Possible Motherboard/RAM Issue

Cereal5 · October 27, 2018

Hey LTT,

I've been having a problem with my recently rebuilt system. About a week ago my Asus X99-A motherboard died. I didn't want to wait a month for an RMA, so I decided that, instead of sinking more money into an older platform, I'd just upgrade. So the next day I cam home from Micro Center with an 8700K and Asus Z370-A (this time I bought a 3 year no questions asked protection plan). Upon putting everything together, I was having weird booting issues. Mostly hanging on the "press delete to enter BIOS" screen. I would have to turn off, and upon restart I would get the post error "You blah blah force closed blah blah, press F1 to run setup". The computer, sometimes, would randomly enter windows no problem. So naturally I would restart to see if it's fixed, and it would hang again. Sometimes, it would get past the BIOS screen after anywhere from 30 seconds to 2+ minutes, and then hang on the windows logo screen (where the screen is black except for the windows logo and loading circle, except there was no loading circle). Once on this screen it would not actually enter windows log in. So I would have to turn it off. Other times, I would actually enter the BIOS, and sometimes it would work, and sometimes it would freeze after about 5 seconds. If it froze in the BIOS, then I would actually have to hold the power button down to force turn it off (all of the other hangs I would just press the button and it would turn off). So finally after a day and a half of this, I tried some trouble shooting. I:

Reset BIOS by unplugging PSU and holding power button for 30 seconds, then booting. This seemed to work for a couple starts/restarts.
Tested each stick of RAM individually in each DIMM slot. The first two sticks of RAM I tried hung on BIOS on the third DIMM from the CPU. Every other slot worked fine for those two sticks, and the other two sticks worked fine in all slots. Both of the sticks that hung I retested twice more, and it worked fine, so I figured they were just not fully seated. I also tried two sticks and 3 sticks in different configs, and they worked fine.

That was about 2 days ago. After reseating the RAM, everything seemed ok, so I put all RAM back in, and it worked fine up until today, when the system hung at BIOS enter screen again. I shut everything down and pushed on all the RAM sticks, rebooted, and it hung again. I did this another two times with no luck. So I took two sticks out (A2 and B2, leaving A1 and B1 in, the first and third from CPU). And... It booted just fine. For the record, all troubleshooting was done without OC (loaded "optimized defaults").

I do not have another CPU or MoBo to test, nor do I have other RAM (however I don't think it's RAM due to my earlier tests). I'm inclined to think there is something wrong with the motherboard and how it handles memory. One thing I did not mention is the MoBo does not have a q code read out. There is a square where it looks like it should be, but it is either something else, or it does not light up (it is located next to the last memory DIMM, above the 24-pin). Is my best bet just to return the motherboard and try a new one? Or are there other steps I should take first before doing so?

(specs in signature) Thanks