GA-X58A-UD3R Rev2 power management and boot / restart / shutdown woes

[waster]

I'm on my 2nd GA-X58A-UD3R (first one died - no life @ powerup after 6 months of flakey operation) - the current one and the one before both had problems booting if the mains power lead wasn't first removed to tunoff standby power for the motherboard. Even then there was a 1 in 10 chance it would fail to boot (no display output and a beep code) or random peripherals would not be present under windows (WinXP Pro / WinVista Ultimate x64 / Win7 Ultimate x64) as though the global HW reset to the hardware wasn't doing the right thing and some hardware blocks had hung.

Another problems is that restarts or shutdowns from WinXP Pro hang at the point the machine should remove the power / reset i.e. after the "Do not remove power saving settings" popup  has cleared and just the blue screen and cursor are displayed. WinVista and Win7 can reboot and shutdown, but the subsequent restart can be problematic. Beep codes at POST, no display or on board peripheral not present in devise manager when you log on.

Tired several clean installs of varous the OSes, two different power supplies, and stripping the unit down to minimal hardware. motherbaord, i7 x980, memory, graphics card (GF GTX480), raid controller (Hightpoint RR3510) + Drives. Flakeyness regarding startup / shutdown persists. The system is rock solid once I can get it to boot correctly - that is until I want to reboot or shutdown.

It all looks like a poor motherboard design combined with crap bios sw not driving the power mangement and reset controller correctly. The latest two Bios updates haven't aided the situation either. And unfortuantely I can't revert to the one befor the FF bios... which appeared to be a little better... as its no longer available on the Gigabyte site :-(

Anyone having similar problems... or got any thoughts or suggestions?

[Dark Mantis]

Hi well I would agree that it is probably a BIOS issue buit that doesn't help you much now.

I would suggest disabling all the power saving/sleep modes in the BIOS and see how that effects it. You could also do the same with Windows offerings.

What PSU are you using ?

Have you tried without the Highpoint card installed ?

[waster]

Hi well I would agree that it is probably a BIOS issue buit that doesn't help you much now.

I would suggest disabling all the power saving/sleep modes in the BIOS and see how that effects it. You could also do the same with Windows offerings.

What PSU are you using ?

Have you tried without the Highpoint card installed ?

I turned all the power saving stuff off in the Bios... in windows all but suspend to disk  have been turned off, this is enabled for my UPS. However, I even tried turning this off and hoping I'm near enough to the machine to do a proper shutdown before the battery runs out in a power cut... No difference to startup / shutdown.

As for PSUs I'm currently using a Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1000W. I've also tried my Corsair HX1000W. These should be more than enough PSU given they a 3-way SLI rated and I'm running with a single graphics card configuration. Flakeyness is the same with both.

I haven't tried removing the Raid controller as I'm booting from a 3 drive RAID5 array on that card. However, I've been toying with getting a SSD to boot from... if I do I'll be able to give that a go.

Anyway at the moment it looks like pulling the mains lead will have to do for now 

BBFN
Dave

[Dark Mantis]

Well as with a lot of faultfinding it boils down to a process of elimination. If you can remove the RAID card(Highpoint) from the board and then test at least you can eliminate that as the cause.