ObscureEmpyre

DEJ915
Not sure there I guess you just kill them lmao, no issues here with any of mine since X58 until now but yeah stuff happens, only boards I've ever RMA'd are Asus and EVGA.  The Asus ones are 2nd best it seems from OC DDR4 right now and Gigabyte's DDR4 models are terrible so far if you don't want MSI I'd get Asus.

Trust me, I’ve considered user error, so I can laugh along with you. However, I doubt user error causes PCI and RAM slots as well as USB ports to crap out. Those are some of the other things I’ve had die on me with MSI boards.

I’m working on swapping out my Z390 Aorus Master for the Z690 Aorus Elite AX DDR4 board that just arrived, so we’ll see how things go with my DDR4-3600 kit.

CraptacularOne
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FexM11f8MMg
 
I've been saying it this whole thread: DDR5 in it's current iteration is not worth it. Those of you sitting on the fence or not wanting to build unless you can get DDR5, it's pointless in it's current state. 
 
I'm glad my order got botched, it was a blessing in disguise. 

Are you forgoing Alder Lake altogether, or did you opt for a DDR4 board. If you went the DDR4 route, which board did you get?

CraptacularOne
I'm actually on a rather cheap (well for Z690 anyway) Gigabyte Z690 Gaming X DDR4 board. It retails for $229 and runs so good I'm gonna keep it. I got it as a replacement for a faulty AORUS Elite that had a defective M.2 slot and Amazon didn't have any more of them on hand to replace mine with at the time. 
 
https://www.newegg.com/gi...ddr4/p/N82E16813145347
 
Anyway, I have currently it running my Corsair Dominator Platinum kit at 4000Mhz 16-18-18-38 in gear 1 and performance has been great. Settled on a daily P-Core overclock of 5Ghz and E-core at 4Ghz with 1.22v, not bad for a "cheap" board. Bear in mind that even this "cheap" board has a 16+1+2 phase VRM which is just massive overkill for a mainstream desktop CPU. 

ObscureEmpyre

CraptacularOne
I'm actually on a rather cheap (well for Z690 anyway) Gigabyte Z690 Gaming X DDR4 board. It retails for $229 and runs so good I'm gonna keep it. I got it as a replacement for a faulty AORUS Elite that had a defective M.2 slot and Amazon didn't have any more of them on hand to replace mine with at the time. 
 
https://www.newegg.com/gi...ddr4/p/N82E16813145347
 
Anyway, I have currently it running my Corsair Dominator Platinum kit at 4000Mhz 16-18-18-38 in gear 1 and performance has been great. Settled on a daily P-Core overclock of 5Ghz and E-core at 4Ghz with 1.22v, not bad for a "cheap" board. Bear in mind that even this "cheap" board has a 16+1+2 phase VRM which is just massive overkill for a mainstream desktop CPU. 

I got the Elite AX DDR4 board which is basically a WiFi version of the Gaming X board you have. The DDR4-4000 kit I was eyeing came back in stock last night, so maybe I’ll give that a whirl if I decide to keep this board and return the Master board I originally purchased.

ObscureEmpyre
Hoping I don’t have any dead m.2 slots. I put my OS drive in the CPU slot and the other two I have in the top and middle ones of the lower NVMe slots. At the moment, my concern is the top PCI-E slot. I was able to carefully transplant my old motherboard with this new one by keeping the loop intact, but now my GPU is having difficulty fitting in the slot. It seems like it’s in, but the locking clamp didn’t lock. It kind of seems like the dimensions of the EK block and backplate are prohibiting that. I’m definitely not going to force it into place, but I’ll see what I can do. My back starting acting up (old injury), so I’m taking a short break. Anyway, fingers crossed.

ObscureEmpyre
I didn’t transplant the loop. I transplanted the motherboard. 🤪 Mine is a Fractal R6 case, so the top radiator mount is detachable. I just unscrewed it, then lifted it before placing it atop the case at an angle so it wouldn’t slide back down. I also propped up my GPU so the tubs weren’t pinched. After that, the board slid right out the top. Naturally, I disconnected everything from it prior to sliding it out. It’s all back together now with the new board. I’ll see about posting a pic. Well, so long as it still works. lol It’s all connected, but I wanted another break before powering it up. Again, fingers crossed. Oh, before I forget, what OS are you using? I’ve got both Win10 and Win11 ready to go on separate USB sticks. I haven’t decided which I’m going to use yet. Maybe I’ll do a dual OS partition so I can gauge performance of the new system with each OS.

ObscureEmpyre
It lives! Just updated the BIOS and a good thing I did. None of my m.2 drives were detected, even though two of them were able to be selected when choosing which drive to install the new BIOS from. Now that the BIOS is up to date, all three drives are detected. Thinking of trying the memory XMP profile before I install Windows. May as well. Regardless, I think I’ll go with Win11 with this build.

ObscureEmpyre

CraptacularOne

ObscureEmpyre
It lives! Just updated the BIOS and a good thing I did. None of my m.2 drives were detected, even though two of them were able to be selected when choosing which drive to install the new BIOS from. Now that the BIOS is up to date, all three drives are detected. Thinking of trying the memory XMP profile before I install Windows. May as well. Regardless, I think I’ll go with Win11 with this build.

Grats! No matter how many PCs I've built (and it been a lot lol) it's always a relief when it powers on a goes to the BIOS for the first time. I guess I should have mentioned that too, yeah for whatever reason the stock BIOS the board shipped with I needed to update to the F4 BIOS before it would detect all my M.2 drives as a matter of fact it was the same issue with this board too. Enabling the XMP profile should be just as simple as that though. If you want any pointers on tweaking the memory timings/speed lemme know 

The XMP profile works just fine… in gear 2. lol I had it set to auto and it POSTed just fine. Set it to gear 1 and it didn’t know what to do. Wondering if it’s because I have a 4-DIMM kit for 32 GB. Suppose I could take out two sticks to test that theory. Almost hoping that doesn’t work. Means I’ll have to buy another kit, a 2x16 GB if I want to stick with 32 GB total. I bought a 4-DIMM kit because my Z390 Master features T-topology for the RAM, so a 4-DIMM kit worked just fine. These newer Z690 boards are all daisy chain from what I’ve read. Otherwise, I’ve got a other DDR4 kits I can try, but they’re all slower and have looser timings. As far as pointers go, I may just hit you up in a DM.

ObscureEmpyre
It’s a TridentZ DDR4-3600 16-16-16-36 kit with Samsung ICs, but I’m not sure if it’s B-die off the top of my head. I’ve been reinstalling everything since installing Windows figured I’d get that knocked out of the way before messing with any kind of overclocking. Were you able to POST with your DDR4-4000 kit using XMP in gear 1 before you messed with anything else? Also, are those the only RAM settings you manually input? There’s another setting that’s three digits that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I know XMP profiles change it.

ObscureEmpyre

CraptacularOne
Those are Samsung B-Die ICs on those TridentZs. As for being able to POST, yes I was by just enabling XMP. However these are "only" 3200Mhz sticks with their XMP profiles so it worked just fine out of the gate even in Gear 1. 
 
Try NOT enabling XMP and just manually entering your XMP settings and set your memory speed to 3600Mhz and see if it works. Be sure to bump your VCCSA voltage up to at least 1.1v and manually set your DRAM voltage to 1.35v. There is also a "DRAM Training voltage" setting under the "Advanced Voltages" tab that you can try manually settings to 1.4v as well. 

I was able to use my memory’s rated spec in gear 1 by manually entering everything. What’s annoying, though, is that I’m having a heck of a time with testing games using Win11. From the get go, one refused to launch and the other is crash city. It was getting late for me, so I didn’t test that many, but this isn’t a good sign.

What’s also not a good sign is I keep BSODing. It’s not the manual RAM settings, as I went as far as to clear the CMOS after trying a few things first. The BSODs occur with stock RAM, XMP enabled with gear 2, and manually settings with gear 1. So, I did what I was thinking I’d do and installed Win10 on a separate partition.

I’m in the midst of reinstalling all the drivers and what have you to see if Win10 likes to BSOD with this setup. If it does, then it’s either the CPU, motherboard, or the new m.2 drive I used for this build. Everything else is the same.

On a different note, what about VCCIO settings for manual RAM overclocking?

ObscureEmpyre

CraptacularOne
Hmm, it may be instability with your CPUs memory controller. I'm really not sure, but we can test that to see. Try lowering your RAM speed to 3200Mhz with the same timings and try your games again. I haven't had any instance of games crashing on Windows 11
 
PS: They also released a new wave of BIOS for the Gigabyte boards, I'm testing F6a on mine and I see yours has F5a available. 

It’s definitely not the RAM since I’ve had BSOD problems even at stock RAM settings (no XMP/no manual OC). Also, all 4 RAM sticks have passed testing with Memtest86+. I’ve got Win10 up & running on the partition I created earlier, and I’m just about at the point of testing games. So far, no BSOD issues. And, I noticed the F6a BIOS this morning when I was redownloading all the Win10 drivers. It has a date of yesterday, so it either released late in the day or sometime earlier today. Either way, I’ve got it installed as well as Gigabyte’s DRM E-core parking control utility.

Edit: On a bit of a rant for a side note, the boards monitoring sensors are lacking. There isn’t an overall CPU clock sensor for either the P-cores or E-cores, only individual core clock sensors. That’s annoying because I don’t want MSI Afterburner and RTSS taking up a quarter of my screen with the OSD just to see how the CPU’s overall clock speed.

ObscureEmpyre

CraptacularOne
Yeah I haven't tried games quite that old to be honest. I mainly am playing right now Destiny 2, Halo Infinite, CoD Vanguard and the occasional Cyberpunk 2077 and Farcry 6 along with a smatter of smaller titles like FTL, Hyper Light Drifter and Axiom Verge 2 and haven't had any issues. 

I still play games from way back when as well as new ones. I'll also be testing Modern Warfare and Cold War. Haven't bought Vanguard yet. I usually wait for those games to go on sale. Same with Battlefield. And, I have yet to play Far Cry: New Dawn, let alone Far Cry 6. lol In the end, I'm sure these are just growing pains of Alder Lake. At least my existing DDR4 RAM runs in gear 1. Thanks for the tips pertaining to that.
 
In other news, Newegg moved all their DDR5 kits to the Newegg Shuffle. Sad day.

ObscureEmpyre

CraptacularOne
*sigh*......lol well can't say I'm surprised by that. I really really despise the "shuffle" anyway. You have to "win" the privilege to overpay for gear. What a disaster the current market is in...........

I wholeheartedly understand. Although, I have been selected in the shuffle twice. I was able to get a 3080 and a 3080 Ti that way. Of course, I also have two PSUs sitting on a shelf and still in their shrink wrap thanks to the shuffle.

Quick question for you: Does your Gaming X motherboard feature a “CPU Upgrade” option under Settings? Mine does. There’s a Gaming option and something pertaining to maximum performance. I tried both options for the heck of it, but neither seems to have any effect. I thought it may have been something like Asus’ AI overclock feature.