Official GIGABYTE X38-DQ6/X38T-DQ6 Info/BIOS Thread

[Hornet331]

Hornet, how many fins does the Rev 1.1 X38T heatsink have on the NB?, is it 22 or 30?

duno, but i will count it. I have to reaseat the heatsink anyways, because 50°C at full load with IFX-14 at stock (3ghz) is unaccaptable.

[2DIFF]

About heatpipe: I cut mine in half (or better three pieces) and trashed the NB-part. The whole thing is cheap (feels like junk) as hell, and: what's the idea of transporting the heat from the NB (which heats the most) to the SB and the convertors via heatpipe? Since I don't have them connected anymore the SB and convertor part don't even get hand-hot.

AND I never had the cold boot problem again (Bios is F4b)
First time I quote myself

BTW I just realized none of my posted pics were displayed, seems like my webserver needs improvement too...

[victor_c26]

I dont have anything using the ide or the gigabyte sata ports atm, my optical drive is on a regular intel sata port...but I was having serious issues with the optical drive plugged into one of the GB sata ports, every time I'd load a dvd xp would just stop for about 15 seconds or so, or go to my computer, or anything that would cause it to access the drive...The jmicron is on the same irq as the video cards though, which is why I disabled it initally, tho it seemed to only help temporarily, I've since reenabled it, and the system is ok, but I dont have anything plugged into it, either. Something with that X38 NB is odd tho, or maybe its the bioses, not sure, be interesting to see if anybody else is having problems on similar (non GB) X38 boards...

Sobek: Oh and to clarify it was the GB RAID Controller driver I removed, which I think is the same thing anyway

That's pretty strange, I'm using the Jmicron controller for my IDE DVD-ROM and DVDW/R -/+ drives, and I haven't encountered any issues with my system.

Just recently, I wanted to test Media Center on Vista and used a DVD movie, I didn't notice any hang ups at all. Even installing everything from Gigabyte's pack-in driver disk was smooth sailing. I also installed ET: Quake Wars. And not to mention Vista itself.

But I'm just using the IDE connector, not the SATA ports. All my HDDs are connected to the ICH9R controller.

P.S.: I'm still running the F6 BIOS that came with my board on the second week of December.

[Sobek]

Hmm, do you guys think that perhaps an X-Fi in my only free PCI slot might be causing some problems? It's the one component that, strangely, I simply have not touched during all my testing.

What are the odds a sound card could be to blame for all my problems? (BTW, I have no issues with sound, and it functions perfectly).

[ChrissTi]

Sobek: Do you have the latest drivers for X-Fi ? for ATI (I know that HD 2900xt had a lot of issues till the latest drivers)?

[Sobek]

I'm pretty sure I do, I'll have to do some checking. They release new drivers so infrequently for X-Fi's that even if I didn't update it in a year, I'd probably still be using the 'latest' drivers.

The drivers I have on file are 'SBXF_PCDRV_LB_2_09_0007.exe'. Would that be the latest? (XP, remember). Might go trawling through Creative's site and see what I can find.

[Richard Dower]

duno, but i will count it. I have to reaseat the heatsink anyways, because 50°C at full load with IFX-14 at stock (3ghz) is unaccaptable.

50C?...is that the X48 chipset temp?, or your quad core CPU?, 50C at stock with that IFX is pretty damn hot

[panzer948]

Hi. I just built my machine in time for the holidays and after a couple of issues, I got her up and running fine using Windows Vista 64. No OC'ing yet, but that will be for next weekend

So far, all the programs I have installed are compatible. I did have a problem with the windows bios flash program. It went into that continous start post shutdown loop. But after clearing CMOS 3 times, that issue went away, sheew. Think I will use Q-flash next time and for now i will stick with F6B.

I do still have one or two problems. I installed XP first before vista to setup what I hoped was a dual boot system. Never could get the audio to work in XP, not sure if I did the audio drivers right and maybe I let windows driver dialog take over when I shouldn't (saw the warning on pg. 98 of the MB manual a little to late). It does work in vista though.

So after installing vista using the correct options for keeping my XP OS, I updated it, installed a few programs, but when I went back and picked the XP OS harddrive to boot 1st vs the Vista OS HDD (have the OSs on separate HDDs) i got a bootmgr error. So it want boot to XP now. Haven't tried booting from the XP startup disk yet, which might fix the error. Just not sure why this didn't go as smooth as it should have. I did change volume names of the HDDs in vista, so not sure if that matters. Also, if i do get XP running again, is there away to setup a dual boot without having to go into Bios and changing the HDD boot order?

Thanks!

GIGABYTE GA-X38-DQ6 MB
Q6600 Processor - GO
8GB of G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) DDR2 1000 (PC2 8000)
EVGA GeForce 8800GTS (G92) 512MB
2x WD Caviar RE2 500GB 7200 RPM SATA in Raid 0
2x WD Raptor 36GB (non-raid) OS harddrives
1 external WD USB 300GB & old 160GB IDE HDD
CORSAIR ATX12V V2.2 550W PSU
ZALMAN 9700 CPU Cooler
Vista x64 and XP 32bit OS

[Hornet331]

50C?...is that the X48 chipset temp?, or your quad core CPU?, 50C at stock with that IFX is pretty damn hot

yes its the cpu, and the heatsink gets barely warm, so im sure the heatsink needs to be reseated.

[Sobek]

Removed and uninstalled my soundcard, no change at all...

One thing I've noticed is that my crossfire bridges are EXTREMELY (and I must stress extremely) touchy. The mere weight of my finger coming into contact with either one (not actually pushing, just basically resting against it) is enough to cause massive flickering and / or strange colour patterns everywhere. This is the same both with my brand new (expensive) bridges I ordered, or the ones that shipped with the cards. Out of sheer annoyance, I popped one the bottom-inner side of one of the bridges off ingame... Framerates stayed nice and high and all the corruption vanished, but even with 200+ fps in TF2, it FELT like 30 or 40 fps. This still makes me think that for some reason, something is going wrong with the blending of the frames. What would be responsible for that? Two brand new cards with identical problems (magically), drivers, or the motherboard? I tried doing crossfire on this board without any bridges installed, and I got the message that "No dongles / bridges are connected, cards are not supported, or your motherboard does not have any communication lanes between PCI-e slots". Since my cards are supported (and I've seen some people do software crossfire on these cards before), could that point to something fishy going on with the motherboard?

I just don't know what to think. What else could there be?

[ChrissTi]

First of all Mary Christmas ! to everyone here
Second put the cpu at least on 400Mhz fsb, third crossfire or sli doesn't work without the bridge between the video cards.
Check how is mounted the mainboard, maybe you missed a mounting screw on the case.
Try with only one card and see what is the performance without, and with overclock at 400MHz. That mainboard supports 400Mhz without any problems (QX9770 works on 1600 FSB (400Mhz)).

[Celerator]

I am considering the X-38-DQ6 for a new build.

Case: Antec 900
Power: Corsair 650

Probably go for Q6600 CPU.

I'd like 4GB RAM (2x2GB). What RAM setups have worked well?

I'm considering the Scythe Mine Rev.B. What do you think?

Enjoying the thread!

[Caped Crusader]

I am considering the X-38-DQ6 for a new build.
I'd like 4GB RAM (2x2GB). What RAM setups have worked well?

Mine's working great with 2x2Gb of G.Skill's PC8000 PQ. They're @ 1080 with stock timings and stock voltage.

[Richard Dower]

Happy Xmas from Realtek, December 25th and a new driver release. 889A codec drivers version 1.84:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/...&GetDown=false

[Richard Dower]

Mine's working great with 2x2Gb of G.Skill's PC8000 PQ. They're @ 1080 with stock timings and stock voltage.

Stock voltage?...2.0V or 2.1V?

[Richard Dower]

I am considering the X-38-DQ6 for a new build.

Case: Antec 900
Power: Corsair 650

Probably go for Q6600 CPU.

I'd like 4GB RAM (2x2GB). What RAM setups have worked well?

I'm considering the Scythe Mine Rev.B. What do you think?

Enjoying the thread!

You can go and view the .pdf file from the Gb website which gives a list of verfied and tested memory, but for 4GB and price/performance ratio....you can't beat this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231145

The Scythe Mine should work fine.

[guns81]

hi ive a problem maybe someone can help me..ive the T motherboard with ddr3 support..ive flash bios with f4a; after the reboot my motherboard is restarting every 5 second...bios corrupted? rma ?
thanks

[Richard Dower]

Take out the CMOS battery, leave for a few mins...then reseat it and see what hapens.

[Leeghoofd]

Stock voltage?...2.0V or 2.1V?

Run fine at 2.0 volts here at 1066Mhz 5-5-5-15 on the P5K Dlx, very nice ram for it's price...

[Caped Crusader]

Stock voltage?...2.0V or 2.1V?

2.10v

[HeadShotWI]

I am completely having a brain fart or something because I cannot figure outhte audio drivers. I am hooking up the spdiff optical and analog connectiosn both up to my reciever(just to test each of there functionality and capabilities) and I can't figure out how to set speaker configurations, etc to 7.1 or at leats 5.1 to my stereo system and reciever. Please help. I downloaded the azalia drivers from gigabyte website. Do I need something else or is this the wrong thing? I can only seem to get stereo.

[Isepick]

@Guns81: Take out one stick of ram,boot, and get into bios and change the memory settings more to your ram...I have Corsair 1600 and the default on F4a and above sets the memory @ 1333mhz, which for some reason will NOT boot on my ram. In fact wont boot if the memory speed is anywhere from about 1230 or so to 1380, not sure why, but definitely funky. But yeah, it is what gave me the endless reboot cycle, thought I had fried the board via bios flash

I RMA'd my first X38T board b/c of that same issue, didnt figure out the problem until I got my second one and had it happen again.

Good Luck

[Sobek]

First of all Mary Christmas ! to everyone here
Second put the cpu at least on 400Mhz fsb, third crossfire or sli doesn't work without the bridge between the video cards.
Check how is mounted the mainboard, maybe you missed a mounting screw on the case.
Try with only one card and see what is the performance without, and with overclock at 400MHz. That mainboard supports 400Mhz without any problems (QX9770 works on 1600 FSB (400Mhz)).

Crossfire does indeed work without the bridges connected, I tried that once on my previous board (DFI CFX3200-DR) with these very cards and it seemed to work fine, though things ran much much worse... I can only assume bridge-less crossfire isn't supported on this X38 board. Motherboard is mounted perfectly, every single mounting hole has a washer + screw in it, not too tight either.

I'm not sure what you want me to do exactly... Try only one card (which has always worked perfectly) with and without my overclock? Single cards work just fine for me, either by themselves or with both in and just crossfire disabled. I've tested both cards individually both with my overclock applied, and without. I've tried Crossfire with my overclock and without, too... All still the same.

Though out of curiosity, why should I stick to a 400mhz overclock? Are there known problems when using a lower FSB?

[guns81]

but i cant enter on bios..ive try to remove battery and one stick of ram but ive seen the boot image only one time
ive supertalent ram 1333 and enermax galaxy 1kw..thanks for help

edit: now with 1 stick of ram is stopped on bios image

[ChrissTi]

Yes there are some problems with nonstandard FSB's. The mainboards work better at a standard FSB like 800, 1066, 1333, or 1600, since they were optimized to work at that FSB.
There are multipliers also for PCI, PCI-E, if you let the mb on PCI-E on auto I thought your ATI's doesn't get along well on the frequencies set by the MB.