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Old June 26th 18, 07:07 PM posted to alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus
Bill Anderson
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Posts: 249
Default UPDATE: My new Asus Prime X299-A build

I see from the date of my first newsgroup post on this subject that I've
been working on motherboard problems for about two months now. So
here's an update for anybody who's interested.

My old Asus P9X79: I finally had to concede it has gone bad. Nothing I
tried would fix things. A new PS didn't help and my suspicions about my
Colossus video capture card were misplaced too. Nope, the solution was
to replace the whole mainboard (and processor and memory) and now things
are working again. Anybody want a used P9X79? It works great as long
as you don't turn it off and try to start it again; for that you'll need
time and patience. But it's real pretty.

My new Asus Prime X299-A: As of yesterday afternoon it's working just
great, blazing fast at most things, stable, kinda amazing, actually. I
mean, you click on something like Word or Firefox and, boom, it appears
and you just gotta go wow! But even though I think I'm going to love it
in the long run, I didn't get to where I am now without a few potholes
along the road.

Here's what's installed on the new board:

**Processor: OctalCore Intel Core i7-7820X
**Cooler: NZXT Kraken X61 liquid cooling
**Memory: 16GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance
**Graphics: nVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
**Storage, Boot Drive: Samsung NVMe SSD 960 500GB M.2 slot
**Storage, Secondary Boot Drive: Samsung SSD 840 250GB SATA III
**Storage, Four more SATA III HHDs, 3TB (2), 5TB (2)
**Video Captu Hauppauge Colossus II
**Optical Drive: Pioneer BD-RW

Observations, Problems and Solutions:

When I got it all installed it wouldn't boot. It would power up, shut
down, power up, shut down, etc. So I started pulling things out and
discovered the problem was the Hauppauge Colossus video capture card.
When it was installed, no boot. Pull it out, system boots fine. Well,
I figured that stupid card had been my problem all along ... but no, it
turned out buying a replacement, which I did, was a waste of my money.
Seems the X299-A is fussy about which PCIe slots are used when an SSD is
plugged into an M.2 slot. Or something like that. Whatever, my new
Colossus card is working great now that I have it plugged into a working
slot. And the old Colossus card? Well, it's working great too, in a
different computer I've built with leftover parts and an el cheapo MBO.
(More on that in another post.)

The BIOS on this board is flaky, I don't care what anybody says. And
yes, I've flashed to the very latest version (1401) from the Asus
website. Sometimes when in BIOS the mouse will freeze, requiring
power-down and making me long for the days when I navigated BIOS with
arrow keys. But worse, and this was a problem that kept me occupied for
days and days, sometimes BIOS would arbitrarily scramble HDD boot order
and I'd find myself in an OS installation I didn't want to be in. Yeah,
I've loaded three different OS installations on the computer -- all
Win10 but each different. One is my main OS, another is an Insider
program installation (the latest beta Windows), and the third is
installed in a small partition on the back end of one of my SATA HDDs.
I use it as a testbed for things I want to try out before installing
them alongside my important stuff. And for a long time when booting my
new system I kept finding myself in the testbed instead of my primary
OS. It was easy to press F8 during boot and choose the OS I wanted (all
three of them would load fine when chosen this way), but as far as
depending upon my primary OS to be the default OS, I was out of luck. I
thought maybe the problem was the M.2 NVMe slot I was using, which was
buried under a metal plate beneath the graphics card. This slot lets
the NVMe card lie flat on the MBO. So I tried removing it and using the
M.2 slot that makes the NVMe card stand vertically (and vulnerably) on
the MBO, but that didn't help. Through lots of trial and error
involving removing the NVMe card and booting from an SSD, I discovered
the problem lay in my testbed installation. Once I tore those three
Win10 partitions down to unallocated space and re-installed Win10, my
problem with scrambled OS order went away. At least it hasn't recurred
since I discovered what I'm pretty sure is the fix I needed. It's been
almost 24 hours since I re-installed Win10 testbed, and all three OS
installations seem to be working as expected now. I really like seeing
what I expect to see when I turn on the computer.

Speaking of OS installations, that M.2 slot under the metal plate that's
under the graphics card is not the slot to use if you want to be able to
turn your NVMe card off easily. Apparently you can't disable an M.2
slot in bios; if a card is plugged into one it's going to be active
unless you remove it. And since I don't want to be stuck with Windows
Boot Manager, the only way to avoid triggering it when installing a
second (or third) version of Windows is to unplug any drive that has
Win10 already installed. So while that NVMe card makes me nervous
sticking up like that, it's nice to have it in an M.2 slot that's easily
accessible. Cuz you don't want to remove your graphics adapter and
unscrew a metal plate every time you want to unplug an SSD.

The Asus Prime X299-A has only one USB 2 connector on the motherboard.
There are two USB 3 connectors, and that's nice -- I'm using them both
-- but I needed two USB 2 connectors: one for my case's front panel and
the other for my NZXT Kraken CPU cooler. So I found a nice little
converter on Amazon and now I have all the USB 2 connectors I could ever
want, stuck to the inside of the case with double sided tape. And I have
two working USB2 ports I'll probably never use on the front panel of my
case. Why did I want them to work? Because I wanted them to work,
that's why.

I've had so much fun installing this new MBO and figuring out solutions
to problems I'm almost glad my old P9X79 failed. Almost.

--
Bill Anderson

I am the Mighty Favog