Have you considered that the x58 boot drive might appear occasionally?
Have you considered that the x58 boot drive might appear occasionally?
you've got an older x58 setup with an asus rampage 2 ex stream board and an xeon w5670 6gb gskill memory (seems like only 4 is showing up, which is a typical issue). the gtx 960 2g is connected via m.2 to sata. temperatures are normal, the gpu still generates heat even when idle—my guess is the m.2 slot might be faulty since it hasn’t been used for a while. i suspect the crystal disc could help diagnose the problem further. maybe checking the clock battery works, as the date/time didn’t reset. psu seems fine. if you power cycle it on and off a few times and still can’t boot, removing the power cable might be necessary.
Well, that’s a bit of a waste of the 32nm process, but the gap between 2600 and 2800 gigabytes (probably other non-AMI boards too) isn’t too big after all. These chips perform better at high clock speeds, though I’m not sure if that means higher QPI frequency in real-world conditions. The Gigabyte menu is actually quite useful here—it helps identify which stick is detecting or not. For just three sticks, remove one at a time, check which fails, then replace it with another. If that works, clean the faulty one; if not, try re-installing or using a removable BIOS chip. The M.2 NVMe isn’t supported for booting on X58, so you’ll need workarounds like Clover or BIOS mods found online. It’s nice to know ASUS and ASRock have removable chips, so if anything fails, just swap the backup BIOS into the main one and it should fix itself. The Rampage II is even more complicated—it has multiple issues, so if you don’t have a Ch341A, just swap in a different BIOS and it’ll work again.
it's a TV PC and I mostly use it to stream YouTube at night, so I don't mind having only 4 GB of RAM instead of 6. Adding three more sticks would also help. This issue has occurred on all four drives we had, which suggests it's a common problem. Every single one of them was damaged by dust, and reaching 4.0+ GB required solid RAM to fix it. I plan to clean it up. I installed the RAM myself when I first built the PC in 2008, so it's about 17 years old. It had some problems after my dad set up a RAID zero that failed and lost all my data. There are PCIe M.2 slots using standard connectors, so speeds are limited to SATA. It's not an NVMe drive. You could use an adapter like this—do you think the timing of the RAM installation is the problem? I imagine if I used ECC RAM, it wouldn't happen that often. Edited March 10, 2025 by thrasher_565
I believe if four boards are affected, your CPU might be the issue. Try cleaning the underside of the CPU with 99% IPA and a tissue—water also works if needed. Dirty pads can prevent it from detecting RAM on and off three times. If the BIOS reports your OC settings were reset, those settings are likely faulty and need reconfiguration. Although you don’t strictly need high BCLK, you can still run around 1400MHz on the lowest multi at 220GHz. Please share some RAM images so I can help identify the problem and provide a reference to ease your troubleshooting process.
everything seems straightforward with stock components. inserting an xeon into a non-server M.2 slot forces the system to repeatedly check RAM speed and ultimately optimize it. the m.2 is at 89%, which makes it hard to pinpoint the issue. the CPU reports RAM is present but indicates it's in a duel channel; the OS estimates 4GB, so I'm unsure what's wrong. the GPU tests are stable with temperatures normal and no crashes.
It was supposed to be an M.2 drive, but I replaced it with an SSD. The issue is that my PSU didn’t have the correct SATA power cables, so I used a Molex-to-SATA adapter, which doesn’t support 3V. My guess is this caused the problem, though it sometimes works.