GA H55-USB3 2.0 & G.Skill 4GBECO RAM (1.35v) compatibility - new HTPC build

[Dark Mantis]

Thanks for the update anyway and have a great weekend yourself. Hopefully even sunny this time!

[Rob69sage]

Just thought I'd give an update. 

I got a friend of mine who's a network administrator to test the board on a MB tester.

He determined that the board is bad.  If I remember the terminology he used, I think he said it "faulted out" during the POST between the DMA & the VIDEO.  I guess that's why there was no display during the "rebooting"... it never got that far.

So I'm going to go ahead & RMA the board to GB since I used a rebate and can't return to the retailer.

Hopefully it won't take too long.

Thanks again for all the help!

[Dark Mantis]

You're welcome man! No problem.

[Rob69sage]

I finally got the MB back from Gigabyte.  They sent the same board back.  There was no indication as to what they found, what they did, or anything.   

...and the board is doing the exact same thing! ...constantly rebooting! 

My friend, who's a network administrator, took an i5 CPU from a working machine & tried it in the board.  We shorted the CMOS jumpers to reset the BIOS before testing it.

This CPU seemed to work at first (no rebooting), but it just seemed to hang, and there was no output to the monitor.  We plugged in a MB tester & it gave an error code indicating a problem with the CPU, but we were using a WORKING CPU.    

Now I'm wondering... does Gigabyte actually TEST boards that have been RMA'd (install RAM, plug them up to a monitor, go through the boot process, etc...), or do they just voltage test them?

I was thinking of returning my CPU, but I'm not totally convinced that this MB was tested properly by GB, and I'm betting that it's still bad.  If the MB is OK, then why didn't the i5 work?  ...and I'm really confused that the i5 and my i3 act differently (i3=reboots, i5=hangs), but ultimately they both won't work in my MB & don't display any video output. 

Unless there's something we're missing, this board still seems bad.

Does anyone have any other advice or info that might help?

Thanks!

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

I think the best thing you can do is contact the Gigabyte service centre that dealt with your RMAed board and ask them for information about the test and exactly what they did and found if anything.

[Rob69sage]

I'll give that a try...

Thanks!