GA-Z68X-UD4-B3: Keeps rebooting after cold start

[Damo]

Hello,

I came across this forum as I was suffering from the same cold reboot problem as described in the first post.
I had everything set at optimised defaults. Tried all the official and beta BIOSes, tried underclocking everything, reset CMOS, pulled out the MB battery, flashed both BIOSes so they were the same etc,etc....no luck, until Monday.

The problem to me appeared to be that the CPU was not getting a chance to power up.

In a last ditch attempt, I changed the "Delay for HDD (secs)" in the Advanced BIOS features to 10 seconds.

After changing this setting, my machine has not once exhibited the cold reboot problem (5 days). It has frozen once when doing the memory timing check, but a press of the reset button got it going again.

My settings/system specs are:
Official F7 BIOS
i7 2600k @ 3.7 Ghz, 8Gb G.Skill PC1700 Ram @ 2133Mhz, Gainward GTX 580 3Gb video card (stock timing), WD Black 2T HDD in AHCI mode and connected to SATA port 0, Corsair 850W PS, Lite-On BD drive which I have connected to one of the SATA 2 controllers, Antec twelve hundred case.

I joined this forum in the hope that my fix might help you out. Good luck. 

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and thanks for the input.

The HDD Delay is a useful tool and usually helps if a slow drive is used as a boot drive. Most modern drives, except "Green" varieties don't require this to be used but sometimes it can help. Ten seconds though is quite a large delay.

[Damo]

After more testing, I have narrowed my reboot problem down to a single BIOS setting. (It had nothing to do with the HDD Delay in the end).

If I disable GSATA, my machine works flawlessly. When I re-enable the setting, the reboot loop is back. As I understand it, both GSATA and eSATA is controlled by the Marvell 88SE9172 chip. I don't use either, so disabling them is not an issue.

So what does this mean in terms of the integrity of my board? Is there something physically wrong with the board or is it a BIOS issue?

I have tried the latest BIOS updates including a few of the beta versions with no change in this scenario.

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

[Dark Mantis]

I would suspect it is a simple BIOS glitch and needs to be tweaked a bit. It might be a good idea to confirm your findings with GGTS so that are aware of the issue and cause.

Just enter your email address and click on the language of choice.
GGTS   http://ggts.gigabyte.com/

Please expect several days for a reply.