Gigabyte MA790FX DQ6

[keithlm]

One thing I have found with this 9850 is the IMC is nowhere as good as my 9500 was. I'm now running my ram at 800. Must be something in my bit of silicon because it's on the same bios and I know the ram is good for 1150mhz.

I disagree with you: I don't think it is the 9850 IMC. I think it is the Gigabyte bios.

This same memory worked great on the DFI board I had for a few days and I had no problems. (Up until I ran Sandra and it hosed everything. But I think that it just mangled something in the bios... who knows.) But when I say "no problems" I mean that Prime95 ran for hours with no readily apparent problems. I even ran 4xPrime95 and then kicked off the AOD stability test at the same time. I let those both run overnight at the same time with no problems.

It's either the Gigabyte BIOS or they (Gigabyte) have done something wrong in hardware.

(I'd prefer BIOS.)
===========================

ANYWAY:

This morning I did the following:

1. Reset optimized bios settings.
2. Reboot.
3. Reflashed the F3 bios. (I did this since the note on the Gigabyte website says that the F3 bios updates the "backup" bios.)
4. Optimized settings.
5. Reboot.
6. Reflashed F4.
7. Optimized settings.
8. Reboot.
9. Reset some BIOS things. (Turned off misc stuff.)

RESULTS:
1066 was very unstable. I could get windows to post, but if I started Prime95 it would reboot immediately. I lowered the memory speed to 800 and it still rebooted immediately if I ran Prime95.

I also noticed that with the F4 BIOS the CPU-VID and NB-VID both defaulted to 1.3Volts. (They defaulted to 1.2375V and 1.1375 in BIOS version F5)

But F4 was too unstable. So I reflashed F5 (optimized, save, reboot, etc.) and everything is back where it was. I can run PRIME95 and it won't immediately reboot the machine. Prime95 (blend) will fail after a few minutes... but at least it runs. (If I decrease speed to 800 Prime95 will run longer but still fail. If I put in some old DDR2-400 ram it will run for a few hours before failing.)

BTW: I think my "main problem" is the G.Skill 2x2Gb ram I have. (With the powerchip IC. They have really funky BIOS timings.) If I had a more normal RAM I think I'd be a lot more stable. (But not as stable as I'd like to be.) But even though that may be some or even most of the problem... I still suspect that the bios has some issues.

EDIT: I learned more than I wanted to know about Prime95 today. It seems that the "small FFS" test will test the cores and that the "blend" test the memory, core and communication between both. Since memtest86 runs fine on my machine for many passes... and Prime95 small ffs runs without problems for long periods of time... then that leaves the the NB. Which is what I guessed previously.)

Looking at the congregated results here with DS5... I'd say GBT has a major BIOS problem.

Apparently they don't think so:

Gigabyte's response to my question about problems with the current (DS-5 F5) BIOS. (I asked them when they'd have a fix):

There are no known issue with the 9850 with the F5 bios, please check your memory and try testing with single module

So apparently we aren't having problems... it's all our imagination.

To be honest: I had suspected I'd get a lame answer like that.