Rampage III Extreme Initial Testing & No POST Diagnosis Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,583 words · ~7 min read
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if for no reason other than to amuse myself I've taken a rampage 3 Extreme
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put on a 980x and an old school 8800 GTX
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that actually has an Ultra Cool on it uh but I assure you it's a GTX so this is
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the Rampage 3 Extreme that I unboxed and one thing I did want to talk about
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briefly was these four buttons here this is pretty much the coolest feature ever
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and if they had a unit of time large enough then um I could probably tell you
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how much time this would have saved me over the years if I'd had this on my
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motherboards because typically whenever I'm setting up a system for myself I'm
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water cooling the video card so when you're troubleshooting something it
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would be a lifesaver to have these basically what they do is they turn on
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or off each of the four PCI Express 60x
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slots individually allowing you to
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easily troubleshoot without removing graphics cards which is uh very very
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difficult to do when you've got water blocks on the all anyway so for my m m I
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have a rampage 3 Extreme set up with 24 gigs of ocz RAM and the stock shipping
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BIOS 980x and I just wanted to see if it
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would post so I press start and let's find out
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you can discover with me how compatible this is with uh 24 gigs of ocz uh DDR3
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1333 C9 1.65 volt memory let's see if it
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can handle the heat CPU fan is spinning
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up do we have any diagnostic uh
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diagnostic diagnostic diagnostic LEDs on this wow I want my camera Focus this is
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kind of weird it's like
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uh gone all blur chastic here oh there
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it goes okay it did not
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work so it looks like you'd need to do a
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little bit more work on optimizing it in
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order to get it to post with 24 gigs of RAM so what's quite possible is that I'm
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just going to turn it off here now I think this is the memo K button although
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I'm not sure it's positioned in the same spot as the memo K button on so many
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other boards pressing it seems to have turned on the board so uh we'll see what
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happens here and then maybe I'll just keep the camera rolling and see if I can
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get this to work here for uh for my
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viewers so far no dice oh oh oh there it
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goes I think so I saw the number lock turn on come
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on well we got no display
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output I'm
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99.9% sure that that video card works so
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why don't I just quickly make sure that my DVI cable is plugged in correctly
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which it is okay so that isn't the
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problem why don't we try something else really quick here let's make sure sure
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that my8 pin connector is plugged into the correct one of those two yeah yeah I
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got it in the right one maybe we'll try a quick BIOS reset although I've I've
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yet to run into a situation where you actually have to clear simos on a brand
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new board usually they come with a a very cleared SOS so I've gone ahead held
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down the clear seos button let's see what happens this time what I'm going to
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do next is I'm going to remove one of the kits of memory because a lot of the
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time that can be what's causing the problem is that you need to go into the
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BIOS set the memory to the correct settings and then you'll get a uh a post
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situation now what made me think it was going to post last time was all three
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LEDs were on and then only one Switched on which typically means that we're
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about to uh see a display yeah see there it's losing focus
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again that's so bizarre we look at something else and look back I've never
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seen my camera do this before it's pretty strange
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yeah well there see it's back now okay so that didn't work this let's call this
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Linus Tech tips episode on troubleshooting so with
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99.9% of socket uh 1366 motherboards uh
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it'll that's x58 boards you're going to want to take out the modules that are
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closest to the CPU socket so the the
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triple Channel set that starts here because most of these boards are are set
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up so that the primary channels are further away because when you're using
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big air coolers they W will often overhang that first dim slot so that's
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why the motherboard manufacturers typically do that for
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you so let's see if we get it to post
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here hopefully we don't have a more serious problem and we are actually able
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to get a display and I sure wish it would stop
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doing that huh
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so that didn't work either there you go we might uh we might
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have a more serious problem here so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put
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my camera down for a second and I'm going to run and grab another video card
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because you never do know going to make
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sure that this uh adjustable rail power supply is
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uh going
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correctly okay why don't we try an 8800
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GTS 640 super super clocked if it matters
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but it doesn't Okay 8800 GTX goes there
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GTS 640 goes here this one I know Works cuz I pulled it out of my little
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brother's computer on the weekend and it's been running Rock Solid in there
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for months and months and months so I'm
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going to go ahead and throw that in there and then let's see if we can get
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it to uh give me a display play
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output wonder if I've got a DOA board actually I guess I could have DOA RAM
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too it's hard to say I know the CPU Works cuz I've been using it in the quad
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SLI rig but I don't know the motherboard is
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a bit of an unknown the RAM's a bit of an unknown and I've actually had a little bit of difficulty with this power
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supply posting with some boards um it's a very very good unit but it seems to
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have a little bit of trouble posting with certain boards from time to time
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yeah that didn't that didn't do it either okay so it wasn't the video card
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so that's uh typically one of the next steps that I go through so what we'll do
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is we'll pull out some more RAM so I'm
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just going to keep those keep each
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triple Channel kit sort of with its uh correct dims let's find out which one is
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actually slot number one ABC so I think a is actually at so a
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is over here so we're going to just go ahead and run it with just that one
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stick and see if we can get it to go for us I actually have some other DDR3 on
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hand here I'm just going to go back out into my computer room got some G skill
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here so I'll go ahead and pull that off
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that board see if we can make it work with that you know I feel bad for anyone
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who has to do troubleshooting like this uh without a bunch of tester Parts on
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hand because it really does make life a lot easier it might just be that it
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doesn't like um 4 gig dims right off the
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bat here so let's pull that one out put that with its brother and sister let's
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throw a two gig stick in here
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okay and let's see what happens with that start hopefully it'll start this
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time this whole experiment could be just one big failure but uh you never know
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until you try right okay
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come on eat times a charm okay all
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right we have new solid light on the
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monitor well this was fun maybe I'll do an
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updated video when I figure out um what
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went wrong we have a cat visiting us hello oh there you are he's exploring
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my uh my room full of random junk
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including obviously Wildlife
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here okay
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well yeah hopefully this is as simple as a uh
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as a dead board or something or maybe
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it's something as stupid as I've gone
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and you know I wonder if you actually have to plug in these Molex these extra
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Molex connectors although I've never seen a board yet that requires them if
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you've only got one video card installed well better luck to me next
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time I suppose hopefully I'll have a chance to do an update thanks for checking out my video blog on the
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Rampage 3 Extreme and how so far it did
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not work uh at all yet but we're getting
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there