Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3 - Help needed!

[WhaleTrain]

HI there guys I have a question regarding the Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3 motherboard and FX 6100 CPU. Basically I got both today at a nice price and installed it as you do. I got a Windows 7 Disc and installed from the Disc - this is were it gets annoying and where the problem occurs.

I install Windows 7 and it installs and copies from the disc fine - no errors. When the computer restarts for the first time after the install the machine displays the "...Registry Settings..." then the computer just shuts off, no power nothing. I then have to switch off the PSU, unplug the power, plug the power back in and switch the psu back on. I CANNOT get passed that what so ever. I've tried a new psu, a low powered gfx card, clearing bios, trying with just one stick of ram, re plugging wires. Everything I can think of I have tried. I cannot find any other discussion on the issue. If it helps do notice that the Northbridge Heatsink becomes un-touchably hot. This is a brand-new board and am quite annoyed with Gigabyte as this is my first board from them.

A Friend told me it might be a hard drive that isn't compatible but I don't think that would ause it to shut off at every Windows 7 startup screens...

Any help is appreciated greatly.

EDIT: I don't think that it's related to the northbridge as it does it even on a cold boot. I've tried a cmod reset...

Thanks,
WhaleTrain

[IcE]

RMA your board. With that said, the northbridge heatsink is supposed to feel hot, because that way you know its doing its job. Mine feels burning hot yet the temp hovers around 38-42C depending on how I'm using the computer.

[WhaleTrain]

Originally Posted by ice445

RMA your board. With that said, the northbridge heatsink is supposed to feel hot, because that way you know its doing its job. Mine feels burning hot yet the temp hovers around 38-42C depending on how I'm using the computer.

Cheers for the reply. It looks like I am going to have to RMA it as I cannot fix this at all. I rang scan after reading your reply and they said to bring it in, in the tower, to show them the issue that I am having. If they can't fix it they will replace the board they said. I hope my 2nd board works as I have heard so many good reviews about Gigabyte and this board particularly is the best I could find for under £60 - Only paid £53 and £102 for the CPU.

The CPU has a good temp and so does the board so i don't know what the issue is...

Thanks for the help, I really appreciate it

WhaleTrain

[WhaleTrain]

Just a quick update. The board is fine, the PSU is going under load and shutting off as demonstrated by the technician today. Can anyone suggest a PSU that is good enough?

Budget would be £40 - £60 and I will be powering a HD6850, AMD FX 6100 and the motherboard said above with a sata hdd and sata cd drive.

Again, help is appreciated greatly.

Please keep the price as low as possible...

[Jagman]

Corsair CX600....

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/600w-...et-fan-atx-v23

Cheaper here though,

http://www.dabs.com/products/corsair...-psu-7JSQ.html

[IcE]

Originally Posted by WhaleTrain

Just a quick update. The board is fine, the PSU is going under load and shutting off as demonstrated by the technician today. Can anyone suggest a PSU that is good enough?

Budget would be £40 - £60 and I will be powering a HD6850, AMD FX 6100 and the motherboard said above with a sata hdd and sata cd drive.

Again, help is appreciated greatly.

Please keep the price as low as possible...

I thought you said you tried two PSU's?

[deltatux]

Originally Posted by ice445

I thought you said you tried two PSU's?

Probably a new PSU of the same model? If it was a generic PSU, it might still cause issues.

deltatux

[WhaleTrain]

Originally Posted by deltatux

Probably a new PSU of the same model? If it was a generic PSU, it might still cause issues.

deltatux

I did try another PSU. The second one I tried was the same brand just the 750w edition. I thought with it having 42A on the 12v and 750w it might have given it more power but I guess not.

The technician had this monster PSU which worked. He recomended the Corsair BS 600W but he said I might be pushing it with running a 6850 and that I should get a 700/750W PSU. I had no problems running it with my old Asrock n68c-s ucc motherboard.

Is the 600W Corsair going to defo work as I don't want to waste £50 :/

Thanks peeps,
WhaleTrain

[IcE]

Originally Posted by WhaleTrain

I did try another PSU. The second one I tried was the same brand just the 750w edition. I thought with it having 42A on the 12v and 750w it might have given it more power but I guess not.

The technician had this monster PSU which worked. He recomended the Corsair BS 600W but he said I might be pushing it with running a 6850 and that I should get a 700/750W PSU. I had no problems running it with my old Asrock n68c-s ucc motherboard.

Is the 600W Corsair going to defo work as I don't want to waste £50 :/

Thanks peeps,
WhaleTrain

The 600W will be perfectly fine in any conditions on that rig.

[WhaleTrain]

Originally Posted by ice445

The 600W will be perfectly fine in any conditions on that rig.

Thank-you soo much for the advise and answers! You are all stars, cheers

BTW Before this thread goes - What could my current PSU not have that say the Corsair one has?

[IcE]

Originally Posted by WhaleTrain

Thank-you soo much for the advise and answers! You are all stars, cheers

BTW Before this thread goes - What could my current PSU not have that say the Corsair one has?

Well, we don't know the brand. But more than likely it's just poorer quality. A lot of non name brand PSU's use low quality chinese capacitors and regulators which are usually destined to fail. Some really bad ones don't even have protections built in for when they fail, so they spike your system with like 20 volts of dirty, lethal power when they go out. The market is pretty clean of those latter ones as of today, but they're not hard to find second hand I'm sure.

[WhaleTrain]

Originally Posted by ice445

Well, we don't know the brand. But more than likely it's just poorer quality. A lot of non name brand PSU's use low quality chinese capacitors and regulators which are usually destined to fail. Some really bad ones don't even have protections built in for when they fail, so they spike your system with like 20 volts of dirty, lethal power when they go out. The market is pretty clean of those latter ones as of today, but they're not hard to find second hand I'm sure.

Right ok then, thanks for the support and I will get the corsair one ASAP.

Thanks again,
Whale

[FreaK367]

Hope you don't mind if I Hijack this thread a little, I have a really similar build and am having problems which I am putting on the Northbridge.

On the left you can see my build, which is very similar to the OP's, same motherboard, same graphics card, but the FX 6200 instead of 6100, and Corsair RAM.

I only put this PC together over the past 4 months really, and from the get go I was crashing when on games, I ended up getting a Hyper 212+ CPU cooler just to eliminate it being a CPU problem, since it does run at 3.8Ghz stock, reseated everything and just tried to figure out what was going on until I finally pinned it to the Northbridge...

I couldn't touch it for more than about 2 seconds before it burned me, I got around it by playing games with my pc case open with a Desk fan pointing directly at the motherboard, which let me game for however long I wanted, but it wasn't efficient.

I bought an Infrared Digital Thermometer to get hardware readings of the temperature of the heatsink, when gaming and running Prime95 the Northbridge Heatsink went as high as 70*C.

Since then I bought the Zalman Z11 Plus case since my old one had bad airflow, and I run 2 intake, 2 exhaust connected up to an NZXT Sentry Mesh Fan Controller which I max out when on games. I have reseated the Northbridge heatsink twice, using proper thermal paste remover and surface purifier and applied Arctic MX-4 Thermal Paste, which is about the best paste out there, when on the board it is connected by those horrible spring pin things which seem to let the Heatsink wobble around... Which is apparently normal.

I also bought a Scythe Mini Kaze Ultra 40mm fan and used the long screws it came with to lightly screw it inbetween the thick heatsink fins (fits quite nicely), so it slightly hovers above the Heatsink blowing air down onto it connected to the Power Fan header so it runs on full at all times.


That was a mouthful, after doing all that.., for a good while I wasn't crashing on games, but eventually it started again, much less frequently mind, some games I can play for hours without problem, more graphic intensive games can do it quickly, it varies depending on the game.

As you can see, I have exhausted so many options because I just don't want to RMA my board. I use my PC very often and I would be lost without it. Since the OP's RMA came back as a negative on the board being bad, could it be my PSU?

Only thing is, if it was the PSU from the start, why would me pointing a desk fan at my motherboard prevent the crashing?, It must be the Northbridge for me

If you've got this far, any tips?, I want to solve this issue.

[Pill Monster]

Unlikely to be the NB, what kind of crashes do you get?

[FreaK367]

Originally Posted by Pill Monster

Unlikely to be the NB, what kind of crashes do you get?

Just an overall PC crash, I'd be in the middle of a game, everything running smoothly, then no warning my entire PC freezes, recurring of the last sound played through the speakers, PC keeps running and just displays a frozen image of the game.

I have a Logitech G15 keyboard which has an LCD screen on it, and that freezes too, the clock stops ticking, just completely unresponsive. Nothing I press does anything, and it stays in that state for as long as I let it until I just click the restart button, then it starts up as if nothing happened... no BSOD, no dump, no critical error pop up or anything.

When I first put this PC together, it happened and I DID get a BSOD, but eventually that stopped and I haven't had a BSOD in over 2 months now, but plenty of just that freezing/crashing whenever gaming puts my PC under load.

Considering my PC specs, my pc being "under load" via Gaming alone doesn't even use half of my RAM, and the CPU usage is never even close to 100%, more like half that, GPU probably gets stressed the most, but it seems to handle it and the temperature is always pretty good.

Any thoughts?

Also, a Prime95 Small FFT test doesn't crash my PC, but a Prime95 Large FFT test crashes my pc in a couple of minutes.

I ran a FurMark test to stress my GPU, and it went to 73*C and was stable at that temperature for about 20 minutes before I was satisfied. While gaming though I don't see it above 60*C.

[Pill Monster]

Try running HyperPi....

[FreaK367]

Originally Posted by Pill Monster

Try running HyperPi....

Consider it done, what should I calculate?, and do you need any snapshots?

[Pill Monster]

Originally Posted by FreaK367

Consider it done, what should I calculate?, and do you need any snapshots?

1M should be enough....

[FreaK367]

Originally Posted by Pill Monster

1M should be enough....

I did it all the way up to 8M, which was 05m 22.914s

1M screenshot here:

[Pill Monster]

It's prob either your ram, psu or gfx card. PSU has decent reviews though.... What's the 12v like under load (like when gaming).

Btw any games in particular or does it lock up in all of them?

Could be ram if P95 crashes in large FTP's....but you can rule out the CPU or NB imo.

[IcE]

Originally Posted by Pill Monster

It's prob either your ram, psu or gfx card. PSU has decent reviews though.... What's the 12v like under load (like when gaming).

Btw any games in particular or does it lock up in all of them?

Could be ram if P95 crashes in large FTP's....but you can rule out the CPU or NB imo.

Large FFT stresses the memory controller, while blend stresses lots of RAM. He could try bumping up CPU/NB volts a little to see if it goes away.

[FreaK367]

Originally Posted by Pill Monster

It's prob either your ram, psu or gfx card. PSU has decent reviews though.... What's the 12v like under load (like when gaming).

Btw any games in particular or does it lock up in all of them?

Could be ram if P95 crashes in large FTP's....but you can rule out the CPU or NB imo.

Well, software readings of my voltages seem way off, my BIOS shows the 12v as 12.168 and 3.3v as 3.340 - 3.360 , but most software shows my 12v as 7.9 - 8.1, and my 3.3v as 2.028 - 2.040. EasyTune6 which is software that came with my motherboard shows 12v at 12.160 and 3.3v at 3.340 when idle.

Just gamed for a while and EasyTune6 showed my +12v go as low as 12.020, back up to 12.160 when I exited the game.

At one point or other it has atleast crashed once on the 3 main games I've been playing over the past months, FIFA 12 is the rarest... but it has happened a couple of times. Tribes: Ascend is the most common, and APB: Reloaded could quite easily crash the PC.

[Pill Monster]

Can you post a screenshot of your BIOS settings?

[deltatux]

Sounds like bad RAM or misconfigured RAM to me.

deltatux

[IcE]

Originally Posted by deltatux

Sounds like bad RAM or misconfigured RAM to me.

deltatux

Yeah freezes are typical of bad ram or bad PSU.