Woohoo! New PC build...

[Dan Bayford]

Easily done mate ive lost a few in the past its surprisingly complex to replicate what happens naturally in nature but persevere its really worth it if one takes as will your pc when you get to the bottom of your start up problems

 

[Dan Bayford]

Good luck with both

 

[Myles (Mr Fox)]

Ta. Still no reply from Gigabyte support - and I can’t update my ticket with the recent findings either.

I did try some of the alternative XMP settings for similar Corsair sticks (the mobo bios has around nine listed that it will let you try) but none of them solve the problem.

I’d not be too fussed about the issue (given that the pc seems fast and stable once booted) except that it was during one of these (literally) false-starts that the last PSU went bang! The current super-duper one is working fine - except for an occasional tendency to forget/lose the onboard monitoring. A google suggests that this is not uncommon (both Gigabyte and Corsair - and probably MSI if my experiences are relevant - seem to fall int9 the ‘nice hardware, software could be a lot better’ category).

 

[deecee52]

its still a new chipset , they never get it right , too many variables to second guess and the goalposts keep moving as each hardware manufacturer brings out new bits , Gigabyte are usualy pretty handy at BIOS updates just sit back and wait , your rig should suffer no harm i think maybe the last PSU may have had a fault .

 

[Myles (Mr Fox)]

its still a new chipset , they never get it right , too many variables to second guess and the goalposts keep moving as each hardware manufacturer brings out new bits , Gigabyte are usualy pretty handy at BIOS updates just sit back and wait , your rig should suffer no harm i think maybe the last PSU may have had a fault .

It does feel like a safe restart - nothing out of the ordinary. I might fit (or find) a mobo speaker to add the error beeps for good measure.

 

[deecee52]

reading up on the net XMP is causing lots of probs on DDR5 , turn it off for now

 

[Myles (Mr Fox)]

reading up on the net XMP is causing lots of probs on DDR5 , turn it off for now

Thanks, I’ll have a Google.

The base speed without xmp is a lot slower than the sticks are rated at - I’ll see how far they can be pushed back on clock speed alone.

<edit>Crikey - yes, loads of ddr5 XMP issues out there - and they’ve been around for a lot longer than the Z790/13th-gen kit too.

I guess it’s somewhat reassuring that I can at least boot my rig and get stable performance at the XMP target speeds even if the first-boot issue exists. Some seem to just totally fail to boot with XMP turned on.

It’s also ‘reassuring’ that issues have been reported even with memory on the QVL list for a particular board - so no real point in wasting money swapping to ‘tested’ ram.

 

[Dan Bayford]

Was there a similar problem with ddr4 only I had a very similar problem

 

[Dan Bayford]

Ill put the the other 16 in and reduce the mghz in the bios and see just out of curiosity

 

[deecee52]

I never had problems on my old system Dan , that was running DDR4 with XMP running . My current rig uses DDR 5 xmp disabled and its rock steady so far

 

[Dan Bayford]

Thanks Dave it just seemed to be a similar problem but good to know thanks mate

 

[Myles (Mr Fox)]

Mine *does* run - and stably - with XMP at the default settings - it's just this phantom-start issue that bugs me (and the fact that the mobo clearly isn't happy with the ram config but gets on with it anyway).

Made the mistake of checking the current prices for some of my components - eek! talk about depreciation! - well if I'd wanted to save money rather than just get on and use the rig I'd probably have a significantly different setup now anyway!

 

[deecee52]

Is it stil dual booting with xmp off ?

 

[Myles (Mr Fox)]

Is it stil dual booting with xmp off ?

No. Turning XMP on in any shape or form seems to trigger it. What I haven’t yet tried (but might just do now) is see if it will run at XMP speeds but with standard timing - I.e, just over clocking the memory speed.

 

[Myles (Mr Fox)]

Oh! Well - so I tried turning XMP completely off - but bumping the RAM clock speed up to the same level and it does the same thing!

Next test - start at the base RAM speed and increment until I find the problem level... This seems of academic interest only really - as I've said several times before, once booted the PC is stable and fast.

 

[Myles (Mr Fox)]

Yeah, so…

I think the natural speed of the ram is 4800Mhz (so why do they sell it as 6000?)…

It boots cleanly up to 5600 and burps at 5800 (XMP off). I’m now getting bored - it runs stably at at least 6300 once booted.

I’ve also played around a bit with cpu over clocking. My initial attempts back in December just made it slower! I then switched to the automatic Intel XTU app which did a nice safe boost.

Tried a few benchmarks today and found (via xtu) that the all-core performance was being limited by current. I copied the auto over lock details into a manual setting and unlocked the POWER. The only result was thermal throttling when all cores were churning away (3dMark cpu test + starts with all cores and then works down to a single core. Or thread). 5% quicker on all#core utilisation but no real difference down at gaming-level (2+ cores/threads). Again, bored now - it’s not challenged by decent mods and tracks in rf2. Dodgy ones (the merc 190s are poor for instance) can be avoided.

If I had an even more demanding vr set than the HP, I might have tried harder but right now, I’m just losing sim time to fiddling time!

 

[Myles (Mr Fox)]

Not bored enough to give ram speeds one more go…!

6600 didn’t boot, 6400 did but rf2 (but nothing else) would freeze and hang occasionally. 6300 was ok but I felt it was too close to 6400 to be worth the risk. 6200 seems to work fine.

 

[Myles (Mr Fox)]

Well - Gigabyte support have been pretty good and thorough. My memory sticks aren’t in the QVL but they tested the closest they have and sent me a video… After a bit of further clarification, they say the the behaviour is normal if the power has been turned off - there are some settings that cannot be retained (really?) and need to be reset for the XMP to work.

I’ve asked them for clarification but probably case closed.