This weeks project is a quite a nice socket 1366 motherboard – ASUS Rampage II Extreme – with an even more unusual failure. Southbridge thinks it’s on fire. But before I address that problem, a little presentation.
For those that don’t know this motherboard: it’s one of the best choices for Nehalem and Westmere based Xeon CPUs. Mainly because of PCB design, but also 16-phase VRM, easy voltage monitoring solution and “EXTREME OC” switch for less advanced overclockers.
Thankfully no pins in the socket are bent.
Let’s see what the seller meant by “It’s broken beyond repair”.
That’s… not normal. It starts with 90°C.
Temperatures are overall hot, but I didn’t use new thermal paste for the CPU and X58 NB just runs hot.
Thankfully, I have an idea how to fix it.
There.
Done.
Fixed.
There is one small problem though. After You turn the PC off it needs to cool down before You can power it up again.
Guidelines call for a failsafe when a “catastrophic thermal situation” is detected by internal thermal diodes.
Pretty smart solution, at least when You have a WORKING SB.
Well, I see 2 possible fixes:
- modify BIOS to ignore thermal trip signal from SB
- replace the SB
Since bypassing safety measures is a big no-no, I went with the second option.
BUT before that I checked the boardview for a SB thermal trip signal pull-up or pull-down resistors.
“Unfortunately” they work as intended.
Oh well, time for BGA rework.
Here’s the reason why it runs so hot. Thermal paste has turned into not-so-thermal rock.
Last time I changed the Intel SB/PCH it ended up in a failure. Let’s see if it’s same this time.
Surprisingly no! It works just fine!
I was able to update the BIOS then and test it some more with Memtest. I found no problems. There obviously is more to test – Ethernet, USB, OC and SATA to name a few things.
For now this motherboard is fixed.
Thanks for reading!