Problem with error 54 on Black Ops

[jonbass]

Hi!

I bought Foxconn Black Ops a couple of weeks ago and i have been really happy with the board, but then yesterday it started to acting strange. When booting i get an error code 54 and constant beeping, the card locks and i have to power down before the board can boot again. But if i go into BIOS and save then the same problem appears.

If i clear Cmos, and change the settings then i can boot, power off, start up the board a couple of times before this happens again.
I have tried evry BIOS availible but the same problem appears after a couple of reboots. Also i dosnt matter what settings i use, this start to happening after a couple of boots regardless of what i have done. I have also read the debug thread and the "save and exit CMOS - Power off PSU" only helps for the moment, after a couple of boots the the board get locked in the error 54 again.

Before this i have achived really great results with the Black Ops board and like i said, i been very happy with it, but now i am just getting frustrated because nothing i have tried helps. So now i decided to ask if someone here have a qlue on what to do, i just cant get it to work like it use to.
Also i have tried other memorys etc but that doesnt help either.

So if someone had the same problem and fixed it the please i would be gratefull if you could help me, or just give me some pointers because i am running out of ideas. It feels like i have tried evrything but nothing so far has helped, the board locks after a couple of reboots.

EDIT: Even with 24/7 stable settings this happens, between lock down i can go into windows, and i have tested the stability so that shouldnt be the problem.

Also, this morning i changed to BIOS G27 and discoverd thath if i go into integrated Pheripherals / USB Device settings the board locks. This is just a problem i had with G27 BIOS. But beside this problem i think that BIOS G27 is great, especially memory stability is much better with this version, or atleast it have been so for me.


Thanks in advance :)

The system used is.

Intel QX9650 Extreme
Foxconn Black Ops X48 ( right now on BIOS G27)
Super Talent ProjectX 1800 7-7-7-21
Asus 9800GX2
Silverstone Olympia 1000W
Right now the system is cooled with air.

http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q2/Jonbass_121/IMG_8031-1.jpg

[Planet]

54 is caused by memory. I think you might need to tweak your ram settings a bit or try relaxed timings.

[saaya]

hmmmm they come with xmp, dont they?
are you using the xmp profile?
what usb devices are you using?
does it hang when you access the integrated periphals section every time? or at least repeatedly?

[jonbass]

Even with 24/7 stability on memorys this error apears, and i have read the debug thread and saw that this was caused by memorys so i started to check stability and evrything is fine.
I will try to explain the best i can in english, evrything works great for a couple of reboots, but then suddenly the mobo locks at error 54 when booting. Even when using stock settings this problem appears after some restarts. Also, when running for example 7-7-7-17 etc and stabilitys is checked and OK, when i then change to 8-8-8-21 and save and exit, then the mobo starts up fine, but the second restart after save-exit the board locks.
Also i am quite experienced user and have during the last couple of weeks spended some serious time tweaking and overclocking this board without any problems at al, but then yesterday the board just decided to give me these errors regardless of settings. I think that i will try another Black Ops board and se if the problem still appears, if so then it may be some problems with the HW or settings i use, if the problem dissapear then i will change to a new board. Thanks for your answer :)

No, i dont use XMP profile.
I have my USB keyboard and mouse, when i first enter USB Device settings evrything is fine, but if i go out and then in again the board locks. I dont know how to better explain, if you dont understand the please just say so and i will try to explain better.

Thanks for both your replies, i really appreciate your help :).

[saaya]

nice results! :toast:
and your welcome, im glad to help out :)

i just tried the usb menu thing and the same thing happens for me! :eek:
must be some weird bug :D
ill tell the bios engineers about this on monday, should be easy to fix :)

about the board hanging during every other boot or so... no idea what that could be...
and it also happens at stock speed?
are you watercooling? are you sure there is no leak?
could there be something shorting the board?
check all pci and pciE and memory and usb slots to see if something in there could short them
also check the board if there is anything on there that could short it.

ive been rebooting this board for thousands of times in the past days trying different sets of memory and different configurations on it...
so whatever problem you have doesnt happen over here... and i havent heard about it from anybody else...

hmmmmm it could be many things... the board, the cpu, the mem, the psu, the hdd... hmmmm
most likely though is either cpu, mem or board... if you can try another blackops that would be great.
the best and fastest way of troubleshooting is still swapping hardware... if you can try another cpu, other mem, another psu and another hdd that would be useful information.
start with another cpu and mem and psu if possible, actually removing the hdd should be enough, if you remove the hdd and reboot a few dozen times and the problem doesnt appear then it should be the hdd, as the hang appears during posting and not loading the os, right?

do you remember changing anything before this problem appeared?
new bios? changed some setting? changed some hardware?

[jonbass]

Hi!

Thank you again :).

Well i have just done a couple of hours Clear Cmos and then tried to run the board, the first time when i booted evrything was fine, second time it locked. Did the "save and exit CMOS - Power off PSU" thing thath was recomended. After that evrything seemed fine, now i only had about 30 minuts to test things so i may just have been lucky. I will continue later tonight and test the board to see if it still gets me errors when exiting BIOS.
The thing thath drives me crazy is that i can change settings and then exit without any problems, then run a couple of benchmarks with no problems, i can even go into BIOS and save and exit mayby ten times, but then the elevent time the board locks in an 54 error.
I have used the board for about two -three weeks before without any problems, then yesterday this 54 error appeard, i haven´t changed any hardware before this happend or other things that i think could cause this. I have been messing around with timings and others settings before and after this happend but i never had any problem. Now offcourse i have had a couple of lock ups when trying to find the best settings, but that is just normal. This error seemes to appear random. Now i still can run the board stable even when this error appears, i only have to power off and start up again and evrything is then fine for a couple of save and exit.


Also, when i read the debugg thread i saw this, so i thought that the error was mayby something thath others had experienced too
"54 with beeping - Finished Memory Sizing Code, Stuck at Memory Test. Sometimes happens at overclocked settings reboot or after "save and exit CMOS" - Power off PSU - wait till light discharges fully - power on again."

After this problem appeard i have changed CPU, memorys, tried most of the BIOS out there, now i am using G27 and it is working great when the board doesnt lock up.


I will continue tonight with my tests and see if the error 54 still apears and how often, i will try to find a pattern when this error apears, then i can maybe figure out what is causing this.
I will update when i have any new info.

Also, once again a big thanks for the help so far :).

[saaya]

your welcome :toast:

hmmm it sounds like a mem thing to me...
how did you test mem stability?
it could be that its really on the edge of stability...
it works 99.99999% stable but every now and then some timing that is set too agressively happens to cause a problem?

it sucks that its so hard to reproduce this thing... thats always the most annoying things, something you cant reproduce...

can you post your memory timings?
maybe i can help in identifying the timing that might cause this...
IF its the memory timings....

[jonbass]

Hi!

It seemes like the Error 54 problem have dissapeard.

I have now been running this board for two days now without any problems, ever since I cleared Cmos for a couple of hours and restarted, got error 54 once, this problem seems to have disappeared.
I have tried to reconstruct this error 54 problem with different setting, timings etc but no error, I even tried to use timings/settings that I knew weren’t stable and the board still booted up fine.
This is very strange, but i am not going to complain about it :)


Anyway, the Black Ops motherboard is right now assembled in my review system, so during the tests this board are used for, I have tried a lot of different settings. Here are a couple of the timings that is used for the memory overclocking tests.



ECC Scrubbing ..................- Disable
Cas Latency Time(tCL)...........-7 / 6
RAS to CAS delay(tRCD)..........-7 / 6
RAS Precharge (tRP)...............-7 / 6
Precharge Delay (tRAS)..........-17 / 15 / 21
Row Refresh Cycle( tRFC).......-74 / 48 ( and a couple between, but have found these two good)
Performance Level ................-L7 / L6
Write to Precharge (tWR)........-21 / 16
Write to Read Delay (tWTR).....-17 / 19
Act to Act Delay (tRRD) ..........-5 / 4
Read to Precharge (tRTP)........-5 / 7
All Precharge to Refresh.........-Auto / 9
Refresh Period Ratio...............-x1
Refresh Period (tREF).............-Auto
Command Per Clock...............-1T
R2RD Same Rank (TRTRS)........-Auto / 6 ( started to tweak with 6 and went down from there )
R2RD Different Rank (TRTRD)....-Auto / 8 (started to tweak with 8 and went down from there)
R2RD Same Rank (TWTRS).......-Auto / 3 (started to tweak with 3 and went down from there)
R2RD Different Rank (TWTRD)...-Auto / 6 (started to tweak with 6 and went down from there)
FSB Gain 1 ............................ -Auto
FSB Gain 2 ............................ -Auto
FSB Gain 3 ............................ -Auto
FSB Gain 4 ............................ -Auto
Blue DIMM Clock DLL Adjust......-Auto / -1 - -4
White DIMM Clock DLL Adjust ...-Auto
Blue DIMM CTRL DLL Adjust ......-Auto / +1
White DIMM CTRL DLL Adjust ....-Auto
Dram Command DLL Adjust ......-Auto /-2 / +1

Also, I want to say that despite of this error 54 problem I have been really happy with the Black Ops board, and it seems like it is just getting better. Tonight I did some overclockning with the new G27 BIOS, because of the problem I haven’t had a chance to try it before. And with this BIOS my OC went up a notch.


Also, once again a big thanks for the help, i really appreciate it :).

[saaya]

your welcome :D

almost 4.5, nice! :toast:
very detailled memory options you posted there, its almost a memory tweaking guide, very helpful information!
i have made prety much the same experience with the range of settings using higher trfc and 888 since i was in the 2000-2100 ram range.
something is holding me back at 2075, and im not sure what it is yet... going up a one or two steps of mem clocks and its extremely unstable or doesnt even boot... very weird...
the only times i noticed abrupt limitations like this was even when the cpu couldnt run a high fsb, but that cant be the problem for me atm, or when the dlls are out of sync, but i tried all combos and couldnt get any higher.

nb gtl to -4 gave me a really small but noticeable memory clock boost btw

oh and another thing i noticed, even if you use the white dimms, adjusting the blue dimms dlls will affect your memory clocks and can give you a couple extra mhz :D
same for using the blue dimms and adjusting the white dimm clock dlls

so the error has dissapeared now hmmmmm
but you had it once initially after resetting the bios, right?
weird... maybe it was some bug with some setting...
i had similar problems on various boards, sometimes weird unconsistent errors appared, and very often resetting the bios and then adjusting everything to the same settings as before solved the problem.

please check if this error code appears again and let us know when it does :)

im glad to hear you like the board :toast:

[saaya]

i checked, and actually im getting error 54 quite frequently as well when pushing up the memory.
i can shut down and reboot and enter bios but save and exit right away, and the same settings work stable...

not sure why exactly this happens...
but basically it means, if you try a setting it might not work immediatly, turn off the board, boot again and enter bios and save and exit right away to check if the setting maybe works. quite annoying if your tweaking the memory as it makes you think a certain setting doesnt help when it actually does :/

[jonbass]

Hi!
Sorry it has taken me some time to answer, i have been really busy with finishing up some work.

Ok, i haven´t tried to set the white dimms dlls when using blue, but will absolutely try that. By the way, do you see any gain in overclocking/results using blue or white dimms?
Also, very nice memory clock you have achieved, if it´s ok that i ask, what memory’s are you using?



I have also continued with my tests on the Black Ops, the problem did appear again, and i have come to pretty much the same conclusion as you regarding the error 54. Even with settings that are working this error can appear.
But now when i know that nothing is wrong with my HW or the board it doesn’t bother me as much, off course it´s still a bit annoying. But for now, I set my sub timings so it works with the memory frequency I want to use, and then I tweak the timings I can with memset.

And exactly as you write, the best thing to do when this error appears, just turn off the PSU until the light fully discharge and then power up again.

I want to thank you again for taking the time to research this, not everybody would do that so I am very grateful. :)

[Harshal]

Thanks for the info. Shall try BO, once my OCZ from RMA arrives. May be few of your mem setting work for me :)

[Nosfer@tu]

Thanks for the info. Shall try BO, once my OCZ from RMA arrives. May be few of your mem setting work for me :)

OCZ mem has problems at SPD timmings, Dont recall specifily but Tony created a thread about it.

[Harshal]

Thanks man. I have read thread by Tony. Lets see how it goes. ;)

[saaya]

im using one of the golden kits i took from cellshock (2025 777 2v) , im still testing but it seems slot 1 and 3 are slight better than 2 and 4. they are all really good tho, on asus and gigabyte boards slots 1 and 3 usually sucked pretty bad, here on this board all 4 slots seem to clock all really well.

im travelling in china atm, as soon as im back i will work on a memory tweaking guide for the blackops :)

[saaya]

FYI, i talked to the BIOS engineers some more, and they think they know whats causing this... they think they can fix it quickly, if they cant, then they will make a BIOS that always turns off the board and then coldboots with the new settings, that way there should be no more error 54 and annoying beeps when we push the board... applying new settings will take slightly longer, but its a much better solution than having to go through the error 54 thing especially if you keep trying one new setting after the other to tweak the memory :D

[Harshal]

That sounds comforting specially with tweaking the memory.

[jonbass]

That sounds great :), thank you.

That should make the memory tweaking a bit easier, i just got a hold of a 8400 CPU for memory testing so this should be good.

[saaya]

good to hear you agree :D
I just talked to the BIOS engineer, they are working on this, they actually think they can get rid of the timing problem that triggers the memory test fail at 54, if they cant do it quickly they will work on a quick fix that just adds a delay after save and exit to prevent this from happening until they fixed the timing probs :)