Intel 5820k no-post troubleshooting after 4+ years of use

tefmann · April 20, 2020

I built a friend of mine a workstation about 4 years ago using an Intel 5820k and an Asus X99-a motherboard. It has ran pretty flawlessly for his work load over the years, no upgrades at all. About a week ago his machine stopped posting on bootup. It restarted once and worked normally but after that has no posted since. 00 code on the on-board LED panel, no CPU detected. Pulled everything out today and ran a series of troubleshoots, eventually got it down to the good old motherboard on box. Reseated the CPU, redid all the thermal compound, swapped DIMM slots all over the place. Nothing!

The only thing visually I can see when inspecting the motherboard and CPU was on the CPU's contacts, a few were different shades. Almost looked like something shorted out on about 5-7 contacts. Not black or discolored, just different shade of bronze. I have never seen or heard of this before but could this be an indicator?

Besides all that, I just told him I'll take it with me home and do some more tests, but if those fail he may need either a new X99 board or new CPU. I could try and swap parts around with good new ones and see if it's only one of them. Although I also recommended we just part out a newer gen CPU/Motherboard and call it a day. Would be a headache (and after looking at X99 part prices, more expensive) to try and reuse the old stuff. However I would like to still try and salvage these parts because they are still valuable and if I could get them working would make a fantastic second encoding machine for my buddy.

Anyone have any tips or tricks when it comes to X99 no-post issues like this? Would be very helpful as it is the chipset/CPU format I have the least experience with. Thank you!!!!

Damascus · April 20, 2020

I'm a big fan of X99, @Zando Bob is also a veteran HEDT enthusiast. My first thought is that it may be a dead CPU, as the early gen Asus X99 boards have this nasty habit of pushing way too much voltage through stock cpus (iirc 2v)

The easiest way to test if this is a cpu issue would be to buy an e5 2620 v3 on aliexpress, a mildly unimpressive cpu (6c/12t 2.5-3.2hz) that currently retails for a whopping ~15 USD on Aliexpress. If that does wind up being the case, you can then go bother asus for killing your cpu.

Second method is the good old fashioned "trust internet strangers with the hardware and hope they send it back after testing" method. Cheap but risky Lots of us have too much x99 hardware for no good reason...

Last option would be attempting to swap out the bios chip. Again with the early asus boards, they were notoriously finicky and prone to seizing up in after BIOS failure. If the board has two chips, try switching to the secondary. If it has one, you can buy a replacement from sellers like BIOS depot on ebay (no relation, I've simply used their services in the past on an X99 OC Formula)

tefmann · April 20, 2020

38 minutes ago, Damascus said:

I'm a big fan of X99, @Zando Bob is also a veteran HEDT enthusiast. My first thought is that it may be a dead CPU, as the early gen Asus X99 boards have this nasty habit of pushing way too much voltage through stock cpus (iirc 2v)

The easiest way to test if this is a cpu issue would be to buy an e5 2620 v3 on aliexpress, a mildly unimpressive cpu (6c/12t 2.5-3.2hz) that currently retails for a whopping ~15 USD on Aliexpress. If that does wind up being the case, you can then go bother asus for killing your cpu.

Second method is the good old fashioned "trust internet strangers with the hardware and hope they send it back after testing" method. Cheap but risky Lots of us have too much x99 hardware for no good reason...

Last option would be attempting to swap out the bios chip. Again with the early asus boards, they were notoriously finicky and prone to seizing up in after BIOS failure. If the board has two chips, try switching to the secondary. If it has one, you can buy a replacement from sellers like BIOS depot on ebay (no relation, I've simply used their services in the past on an X99 OC Formula)

Thank you so much for all of this info! Typed out a reply while on a meeting phone call and closed the tab, sorry for the late reply. I will certainly order that chip and continue testing. Additionally, I am not sure if the motherboard has two BIOS'. I believe it does because it is the Asus X99-a which was the creme de la creme of the time if my memory serves me correctly. I need to go through the MB manual more and do a lot of research. I certainly appreciate the info you provided and will update this thread as I go through the troubleshooting.

tefmann · April 24, 2020

UPDATE: So i got it to post. Replaced the CMOS battery and super cleaned the CPU socket/all the DIMMs of any particulate. Also used a different set of RAM, same brand/model different frequency. Haven't really tried it in an OS or under any load. It only wants to post about 75% of the time though. The other 25% I keep getting code 00 still and then it just boot cycles. When it does post it behaves completely normally, although a few times I got code CF from the on board LED panel. No idea what was wrong with it initially though. Any ideas gentlemen?

Luckily new CPU/motherboard arrived. Moving to a 3700x/X570 platform for this machine. My friend will still be using his GTX 970, like I stated earlier this is a work station for encoding and he has minimal video game usage so I don't think it should be a bottle neck and if it is I'll probably order him a used identical GTX 970 to run in SLI, would be cheaper than a new GPU and not a waste of an otherwise good, albeit outdated, piece of hardware.

Thank you again!