Hi
I gave up on the X99 board from Gigabyte in January 2015 - took the 700 USD loss - and just went out and bought an MSI XPower. No problems at all. I did do a RMA request for the Gigabyte - but simply did not care about it.
Anyway, around June having more time and out of curiosity I did ask if the RMA was still valid.
The answer af the RMA: CPU pins bent and not covered by the RMA.So:
Check your cards to see if your CPU bins have bent. The socket in these Gigabyte boards seem to be of bad quality - since most are/was experiencing the same problems (bios, reboot, black screen - and finally end of board working). I only put my CPU into the board around start of October 2014 - and tested until January 2015 when the board failed completely.
I never took the CPU out of the socket to test whether the pins had bent when I put it in - that never happened to me since 1991. The same problem even happened to a review magazine who complained about the same problems. I've build my PCs since 1991. So this CPU was only sat in the socket once. I never make mistakes there
)
So the legs bent? Or the legs bents over time - i.e. from the pressure ... of the cooler? I do not know.
But the legs are bent.
So in January 2015 I crapped the board when the screen suddenly turned black - and before that all the instability problems people including me were writing about at the time. Probably the legs just kept bent'ing until finally the board did not work anymore. I had a watercooler on top ...
Anyway a piece of crap. I had the same problem with the last Gigabyte board I bought a few year back - that made me stop buying Gigabyte cards. This just reconfirms Gigabyte has a production problems with their cards that seem to remain.
When Abit went away - Gigabyte replaced them in my case. Then I went with Asrock - out of curiousity. Today I read reviews of cards - and decide depending on the feedback. Wish I had done that for the Gigabyte card - but I was an early adopter - and took the penality for the early adoption I guess.
(BTW I was just archiving my papers - and before throwing out the RMA paper and the card in the garbage can, remembered I would post it here ... so you can check your pins. May be you can get Gigabyte to RMA boards with bent pins in the socket ... I have never seen this before - and also never had a card this bad physical quality. Even the compared to last Gigabyte card which lasted for 1-2 years - then a component fell of the card)
