This is going to be a bit of a long haul
've had a Rampage IV Extreme since July 2012, and I didn't have any problems with it at all for a whole year, until when I moved house, when I first set it up at the new place it wouldn't turn on. The Start, Reset and BIOS LEDs were all on, and my keyboard's LEDs were on and an external HDD was spinning, but pressing start did nothing. In all honesty I don't know what was wrong that time because the issue subsequently went away with no indication of what went wrong I think it worked after I reset CMOS but that was quite some time ago..

A few months later the same issue appeared again, and tearing the system apart and putting it back together again seemed to fix that fine. Another month or two later, the same issue again, although this appeared to be a dead RAM stick since when I removed that it worked fine. What killed it? I have no idea. Maybe running 30 instances of Warp Stabilizer in Adobe Premiere Pro wasn't such a good idea after all. From then on, no issues whatsoever until about a fortnight ago.


There were some pretty massive storms where I live (in Sydney, Australia), and when I came home after the first day of storm(s), it wouldn't boot. Once again, the Start, Reset and BIOS LEDs were all on, Keyboard LEDs were on, my external hard drive was spinning and Audio Interface was indicating it had power, but nothing happened when I pressed start on the Case or the Motherboard. I went through the rounds of pulling it completely apart and putting it back together again. This time, nothing worked. I had several deadlines I had to meet and a lot of work on my hard drives, so after encountering this issue 3 times before, I finally tried the Hair Dryer trick (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMRzN3xbMN4). This essentially involves running a hair dryer over the system until it starts. I'd intentionally been avoiding in the past because I didn't want to damage any components, but I really just needed it to start. The trick worked fine, and I've been using it for the past fortnight whilst I'm working on these assignments, but as soon as an alternative presents itself I will gladly abandon that.

The computer has been usable in this time, but I've still been trying to fix the issue. I updated the BIOS, first running the ROM to CAP converter, which went fine, but then when I went to install BIOS update 4901, things went bad. Mid update (using EZ Flash 2, whilst the 'processing' bar was running), the system just stopped dead. When it finally awoke (with some coercion from a hairdryer, no buttons pressed), it went in to BIOS recovery mode. I installed the BIOS USB I already had, and when I reset like the splash screen had asked, it wouldn't start again and was stuck on CSM Initialization (Error code 79). I turned the system off and flashed the BIOS from the ROG Connect button on the back of the board. Everything booted fine from there, and the new BIOS was actually noticeably faster. About two hours into use, I suddenly noticed that Folding at Home was giving me warning messages (I had it running since I was only doing Word Processing at the time), and it said that it couldn't detect one of my (2) GPUs. How odd. So I rebooted and went into VGA POST in BIOS and it claims that my GPU is running at x4 native, which apparently means that it isn't doing anything, even though it is spinning and its LEDs are on, and the PCIE indicator light next to the PCIE switch is on. I went to unplug the GPU to try and reseat it, and this is where I stopped, because when I turned the power off to reseat the GPU, I forgot that I would need to blast the system with a hairdryer to get it to start again.

I will try and reseat the GPU tomorrow, but in all honesty I just couldn't be bothered right now because I've already spent about four hours today working on this system (or 1 hour if you don't count the time Googling).


These issues are really causing me trouble with my work at the moment, though I can work around it, but I really just need a solution.

Also, if you do have a Rampage IV Extreme, did you ever have the issue I do with it not booting? I ask because I have about a 1 month window to RMA this thing if I need and I want to know if there's a chance I'll just have the same problem again with a new Board. I really can't afford to get a new X79 motherboard, let alone a whole system if I move away from X79.


My Specs:
Intel i7 3930k (Overclocked with Normal OC Profile, I think 3.5GHz but that may be wrong.)
Asus Rampage IV Extreme
24GB (3x8) 1866MHz Corsair Vengeance RAM (clocked to 1666 since at 1866 it sometimes wouldn't boot)
2x MSI Radeon HD7970 Lightning (Overclocked with Afterburner. I don't remember which profile it was last on)
Cooler Master 1200W Silent Gold Plus
240GB Corsair Force GT SSD (Boot Drive)
4TB Western Digital Black HDD (Secondary Drive, has all my games, music, work and non-critical programs)
2TB Seagate Barracuda HDD (Tertiary Drive, has a bunch of Movies, photos and extraneous files)

If anyone wants any screenshots to clarify things, please let me know.