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- Aug 30, 2009
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- 4,012 (0.75/day)
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- Sarasota, Florida, USA
| System Name | Awesomesauce 4.3 | Laptop (MSI GE72VR 6RF Apache Pro-023) |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core i7-5820K 4.16GHz 1.28v/3GHz 1.05v uncore | Intel Core i7-6700HQ @ 3.1GHz |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-X99-UD5 WiFi LGA2011-v3| Stock |
| Cooling | Corsair H100i v2 w/ 2x EK Vardar F4-120ER + various 120/140mm case fans | Stock |
| Memory | G.Skill RJ-4 16GB DDR4-2666 CL15 quad channel | 12GB DDR4-2133 |
| Video Card(s) | EVGA GTX 1080 Ti Hybrid SC2 11GB @ 2012/5151 boost | NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB +200/+500 + Intel 530 |
| Storage | Samsung 840 EVO 500GB + Seagate 3TB 7200RPM + others | Kingston 256GB M.2 SATA + 1TB 7200RPM |
| Display(s) | Acer G257HU 1440p 60Hz AH-IPS 4ms | 17.3" 1920*1080 60Hz wide angle TN notebook panel |
| Case | Fractal Design Define XL R2 | MSI |
| Audio Device(s) | Creative Sound Blaster Z | Realtek with quad stereo speakers and subwoofer |
| Power Supply | Corsair HX850i Platinum | 19.5v 180w Delta brick |
| Software | Windows 10 Pro x64 | Windows 10 Home x64 |
I wanted to share my experience with repairing the Gigabyte motherboard listed in the title of this thread as I saw on Newegg that many people also had the same problem with this board and thought it was actually dead after anywhere from 1-8 months of use. Anyway, my father knocked on my door requesting tech support and I walked into our home office to find my mom's computer turning on for a few seconds, turning off, and turning on again repeatedly (sometimes with slight variations in the power on duration, but no more than a few seconds). I also noticed that the PCB gap between the audio codec circuit and the rest of the board would not glow red as well, and the board exhibited the same symptoms even with the RAM removed (no beeps). So, I removed the disk drives and took the case into my room for further inspection. The RTC battery checked out fine and board still displayed the same symptoms, even with a power supply swap as well as messing with the RAM modules individually.
So, I started fiddling around a bit desperately with the board, figuring it might just be the BIOS that had somehow corrupted as dad was just doing Windows updates when the computer suddenly bluescreened and went into its current state, so I tried clearing the CMOS RAM a couple times trying to provoke the board to load the slave BIOS as the automatic system was of course not working, and there are no switches on the board to change active BIOS chips like my X99-UD5 WIFI. I became a bit annoyed and rapidly tapped a screw against the CLR CMOS header a few times, letting go instantly when the board was going to shut off from doing so, and after three randomly spaced taps within a second or two, the audio circuit LEDs came on and about 20 seconds later a single beep and my TV hooked up to VGA displaying a screen telling me my BIOS settings were reset. I quickly went into BIOS and it said it was version F1, and I knew I had flashed F3 on there back in October 2015, so it was definitely running on the slave BIOS, and I then flashed it to F4 right away with Q-Flash in the BIOS. The system restarted fine, but powering off and back on left me with the original problem.
I "hotwired" the system and tricked it into booting off of the slave BIOS once more with the drives reinstalled, and Windows booted fine, so I decided to go to Gigabyte's website and look for @bios to see if I could flash the master BIOS chip again. While scrolling down the utilities page, I found "Gigabyte Firmware Update Utility" and decided to give it a try, so I installed it, and sure enough after finding where it installed, there was an application named something like "DualBiosRescue.exe" which I clicked on and told it to update my BIOS. I shut down after that, pulled the power cord for a few minutes, tried again and sure enough the board was REPAIRED! I then proceeded to update some drivers and and also install the Thunderbolt driver along with upgraded USB 3.1 controller firmware, and everything is still fine.
I hope anyone stumbling across this on Google finds it useful when this particular Gigabyte board's master BIOS corrupts itself (maybe it works for other newer DualBIOS setups?), and like it did for me, it might save you the frustration of an RMA and several weeks of downtime. Thank you for reading!
So, I started fiddling around a bit desperately with the board, figuring it might just be the BIOS that had somehow corrupted as dad was just doing Windows updates when the computer suddenly bluescreened and went into its current state, so I tried clearing the CMOS RAM a couple times trying to provoke the board to load the slave BIOS as the automatic system was of course not working, and there are no switches on the board to change active BIOS chips like my X99-UD5 WIFI. I became a bit annoyed and rapidly tapped a screw against the CLR CMOS header a few times, letting go instantly when the board was going to shut off from doing so, and after three randomly spaced taps within a second or two, the audio circuit LEDs came on and about 20 seconds later a single beep and my TV hooked up to VGA displaying a screen telling me my BIOS settings were reset. I quickly went into BIOS and it said it was version F1, and I knew I had flashed F3 on there back in October 2015, so it was definitely running on the slave BIOS, and I then flashed it to F4 right away with Q-Flash in the BIOS. The system restarted fine, but powering off and back on left me with the original problem.
I "hotwired" the system and tricked it into booting off of the slave BIOS once more with the drives reinstalled, and Windows booted fine, so I decided to go to Gigabyte's website and look for @bios to see if I could flash the master BIOS chip again. While scrolling down the utilities page, I found "Gigabyte Firmware Update Utility" and decided to give it a try, so I installed it, and sure enough after finding where it installed, there was an application named something like "DualBiosRescue.exe" which I clicked on and told it to update my BIOS. I shut down after that, pulled the power cord for a few minutes, tried again and sure enough the board was REPAIRED! I then proceeded to update some drivers and and also install the Thunderbolt driver along with upgraded USB 3.1 controller firmware, and everything is still fine.
I hope anyone stumbling across this on Google finds it useful when this particular Gigabyte board's master BIOS corrupts itself (maybe it works for other newer DualBIOS setups?), and like it did for me, it might save you the frustration of an RMA and several weeks of downtime. Thank you for reading!
