Gadgetory

if for no reason other than to amuse myself I've taken a rampage three extreme put on a 980 X and an old-school 8800 GT X that actually has an ultra-cool on it but I assure you it's a GT X so this is the rampage three extreme that I unboxed and one thing I did want to talk about briefly was these four buttons here this is pretty much the coolest feature ever and if they had a unit of time large enough then I could probably tell you how much time this would have saved me over the years if I'd had this on my motherboards because typically whenever I'm setting up a system for myself I'm water cooling the video card so when you're troubleshooting something it would be a lifesaver to have these basically what they do is they turn on or off each of the four PCI Express 16x slots individually allowing you to easily troubleshoot without removing graphics cards which is very very difficult to do when you've got water blocks on the mill anyway so for my amusement I have a rampage three extreme set up with 24 gigs of ocz ram and the stock shipping bios some 980 X and I just wanted to see if it would post so I press Start and let's find out you can discover with me how compatible this is with 24 gigs of ocz ddr3 1333 c9 1.6 5 volt memory let's see if it can handle the heat CPU fan is spinning up do we have any diagnostic diagnostic diagnostic diagnostic LEDs on this file I want my camera focus this is kind of weird it's like a Donald blur tastic out there goes ok it did not work so it looks like you'd need to do a little bit more work on optimizing it in order to get it to post with 24 gigs of ram so what's quite possible is I'm just going to turn it off here now I think this is the mem ok button although I'm not sure it's positioned in the same spot as the mem ok button on so many boards pressing it seems to have turned on the board so we'll see what happens here and then maybe I'll just keep the camera rolling and see if I can get this to work here for for my viewers so far no dice oh oh oh there goes I think so I saw the number lock turn on come on well we got no display output I'm 99.9% sure that that video card works so why don't I just quickly make sure that my DVI cable is plugged in correctly which it is okay so that isn't the problem why don't we try something else really quick here let's make sure that my 8 pin connector is plugged into the correct one of those two yeah yeah I got it in the right one maybe we'll try a quick BIOS reset although I've I've yet to run into a situation where you actually have to clear CMOS on a brand new board usually they come with a a very cleared seamos so I've gone ahead held down the clear CMOS button let's see what happens this time what I'm going to do next is I'm going to remove one of the kits of memory because a lot of the time that can be what's causing the problem is that you need to go into the BIOS set the memory to the correct settings and then you'll get a post situation now what made me think it was going to post last time with all three LEDs rond and then only one switched on which typically means that we're about to see a display I'll see you there it's losing focus again that's so bizarre we'll look at something else and look back I've never seen my camera do this before it's very strange yeah well their seats back now okay so that didn't work this let's call this on Linus tech tips episode on troubleshooting so with 99.9% of socket 1366 motherboards i'll that's i x58 boards you're going to want to take out the modules that are closest to the CPU sockets so the the triple channel set that starts here because most of these boards are set up so that the primary channels are further away because when you're using big air coolers they will often overhang that first in slot so that's why the motherboard manufacturers typically do that for you so let's see if we get it to post here hopefully we don't have a more serious problem and we are actually able to get a display and I sure wish it would stop doing that huh so that didn't work either there you go we might we might have a more serious problem here so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put my camera down for a second and I'm gonna run and grab another video card because you never do no and make sure that this adjustable rail power supply is going correctly okay why don't we try an 8800 GT s 640 super super clocked if it matters but it doesn't okay 800 GTX goes there GTS 640 goes here this one I know works because I pulled it out of my little brother's computer on the weekend and it's been running rock solid in there for months and months and months so I'm going to go ahead and throw that in there and then let's see if we can get it to give me a display output wonder if I've got a DOA board actually I guess I could have do a ram - it's hard to say I know the CPU works because I've been using it in the Quad SLI rig but I don't know the motherboard is a bit of an unknown the Rams a bit of an unknown and I've actually had a little bit of difficulty with this power supply posting with some boards it's a very very good unit but it seems to have a little bit of trouble posting with certain boards from time to time yeah that didn't that didn't do it either okay so it wasn't the video part so that's not typically one of the next steps that I go through so what we'll do is we'll pull out some more RAM so I'm just going to keep those keep each triple-channel kit sort of with it's correct dims let's find out which one is actually slot number one ABC so I think a is actually at so a is over here so we're going to just go ahead and run it with just that one stick and see if we can get it to go for us I actually have some other ddr3 on hand here I'm just going to go back out into my computer room got some g.skill here so I'll go ahead and pull that off that board see if we can make it work with that you know I feel bad for anyone who has to do troubleshooting like this without a bunch of tester parts on hand because it really does make life a lot easier it might just be that it doesn't like 4 gig dims right off the bat here so let's pull that one out put that with its brother and sister let's throw a 2 gig stick in here ok let's see what happens with that start hopefully it'll start this time this whole experiment could be just one big failure but you never know until you try right ok gone each time to chime okay all right we have new solid light on the monitor well this was fun maybe I'll do an updated video when I figure out what went wrong we have a cat visiting us hello well there you are he's exploring my my room full of random junk including obviously wildlife here okay well yeah hopefully this is as simple as a UH as a dead board or something or maybe it's something as stupid as I've gone and you know I wonder if you actually have to plug in these molex these extra molex connectors although I've never seen a board yet that requires them if you've only got one video card installed well better luck to me next time I suppose hopefully I'll have a chance to do an update thanks for checking out my video blog on the rampage 3 extreme and how so far it did not work at all yet but we're getting there