X48 Rampage Formula Preview.

[Counter CS]

Are you guys aware that ASUS started to work on EFI BIOS for their P45 boards and then "put the project on hold"?
Apparently an EFI BETA BIOS was released for the P5Q series board
Shame they never got around to releasing this for the Rampage Forumla and Rampage Extreme
John

Yes i was aware of that.

[greg.m]

Guys im lost...

I will upgrade my system...and ill go SB but idont know which p67 mobo to buy.
2600k and some fast ripjaws will be the rest ocf the new components.
Ive read a lot about all of the p67 mobos but it seems that they all perform about the same! I dont wanna buy asus BUT it seems that maximus4 is one of the best...

Any suggestions???

Cheers

Greg.m

[Leeghoofd]

Don't derail this thread, open another one mate...

No need to cash out for daily usage ( 4.5-5ghz ) usage : P8P67Pro, Dlx or Gigabyte UD4/5 or ASrock Extreme series... UD7 and Maximus are only usefull to benchers and multiple GPU setups..................

[Spyrus]

Bios sometimes freezes when i change Vcore and hit F10 - tested on 1001 & 1002 beta

[greg.m]

Don't derail this thread, open another one mate...

No need to cash out for daily usage ( 4.5-5ghz ) usage : P8P67Pro, Dlx or Gigabyte UD4/5 or ASrock Extreme series... UD7 and Maximus are only usefull to benchers and multiple GPU setups..................

Thanks for the tips

Look here:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=269194

I got zero answers/tips and i thought i could get some help here, from my "old" rampage-mates

[Spyrus]

Any idea why i am LinX stable / OCCT Linpack stable (1hour +) and i have blue screen even on 2D? Machine check error exception. I consider software also - bad driver.

[neven]

Any idea why i am LinX stable / OCCT Linpack stable (1hour +) and i have blue screen even on 2D? Machine check error exception. I consider software also - bad driver.

I would put some $$ on bad GFX hardware/software. Change driver first and then borrow random VGA and see what happens.

[Spyrus]

Gfx?

[DrTeal]

graphics card/graphics driver

[greg.m]

Hmm... It could be room temperature. At around 10° Celsius or lower my Q9650 can run stable at 4.22GHz with DDR 1250MHz. The failure starts at around 15° Celsius. I also know that around 25-30° Celsius it's going to fail Prime95 Blend at 4.05GHz.

The reason could be the MSR inconsistency and that's why I would like to see BIOS 0001 without the MSR fails.

Well, i have exactly yhe same problem as Alien Grey has. During winter and with lower room temps my system is stable with lower volts until the spring comes... and... suddenly something happens (it has to do with room temps and our lovely but completely abandoned from asususussss rampage formula...)

BUT

here is some more results before ill go Sandy...

cpu-480x9@4320
mem-1200 pl7 but ALL the second and third timing settings @ auto
and of course a little bit more voltage than usual...

25c room temperature doesnt help but, what do you think guys, does 4h prime blend mean that my system is stable enough, or not?

[greg.m]

Lowered my overclock to 50 MHz (9x445) vs 9x450 and it passes LinX.
When i bought this CPU 3 years ago have it at 4.050MHz for 2 yrs@ 1.3V.
Last year without touching anything or change the bios (0902) needed to pump it to 1.31V
This year even with 1.34 cannot be 9x450. But with 9x445 and 1.31V (maybe lower i try that) it is ok.
PLL/FSBT at minimum (1.5./1.2) - i have benched at 4.5GHz by only raising Vcore + Vnb

Sometimes even if you change your VGA with a more powerfull one, you have to change (usually raise) your volt-settings. I have a friend with the same mobo as you and he had the same problem with you. Last year, ha had to raise almost all the volts a bit... but all that, after he added a second 4870x2 (he went quadfire) to his system. Then again degradation is smoething that may happens after 2-3 years especially if your system temps are high. Try to change vtt also.
Att you were linx and occt "stable" doesnt mean so much, it happens to me also to do 25 linx passes and then... next day... bsod. Prime blend for some hours will show if you are stable or not

[DrTeal]

I don't think stable is a binary thing - no matter how long you run prime (or some other stress test), you may eventually run into a program that crashes you. To me, a system is stable after 8hr prime, 10-20 passes of LinX/IBT. Other people have different requirements (more prime, more LinX, different programs... etc). Different applications will load/stress the CPU in different ways. Ultimately (IMO), your system is stable enough if you never get BSODs running applications in reasonable conditions (250 passes of LinX isn't reasonable). In my experience, 4 hr prime stable means you are probably ok, but I've had prime stable systems that LinX crashed so you might try also running a few passes of LinX/IBT.

[Spyrus]

I am sure now that at least for Linpack stability 16120T is no go and reverted back to 3120T. I keep it that way to see if blue-screens will be fixed also.
In order to have 16120T i need NB voltage only if i read right in previous posts.

[JohnZS]

Hi Alien, et al

ASUS got back to me today about the BITS test results.

Dear Valued Customer,

About the MSR issue, the error message you get did not define on the BWG from Intel, Some device need to use SMI under DOS, so there maybe suffer SMI Latency under DOS, it is normal.

What is BWG?

It looks like the end of the road
John

[Alien Grey]

I don't know what BWG means but I think that it's a cheap excuse from ASUS so they won't have to fix the BITS errors.

Do we really have to wait such a long time to give us this cheap excuse?

How do they explain why other boards don't have these errors?


I'm more and more convinced that these MSR failures aren't their by misstake but are coded that way in the BIOS for a good reason by ASUS. I think that the reason is to create small instabilities and limit overclocking. They almost got away with it but lucky for us Intel released this BIOS Implementation Test Suite and now we can see it with our own eyes.


But like I said before. I've learned to live with that and I also know that I won't make that misstake again. I know that most of you guys are thinking that it isn't all that bad. I agree with that but remember who was helpful and who wasn't. It wasn't all that bad because we had very good unofficial support but take that away and you would've end up with nothing.

With that said if the time comes to upgrade for me, it won't be with an ASUS board but most likely a Gigabyte board. ASUS boards might be better for benchers but I'm looking for a nice 24/7 overclock and I think that a Gigabyte board clocks a lot better for 24/7.

[JohnZS]

Ahh at first I had no idea what the BWG was too, but I consulted with Google :p (quite a clever chap he is).
Apparently it is the BIOS, Writers, Guide provided by Intel.
So to try and translate their broken English into English.

<translation>

About the MSR issue. The error message you have got, is not defined within the BIOS Writers Guide provided from Intel, therefore we are just as clueless as you are.

Some devices need to use SMI under DOS, so if they are in use, they could cause a degradation in SMI latency in DOS, this is normal (as we cannot be bothered to find out how to troubleshoot this, or find a work around or at least suggest which devices might be the cause of the issue), so please do not contact us with these queries again.

</translation>



John

[leo27]

That excuse is simply pitiful

[leo27]

Well it looks like my board is finally dead. I put my new watercooling system on it and went to boot and i just get CPU INIT and green, orange and red LEDS all round the board.
I've cleared teh CMOS and have the CMOS Battery out and will try it again later. Any ideas people??

[SoLoR]

Well it looks like my board is finally dead. I put my new watercooling system on it and went to boot and i just get CPU INIT and green, orange and red LEDS all round the board.
I've cleared teh CMOS and have the CMOS Battery out and will try it again later. Any ideas people??

carefuly check all cpu pins on mobo if one is maybe bent or something.

edit: if someone will be looking for moded bios url has changed: http://hotfix.chris123nt.com/Asus.Rampage.Formula/ no changes to bios yet tho, tryed latest 10.5 intel option roms but they still dont work...

[leo27]

cheers SoLoR i give it a go and see what happens

[leo27]

The problem is now fixed. I took out the CPU and re-seated it and it booted first time. Its now at 3.4GHz again and I must say I love water cooling .

On my TRUE under LinX my hottest core temp was 75C, on my XSPC Rasa block and RX360 rad under LinX my hottest core temp was 58C .

Now to try for 3.6GHz so that my rig lasts until Ivy Bridge + 680GTX

[DrTeal]

Well, I know its old news running sli on x48, but I figure I'll share anyway.

I got a second gtx 470 and had no trouble running sli with the latest nvidia drivers 270.61 and the latest version of slipatch 1.42. Hoping this rig lasts me a while longer .

[leo27]

DrTeal out of curiosity how much of a bottleneck is your Q6600 with 2 470GTX's??

[DrTeal]

Not sure exactly. I ran 3dmark06 (the only bench I have installed atm) and went from ~12.7k to ~18k at 1920x1200 with full AA and AF. Haven't run any other benches yet. I'm probably going to get a 2560x1600 monitor in the near future. Wanted to be sure I could get sli working first tho. Basically just looking to be able to max all the eye candy.

If I could find a q9650 cheap I'd get one, but I'm not about to go drop $300+ on one. I'm stuck with this crappy vid (1.3125) q6600 until then . It won't go higher than 3.6 without crazy volts (takes 1.496V real for 3.6).

EDIT: I'll post up some 3dmark11 and heaven results later/tomorrow.

EDIT2: Having some issues with 3dmark11. Did bench heaven and the scaling is pretty impressive:

Heaven - DX11, shaders: high, tessellation: normal, anisotropy: 4, antialiasing: none, 1920x1200

Configuration - Min/Avg/Max FPS - score
SLI disabled - 18.9/32.4/70.7 - 817
SLI enabled - 31.7/61.7/132.8 - 1554

Average framerate just about doubled so I'd say I'm not bottlenecked by my q6600.

[BCBC]

A strange thing that I was having random BSODs before. Then I bought a SSD and installed Win7 64bit again but didn't setup sounddriver which is provided by Solor, there was no BSOD.
Then I installed modded sound drivers and random BSOD came again
And this part is very interesting; when I changed the "PCI Express - Link State Power Management" setting in the "advance power settings section" to "Off" state, BSOD is gone.
BIOS version is 1002b.
Q9650, 468Mhz FSB