Question ASUS X79-Deluxe going bad?

[djlenoir]

As the title says, I have an ASUS X79-Deluxe motherboard. It has been running a non-overclocked i7 4930k, with 64GB of RAM the entire time I have owned it. Recently it started acting up. Symptoms varied, but it would boot just fine, run perfectly, no matter how long it was up, but the moment I go to reboot it, it would either come up and fail to post because it will lose my SATA attached SSD, or it just would not even power on at all. When it would not power on, I would see the power and reset lights, but none of the buttons did anything. I thought originally that the SSD was the problem. Tried a brand new replacement with a new SATA cable. Booted up, ran for an hour or so, rebooted for an updated and it did not boot. Could not power it back on again. I am sure if I leave it long enough, it will boot up again. Is something overheating and then BIOS safety measures are preventing it from making it past POST? What could be wrong please?

I should add that the very first time it happened that it would not power up, I thought it was the power supply, so I bought a new 850w Corsair power supply. So that rules out power. Recently, someone suggested to try to replace the CMOS battery, so I bought a Energizer lithium replacement battery. When I replaced the power supply, it worked... and then it didn't when I rebooted. Same for the CMOS battery. *sigh*

 

[djlenoir]

So I am planning to tear down the system, pull the motherboard and look if I can pull up all the heatsinks and apply new thermal paste. Not sure if they are screwed down or glued down right now. I am wondering if age may have contributed to a breakdown of whatever 'paste' is between the heatsinks and the chips? Any thoughts on if this might be a worthwhile cause?

 

[RLGL]

Check the caps for leaking and bulging. If it were mine, I would not spend the time or effort to figure it out. I would instead be researching my next build.

 

[djlenoir]

Check the caps for leaking and bulging. If it were mine, I would not spend the time or effort to figure it out. I would instead be researching my next build.

I will check the caps, thank you. I am not exactly sure what a 'leaking' cap looks like, but I will search it. I am on the fence on building a new system and sell off the individual components to try to recoup some of the money. The cost of a new CPU/RAM and motherboard is not something I really want to absorb right now though if I can avoid it.

 

[aigomorla]

Can be several problems.

1. a corrupted bios. - i would try to reflash your bios in stock settings.
2. a bad mem controller - this has to do with bad cpu
3. possibly bent cpu pins. - visually pull out the cpu and inspect the pins.
4. dying northbridge -
5. Bad PCI-E slot and not registering Video Card or bad Video Card.

Does your led diagnostic freeze on a number when its booting like 2F or FF?
Problem 2 will be difficult, you can try to give it more voltage.
Problem 4 is also difficult, you can try to give it more voltage.
Problem 5 you can try to move your card to another slot, or try another video card.

You can probably get a cheap Xeon E5-2620 on ebay series to rule out cpu, if you really want to debug it out.
You can also rule out ram by putting 1 or 2 stick in the blue slots, and testing.

 

[djlenoir]

Can be several problems.

1. a corrupted bios. - i would try to reflash your bios in stock settings.
2. a bad mem controller - this has to do with bad cpu
3. possibly bent cpu pins. - visually pull out the cpu and inspect the pins.
4. dying northbridge -
5. Bad PCI-E slot and not registering Video Card or bad Video Card.

Does your led diagnostic freeze on a number when its booting like 2F or FF?
Problem 2 will be difficult, you can try to give it more voltage.
Problem 4 is also difficult, you can try to give it more voltage.
Problem 5 you can try to move your card to another slot, or try another video card.

You can probably get a cheap Xeon E5-2620 on ebay series to rule out cpu, if you really want to debug it out.
You can also rule out ram by putting 1 or 2 stick in the blue slots, and testing.

Thank you! You have given me a list of stuff to test tomorrow (and possibly into Saturday).

 

[djlenoir]

Updating the thread. I finally found the time to work on this project. I pulled the motherboard out of the case, removed all cards, RAM and the CPU. Inspected the pins in the socket and they all looked perfectly aligned, so no issues there. I pulled off the heatsinks and inspected all capacitors. They are all the solid capacitors, but as far as I can tell there was no visible issues of any kind with any of them. The one thing I noticed was the material that was between the heatsink and the X79 chipset was essentially dried up and useless. I added a liberal amount of Kryonaut and put everything back together. Put everything back together and back into the case. It worked the first boot (which it would many times if not used previously). I let it run about 30 minutes and tried to reboot. It came back up fine. This is positive as it would fail to reboot after it had time to warm up. Shut it down. Still booted back up. So far, it appears to be working fine again. Maybe the X79 chipset was getting too hot due to poor thermal conductivity. I think I have it fixed though (crossing fingers).

 

[aigomorla]

i think it was probably improperly seated cpu, or you may have shorted a ground somewhere on the board.

 

[djlenoir]

i think it was probably improperly seated cpu, or you may have shorted a ground somewhere on the board.

You could be right. I noticed that the CPU has a tiny bit of play when sitting in the socket, and the clamping mechanism to hold it down is not really precise. I did my best to make it dead center and clamp it down evenly.

The good news is that it appears to be working like new again, so whatever the issue was, I am just thankful that it is not longer giving me problems. Of course, I now have a 2TB SATA SSD and a 2TB NVME SSD with PCIe adapter that I didn't need.

Thanks for all the help and advice. This thread can be closed.

 

[blckgrffn]

I would be deeply suspicious of that PSU. Both of my X-750 units of that same vintage died slow deaths of unstable systems about six months ago. The one paired with my X79 system was most annoying.

Of course, now is one of the worst times in recent memory to buy a PSU for troubleshooting, but if I were you I would shop that. Even if you end up carrying it over to the next build, those PSU's likely had 7 year warranties for a reason

(So I was reading your sig for your PSU. Looks like a totally different rig, but my recommendation remains unchanged I always look to PSU first these days when long term stable hardware starts getting weird.)