Bloax
Slightly less n00b
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2019
- Messages
- 113
- Points
- 28
Hi, I'm Bloax
You may know me from such tales as Are Fat BIOSes a Threat To My Memory Overclocking?
And of course; the recent blockbuster, How To Identify Wooden Integrated Memory Controllers: WTF, my CPU only does single-channel???
I am here to once more share some wild and wacky hardware tales!
First off, I will give you a byte-sized story:
Funny Little ITX Board
Big Heatsink
FUNNY AESTHETIC CHOICES
BIG HEATSINKS
EIGHT HOURS
MANY SCREWDRIVERS
NO FUNNY AESTHETIC HEATSINKS
BIG HEATSINK
Alright, with that cautionary tale of pairing a FUMA 2 with that board out of the way - let's get to business.
As you might know from my last story about how to identify that it's probably your memory controller that's ****ed, I had a ****y 3700x that I bought to replace a Ryzen 3600 that I busted up during transport. What you might not know, is that I bought this 3700x not for the processor, but for the stock heatsink that wouldn't give me an aneurysm when trying to mount it.
What you might also not know, is that this stock heatsink requires the stock AMD AM4 socket thing-a-mabobs included with the stock backplate.
Thing-a-mabobs I could no longer find. Thus I had to re-use the NH-U12A I had lying around if I wanted to use the CPU at all, successfully mounting which took two hours and more sanity than I had to give.
Having lost my mind, and nearly wrecking the CPU in the process - even getting some NICE THERMAL PASTE into the socket during the chaos, I eventually got the infernal contraption to screw the screwyscrews by unscrewying the screw screw on the mounting bracket with the hollow screws and manually forcing those two onto the screwyscrews with no regard for perfect alignment or balance of the mounting bracket.
Runaway sentence, or intentional artistic choice? Nobody knows! Onwards!
For the long story you can read the IMC post, but long story short; the thermal paste was innocent, and the CPU just refused to do dual-channel memory for some reason.
Now, of course - I'd like to not be stuck on single-channel memory, as this is massively detrimental for the performance of the system in the tasks I needed it for in the first place.
Thus I went out to the place I bought it, a five minute walk from this place, and asked if I could have it swapped around since it has a weird and wacky problem.
"Sure thing, just bring it over."
So, I went back here, collected some extras for really making out the wackiness of this whole thing, and dismounted the heatsink in a bit of a hurry as I had already spent a bunch of time collecting all that gruff.
There's not enough room for the heatsink to wiggle it around, so the detachment was a bit rough. It came off, though - and this was hardly the first time I had dismounted it.
Indeed, for I had done so before to test my old 3600 I had unbent the pins on a couple of days prior.
Ho ho, bent pins there were; for I had previously ****ed around with a pen to see if I could unfuckulate the pins (that's a No, chief) and discovered in the process, just how tough AM4 and non-delicate pins really are. Very hard to displace and bend!
Fortunately, in the Ferocious Phantom ITX Butchery, we had uncovered a set of screwdrivers that featured a teeny tiny flathead - so teeny and tiny, that it was perfect for the job.
Some three hours pass, and what must've been a solid 10% (that's a lot!!) of the pins got adjusted in one way or another; fixing both original and collateral damage from learning and from obligatory get-out-of-the-way bends to fix nasty bends.
Using my trusty old de-commissioned b450 Tomahawk as a "socket bitch", I eventually unfuckulated the pins to the degree that it slipped into the socket perfectly, and the clamping mechanism kept it firmly in place even with the board flipped downwards. Doing so results in the CPU taking the full brunt of this magical phenomenon, Gravity, and as some of you may be aware - these CPUs weigh their fair share in metal, rock and gold -- thus revealing any imperfections in your pin-fixing adventures. Took a couple of tries, please hold your hand over the CPU to catch it. Thanks.
Unfortunately, my 3600 didn't seem to come back to life. Despite it fitting perfectly into the socket, the board refused to power on with it installed.
Never lucky, rubber ducky. oh well
I deposited it back into the Tomahawk, and let this fallen champion lie in eternal slumber.
The FUMA 2 was a pleasure to un-mount and re-mount, by the by - the occasion it doesn't flawlessly snap onto the screwholes immediately, it only takes minor finnagling to get one screw in, and screw the other while adjusting the heatsink until it lands properly into the hole.
You know, unlike some infernal contraption you can Screw WIThOUT it ScREWiNG In becauSe It"S HoLloW ****inG ScrEWs AaAaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaa
snap back to reality, whoa - we even mentioned gravity
You recall that thing about dismounting the heatsink? Yeah, well - the CPU whined a bit about being taken out of the (yes, unclamped, I ain't silly) socket, but whatever.
So I get back to the place, give him my wacky 3700x, nice nice
He gives it a looksie
Looksie look
Hmm
What's this
hey mister you've got a bent pin there
And boy, is it bent - so bent, I ain't even risking unbending it because I could be liable for breaking off the pin!
blah blah maybe that's why you're having funny issues ecks d xd xd
can't trade in a BORKED MISHANDLED CPU
He gives it back to me, and I give him my best "you WhaT" face
"Pin damage, wha? It had no bent pins last I looked, the hell?"
In the exacerbation and complete bamboozlement of plans, I flip the **** tray around and it ****ing plops right out of that stupid non-slotted thing and slam-dunks itself onto the table, pins-first;
"Pin damage, huh? Yeah speak of the devil."
nothing changed though, no pins got bent from the small drop..
A bit of further Blah's and Sorry's later, I take it back home
Plop it in
NO POST
Who woulda thunk it, the **** thing had the nerve to ****ulate itself exactly as I was about to get a replacement
yeah **** you too buddy
So then, with ten sleepless hours under my belt, some nerves and copious amounts of caffeine - I take onto the CPU Surgery
With three powerful MLG Pro pin-bending experience under my belt, the process of unbending the singular pin from a minor 80 degree Ben Dover sex-tape act actually went shockingly smooth.
Unfortunately, due to either having recently heated the CPU up from plopping it into the board to see if it even worked with the bent pin (it didn't), or the recent "what"-moment fall, a couple of the pins decided to - much unlike the absolute tanks featured on my 3600, which took Herculean effort to even budge - YEET the hell off the CPU.
What was otherwise a successful operation, turned out to result in a Dead patient due to a case of the shaky-trembly-handsies from Caffeine And A Bit of Nerves 360 NOSCOPING some n00b pins that immediately ragequit.
End result? CPU slots into socket. Sits in the socket. Put a USB NF-A12x25 on top of it to keep its temperature non-critical without heatsink.
DOESN'T POST
haHa happy hAppy lucky me :---DDDDDDDDDDD
With hope of a miraculous recovery freshly leaving the soul drained, with my bank account freshly emptied from Aesthetic ITX boards, and a dead 3700x - there was but one last ace up my sleeve before a long plunge into The Great Dark;
The Fallen Champion, lying in his deathbed.
I plop the 3700x out of the socket
I undo the tomb of The Hero of Old, and pick up his faded corpse.
See, he was faded for he had no face left - after a five-month adventure with liquid metal, and some sanding to get it back off, his proud Ryzen identity and name, gone!
But his memory and record of reckless deeds, lives on in our cold hearts.
All hope is out, after all - the 3700x already left and re-arrived dead - you may as well give it one last shot before dropping out of cyberspace until you get the cashmoney for more fresh meat.
What happened next, is but a continuation of Mr. Bloaxes' WiLD anD WACkY Ride
The dead CPU
Yeah, that dead CPU
Had a little Altered Beast moment
the board powered on
Shocked, I pulled the power and pressed the CLEAR CMOS to make the board get its bearings faster
it POSTed
A smirk crept onto my face, with my finger holding down Delete during the intermission screen
There it is, proudly displayed in the top-left; "Ryzen 5 3600, 6-core"
"Hello there, old friend."
Then I loaded up my saved BIOS settings for single-stick goodness to see if it was still good
It POSTed
I power it off, now for the real test; populating the second DIMM, the bane of the 3700x
...
...
It POSTed, even with the 1.58v single-stick settings despite rocking full 2-DIMM now
Actual
****ing*
nutter CPU
Claws its way out of the grave, with a vengeance.
* I was surprised by the testing speed, and no - it didn't spit out errors left and right
Somehow, when all looked bleak and with the siren call of the Abyss howling, The Fallen Champion returned to his people once more.
what
You may know me from such tales as Are Fat BIOSes a Threat To My Memory Overclocking?
And of course; the recent blockbuster, How To Identify Wooden Integrated Memory Controllers: WTF, my CPU only does single-channel???
I am here to once more share some wild and wacky hardware tales!
First off, I will give you a byte-sized story:
Funny Little ITX Board
Big Heatsink
FUNNY AESTHETIC CHOICES
BIG HEATSINKS
EIGHT HOURS
MANY SCREWDRIVERS
NO FUNNY AESTHETIC HEATSINKS
BIG HEATSINK
Alright, with that cautionary tale of pairing a FUMA 2 with that board out of the way - let's get to business.
As you might know from my last story about how to identify that it's probably your memory controller that's ****ed, I had a ****y 3700x that I bought to replace a Ryzen 3600 that I busted up during transport. What you might not know, is that I bought this 3700x not for the processor, but for the stock heatsink that wouldn't give me an aneurysm when trying to mount it.
What you might also not know, is that this stock heatsink requires the stock AMD AM4 socket thing-a-mabobs included with the stock backplate.
Thing-a-mabobs I could no longer find. Thus I had to re-use the NH-U12A I had lying around if I wanted to use the CPU at all, successfully mounting which took two hours and more sanity than I had to give.
Having lost my mind, and nearly wrecking the CPU in the process - even getting some NICE THERMAL PASTE into the socket during the chaos, I eventually got the infernal contraption to screw the screwyscrews by unscrewying the screw screw on the mounting bracket with the hollow screws and manually forcing those two onto the screwyscrews with no regard for perfect alignment or balance of the mounting bracket.
Runaway sentence, or intentional artistic choice? Nobody knows! Onwards!
For the long story you can read the IMC post, but long story short; the thermal paste was innocent, and the CPU just refused to do dual-channel memory for some reason.
Now, of course - I'd like to not be stuck on single-channel memory, as this is massively detrimental for the performance of the system in the tasks I needed it for in the first place.
Thus I went out to the place I bought it, a five minute walk from this place, and asked if I could have it swapped around since it has a weird and wacky problem.
"Sure thing, just bring it over."
So, I went back here, collected some extras for really making out the wackiness of this whole thing, and dismounted the heatsink in a bit of a hurry as I had already spent a bunch of time collecting all that gruff.
There's not enough room for the heatsink to wiggle it around, so the detachment was a bit rough. It came off, though - and this was hardly the first time I had dismounted it.
Indeed, for I had done so before to test my old 3600 I had unbent the pins on a couple of days prior.
Ho ho, bent pins there were; for I had previously ****ed around with a pen to see if I could unfuckulate the pins (that's a No, chief) and discovered in the process, just how tough AM4 and non-delicate pins really are. Very hard to displace and bend!
Fortunately, in the Ferocious Phantom ITX Butchery, we had uncovered a set of screwdrivers that featured a teeny tiny flathead - so teeny and tiny, that it was perfect for the job.
Some three hours pass, and what must've been a solid 10% (that's a lot!!) of the pins got adjusted in one way or another; fixing both original and collateral damage from learning and from obligatory get-out-of-the-way bends to fix nasty bends.
Using my trusty old de-commissioned b450 Tomahawk as a "socket bitch", I eventually unfuckulated the pins to the degree that it slipped into the socket perfectly, and the clamping mechanism kept it firmly in place even with the board flipped downwards. Doing so results in the CPU taking the full brunt of this magical phenomenon, Gravity, and as some of you may be aware - these CPUs weigh their fair share in metal, rock and gold -- thus revealing any imperfections in your pin-fixing adventures. Took a couple of tries, please hold your hand over the CPU to catch it. Thanks.
Unfortunately, my 3600 didn't seem to come back to life. Despite it fitting perfectly into the socket, the board refused to power on with it installed.
Never lucky, rubber ducky. oh well
I deposited it back into the Tomahawk, and let this fallen champion lie in eternal slumber.
The FUMA 2 was a pleasure to un-mount and re-mount, by the by - the occasion it doesn't flawlessly snap onto the screwholes immediately, it only takes minor finnagling to get one screw in, and screw the other while adjusting the heatsink until it lands properly into the hole.
You know, unlike some infernal contraption you can Screw WIThOUT it ScREWiNG In becauSe It"S HoLloW ****inG ScrEWs AaAaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaa
snap back to reality, whoa - we even mentioned gravity
You recall that thing about dismounting the heatsink? Yeah, well - the CPU whined a bit about being taken out of the (yes, unclamped, I ain't silly) socket, but whatever.
So I get back to the place, give him my wacky 3700x, nice nice
He gives it a looksie
Looksie look
Hmm
What's this
hey mister you've got a bent pin there
And boy, is it bent - so bent, I ain't even risking unbending it because I could be liable for breaking off the pin!
blah blah maybe that's why you're having funny issues ecks d xd xd
can't trade in a BORKED MISHANDLED CPU
He gives it back to me, and I give him my best "you WhaT" face
"Pin damage, wha? It had no bent pins last I looked, the hell?"
In the exacerbation and complete bamboozlement of plans, I flip the **** tray around and it ****ing plops right out of that stupid non-slotted thing and slam-dunks itself onto the table, pins-first;
"Pin damage, huh? Yeah speak of the devil."
nothing changed though, no pins got bent from the small drop..
A bit of further Blah's and Sorry's later, I take it back home
Plop it in
NO POST
Who woulda thunk it, the **** thing had the nerve to ****ulate itself exactly as I was about to get a replacement
yeah **** you too buddy
So then, with ten sleepless hours under my belt, some nerves and copious amounts of caffeine - I take onto the CPU Surgery
With three powerful MLG Pro pin-bending experience under my belt, the process of unbending the singular pin from a minor 80 degree Ben Dover sex-tape act actually went shockingly smooth.
Unfortunately, due to either having recently heated the CPU up from plopping it into the board to see if it even worked with the bent pin (it didn't), or the recent "what"-moment fall, a couple of the pins decided to - much unlike the absolute tanks featured on my 3600, which took Herculean effort to even budge - YEET the hell off the CPU.
What was otherwise a successful operation, turned out to result in a Dead patient due to a case of the shaky-trembly-handsies from Caffeine And A Bit of Nerves 360 NOSCOPING some n00b pins that immediately ragequit.
End result? CPU slots into socket. Sits in the socket. Put a USB NF-A12x25 on top of it to keep its temperature non-critical without heatsink.
DOESN'T POST
haHa happy hAppy lucky me :---DDDDDDDDDDD
With hope of a miraculous recovery freshly leaving the soul drained, with my bank account freshly emptied from Aesthetic ITX boards, and a dead 3700x - there was but one last ace up my sleeve before a long plunge into The Great Dark;
The Fallen Champion, lying in his deathbed.
I plop the 3700x out of the socket
I undo the tomb of The Hero of Old, and pick up his faded corpse.
See, he was faded for he had no face left - after a five-month adventure with liquid metal, and some sanding to get it back off, his proud Ryzen identity and name, gone!
But his memory and record of reckless deeds, lives on in our cold hearts.
All hope is out, after all - the 3700x already left and re-arrived dead - you may as well give it one last shot before dropping out of cyberspace until you get the cashmoney for more fresh meat.
What happened next, is but a continuation of Mr. Bloaxes' WiLD anD WACkY Ride
The dead CPU
Yeah, that dead CPU
Had a little Altered Beast moment
the board powered on
Shocked, I pulled the power and pressed the CLEAR CMOS to make the board get its bearings faster
it POSTed
A smirk crept onto my face, with my finger holding down Delete during the intermission screen
There it is, proudly displayed in the top-left; "Ryzen 5 3600, 6-core"
"Hello there, old friend."
Then I loaded up my saved BIOS settings for single-stick goodness to see if it was still good
It POSTed
I power it off, now for the real test; populating the second DIMM, the bane of the 3700x
...
...
It POSTed, even with the 1.58v single-stick settings despite rocking full 2-DIMM now
Actual
****ing*
nutter CPU
Claws its way out of the grave, with a vengeance.
* I was surprised by the testing speed, and no - it didn't spit out errors left and right
Somehow, when all looked bleak and with the siren call of the Abyss howling, The Fallen Champion returned to his people once more.
what
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