I really love Gigabyte products.Especially the ultra durable concept. Their MB usually just works for ages with no maintenance, But nothing prepared me to the GA-EP45-UD3LR MB experience.
First I run it with 2 Kingston value DDR3 1333 memory sticks of 2 GB each ,it run quite smoothly for a month or so ,until one stormy night i decided that i should not relay on my home UPS and shut down the machine. After two days I got the power back on it started for 20 second and shutdown ,and did not response to power for several minutes . After 10 times I decided to do what i should have done 8 times ago ,
Google it . It seems that those boards suffer from some design and QA faults.It all suppose to be fixed by a BIOS update , but my board did not power up enough for me even check the bios version. Since it still in it 3 year warranty I RMA it.
The new board had suffer from the same symptoms , but this time I did got to see it has the latest BIOS version. After long 2 days of frustration which include change some BIOS setting ,reboot ,check to whether it holds and wait 10 minutes for the power to get back i found out that running in "optimize settings " with dropping down the DDR speed to 800 MHz will have the board run smoothly enough to find out the the on board NIC is malfunction ....
RMA and got a new board which did not response the the previous trick ... HELL with it ! Just a minute before RMA it for anther MB model i tried "load fail safe settings" which , to my surprise , worked ( it did not worked for the second board ).
Well it worked for 2 weeks ,enough for me to understand that 4 GB is not sufficient for this project.
DDR3 prices dropped below 60$ for a 4GB piece , so i bought 4
Patriot PSD32G1333KH models (with heat shield ).Which did worked OK with the MB ( did not have any power up problems) .I started to load the Xen server , but it kept freezing ,so Memtest was called to action.
It did pass the first 40% of the test until 93 errors were found.
OK started to run memtest for each model ,which pass 100% with no errors ( about 1-1:30 hour each ) ,but when inserting 2 models he test failed
Puzzled and frustrated ,but armed with previous experience I've tried to under-clock my RAM to 800 MHz ,It passed Memtest. Twice, with 2 ,and 4 sticks ! But it was too slow ( Memtest showed about 3800 MB/s ,while on 1333 MHz it was about 5000 MB/s ) , i got it up to 1066 MHz and it pass the test once again ,i decided that 4800 MB/s should be enough and stopped there.
Bottom line:
- I strongly recommend you to stay away from GA-EP45-UD3LR , it looks great but will pass you throw hell with memory compatibility.
- I do have a lot of experience with Gigabyte MB in the past 5 years (bought it to family and friends) . Never had any problems ,so i will continue to buy from them.
- If you having problems with this board ,try under clocking to 800 MHz and 1066 MHz
Please comment this post (or any other) if it helped you or not
First I run it with 2 Kingston value DDR3 1333 memory sticks of 2 GB each ,it run quite smoothly for a month or so ,until one stormy night i decided that i should not relay on my home UPS and shut down the machine. After two days I got the power back on it started for 20 second and shutdown ,and did not response to power for several minutes . After 10 times I decided to do what i should have done 8 times ago ,Google it . It seems that those boards suffer from some design and QA faults.It all suppose to be fixed by a BIOS update , but my board did not power up enough for me even check the bios version. Since it still in it 3 year warranty I RMA it.