Mr. Fox

@Rage Set it must be DIMM dying season. Check this out. Weird short circuit on this PC at the DIMM module.

A test BIOS (9923) dropped from ASUS for AM5 and it seems like an improvement. I cannot get 8400 fully stable, but I think that might be a CPU/IMC limitation. This is my weakest CPU. I may try my better 9950X or my 4585PX, but there is almost no measurable difference in performance between 8200 and 8400, so no biggie either way. These Kingbank XMP/EXPO 8400 sticks that @gupsterg turned me on to have been great. They were dirt cheap when I bought them on Amazon back in the "good old days" (not long ago) before the tech world went off the rails with the crazy AI nonsense. I've never seen so many stupid people that would otherwise be viewed as intelligent. Now I wish I hadn't sold that second 8400 kit. Kingbank no longer sells memory on Amazon, and even if they did the price would suck now. 😑

Yeah it is a real bummer. I am puzzled as well. Maybe they didn't make enough on motherboard sales for it to be sustainable. I loved their hardware and firmware. That will be a nice case upgrade for the wife. Antec makes good stuff, especially their cases. I enjoyed the Intel Unify X, but the firmware kept me from loving the X870E Carbon. It was not terrible by any means, it just never rose to the level of seeming awesome... good versus great.

That is the only solution that I would deem acceptable. Although disappointing, the fortunate thing for me is gaming is not important enough that making an exception and compromising my position on the subject isn't necessary. I won't lose any sleep over no longer playing new titles in game franchises I have enjoyed since the initial release. Seems like status quo that good things eventually turn to crap. Not a matter of if, but when. Easy come, easy go. Que sera sera. 🤣

Meta (aka FacePoot) Instacram and Reddtit are the social media cesspools of the world and I do not even like logging in to their platforms. I feel instantly dirty when I do.

After owning several MSI boards (Unify X and Carbon) and numerous ASUS boards, if it were me I would stick with ASUS if for no other reason than much better firmware. Apex is a great motherboard generally. Every MSI I have owned has something in the firmware that was irksome to me. They were OK in terms of hardware. Svet deals with fixing lots of MSI firmware messes. They are never-ending. MSI forums are littered with examples of problems caused by screwed up firmware. That sucks donkey butt. These idiot game dev clowns are going to FAFO what happens to dictators. They usually end up dead. I am happy that I don't care about Valorant. If I did, I would no longer. It would be dead to me, just as Battlefield and Call of Duty titles that require this stupid nonsense are now. Nasty finger salute to all of them, with both hands. No game is good enough or matters to me to such a degree that I will be told what I have to do in order to play it. They can drop dead and I hope that they do.

The current situation sucks. However, there is always a silver lining to a dark cloud when you are forced to look for it. This will likely benefit those selling spare used PC components. They (we) may be able to sell things used for the same amount or more than what was paid for them new. And, an additional benefit is that consumers will probably stop wasting money upgrading systems that still work fine for the tasks for which they are used. If games are dumbed down or "optimized" to function well on less capable hardware, the notion that an upgrade is needed should also be dramatically reduced. In practical application, systems that were nearing the end of their service life due to performance limitations may get a new lease on life. Another potential benefit is this may pressure the Redmond Reprobates to back off on their idiotic OS system requirements if their intent was to contribute to e-waste development by forcing people to buy newer computers. That may become more difficult for consumers and cause Winduhz 11 adoption to stagnate even further than it has. And, another potential benefit... perhaps the best possible scenario of all... AI development will implode, end up in a state of ruin and self-destruct. The very thing causing these problems may burn itself out due to astronomical costs developing something that their intended victims will not be able to leverage due to not enough consumers having the resources needed to utilize the garbage they are hoping to capitalize on. The idea of spending gobs of money on something that will not generate enough revenue to offset costs will ultimately fail. This is what I am hoping happens.

You're welcome. I also enjoy that kind of thing. If/when you can figure something out, or explore something out of the ordinary trying to figure it out, it feels good.

If you can determine the target slot number with the tool after saving the SPD from the good stick, select the target slot for the dead stick and see if the tool will allow you to write to it. When I had the SPD corruption happening from OpenRGB the stick seemed dead. CPU-Z could not "see" it and the tool could not read from it, and Thaiphoon Burner showed the module had no firmware on it. But, I was able to select the target slot annd write the SPD from the good stick to the corrupted one. Set the BIOS for SPD Write enabled (or SPD write disable set to "enabled" depending on how it is worded in the BIOS) has to be toggled. It may not work, but it would be worth a shot. Maybe you will get lucky.

Try with the naked green sticks as well as the RGB. That's a bummer that it doesn't see the other stick. That suggests it could be a hardware failure. Did you enable SPD Write in the BIOS? If not, enable that and try again and maybe it will work.

There might be a newer version in the opening post by Safedisk in this thread: https://community.hwbot.org/topic/242375-rog-crosshair-x870e-heroapexextreme/ I will have to see if it works on my X870E Apex motherboard. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/94dljuo7lj4o0luen1hc1/OCPak_1506.zip?rlkey=sgozvyrcy88kxxhbo3fpwdcya&e=1&st=9zd14xd6&dl=0

What kind of DDR5 motherboards do you have? I do not know if it will work on an AMD system. The ASUS OCTools are not specific to ASUS, but some features only work with a limited set of boards where i2c bus access is available using software. I do not think ASUS authors the tools, but they are commonly used by people like Safedisk that work for/with ASUS. The same OCTools allowed me to override the Intel ARC GPU power limits and voltage to overclock it further. (It has an ARC tool feature that worked similar to the EVGA Classified tool.) I discovered that in a Skatterbencher video. Edit: @Rage Set I believe it is bundled in this OCPak archive. I found a link to it in this thread: https://community.hwbot.org/topic/220910-asus-rog-maximus-apex-z790-apex-15/#comments

I downloaded the OCTool from HWBOT forum. Let me see if I can locate the link. You don't need an Apex. A Maximus board of any kind will work if memory serves me correctly. When I stopped trying to control the memory RGB lighting and removed any and all software to control it (including Armory Crap) the problem stopped and never returned.

@Rage Set not only OpenRGB but also Corsair iCUE has been known to corrupt the SPD. If that is the problem and not a hardware failure, here is the link that I discovered and the method I used to fix the corrupted SPD more than once. https://www.overclock.net/threads/corrupted-ddr5-spd-fix-tutorial.1795935/ I see numerous links about Corsair iCUE doing the same thing as OpenRGB. You can also fix it another way (which I have not tried). https://linustechtips.com/topic/1505572-am4-x570-system-no-longer-posts-with-4-sticks-of-memory-installed/?do=findComment&comment=15930927

One of those kits I purchased used on eBay and the other from AliExpress, so probably no place to get the warranty covered. I don't remember which kit he bought from me, but both were essentially the same. Dell OEM server modules that overclocked very well. Same modules that Splave was selling in HWBOT forum for 2 or 3 times more than what I paid for them. If it is SPD corruption and not a hardware failure the firmware can be copied from the good module to the corrupted one. If I can find the link to where I saw how to do it (overclock.net) I will post it. You have to have a ROG Maximum motherboard or the tool will not work. Unless something has changed it will not work with a Strix, Prime or TUF motherboard.

It corrupted the stick in the first slot and the system would boot if I moved the good one to the first slot and let the memory train, then turn it off and put the corrupted stick in the second slot. It would not boot at all with the corrupted stick in the first slot. In Windows, the corrupted stick showed everything was erased. This actually happened like 3 times. The first time I did not know what happened and the second and third times I fixed it.

I had CachyOS installed before on the AORUS Master, but I tried the current and previous distro this morning and the installation failed on three attempts on the Strix. Not sure why, maybe it is the EPYC CPU, but Asus often has issues with Linux for some reason. It was hit or miss on both Z790 Apex and Apex Encore. I will attempt to install CachyOS on the Apex and see if it fails. I had similar issues attempting to install other Linux distros on the Strix and Apex before. The only distro that consistently will install on either one currently is Kubuntu with kernel 6.11 or newer. LTS versions with older kernels fail every attempt. That is very strange. I have purchased defective RAM (DDR4) but never had any RAM sticks die that I can remember. Also odd that one stick on each kit on different machines died so close together in time. The only issues I have had with RAM failures on DDR5 were on the Z690 Unify-X and it was caused by OpenRGB corruptinng the SPD. I had a couple of TeamGroup kits that were ruined by OpenRGB. The second time I figured out what was causing it and used ASUS OCTools to copy the firmware from a good module to the corrupted module installed in the Z690 Apex.

I think I may have misspoken about CachyOS being immutable. I looked into it and see it is NOT an immutable distro. I installed it over Bazzite (which I truly despised) and that may have done something to make it that way. I am going to try it again on a formatted SSD instead of installing using the "replace" option like I did before. (I assumed using the replace option in Linux setup would have wiped the drive, but I am thinking maybe it did not and kept the Bazzite partitioning structure.) If I don't like it then I will just restore my Kubuntu image from Macrium Reflect... easy come, easy go.

Micro$lop nonsense is infinite and non-stop...

Off topic, but tech-related: Nice to see them squirming... eff the EU... LOL. They should all be ignoring EU fines and sanctions and telling them to stuff it up their tailpipe and go to the hot place where bad dead people go.

The way things seem to be heading for us with absurd RAM and GPU prices, 1080p low settings might become the new mainstream because it would cost $10K to build a PC with respectable specs. The badasses will be rocking 8GB DDR5 6000 C38 (2x4GB) with Samsung or Micron ICs and a 5060 for $3500.