In mid-August I put my GA-X58A-UD3R together with an i7-930 and 3X2GB Mushkin Redline memory. Soon I noticed BSOD’s every few days, sometimes multiple times the same day. Memory testing pretty quickly identified one module that always failed, so I RMA’d that one piece.
The box was much better, but not perfect. Every several days Windows 7 Explorer would quit and restart, the logs would fill up with strange errors, applications such as Photoshop would blow up, the box would not always resume from sleep, etc. I tried all sorts of BIOS settings, ran at stock, OC’ed, ran memory at 1066 or the rated 1600, and none of that seemed to matter. CPU tests always passed. Memory tests almost always passed, and when they didn't, simply restart fixed the error.
Then I started to run memtest86+ at every boot, and every 5th to 10th boot would post but then shower my monitor with memory errors. What was INTERMITTENTLY bad? Another memory module? My CPU? The X58A? Another controller chip? My power supply? A random capacitor or other component? Where do I start?
I heard, true or not, that Gigabyte would replace a board on the second RMA, and I was thinking the problem was likely there, so I sent the GA-X58A-UD3R back expecting them to return it but setting up the process to send it in a second time for replacement. Of course, they did return it saying it passed their 24 hour test which really annoyed me since it often worked for me for 24 hours, just not EVERY 24 hours, but that’s what I expected they would do, at least the first time.
Since the box was going to be down, I also sent the memory back to Mushkin also asking them to replace it. Unlike GB, they did. They sent three new modules. So I reassembled the box dreading what I would find, and I started with CPU stock timings but memory at XMP 1600 MHz, its rated speed. After two weeks I’d still to experience a failure, so I bumped BCLK up to 160 and reduced the memory multiplier to hold it at 1600. That was three weeks ago, and still no failures.
I’m not going to get over-confident, but it’s starting to look like (at least) two of my original three memory modules were bad – one blatantly so, and the other very subtly and very annoying intermittently so. I’ve built 10 or more systems over the years, and I’ve never had any grief at all, certainly not like this box. I hope this is fixed, and I hope the next time will be smoother!
