still on.
Click to expand...

I've had bad experiences with Gigabyte boards that have left a real aweful tate in my mouth. I wont buy their products for many reasons, one being the cusomer support and secondly being the shoddy quality.
 
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