Okay get ready for a rant. 
In february I decided to upgrade my home server. I use this machine for a lot of stuff and it was starting to show its age. It was a Core i7 940 based system on an Asus WS P6T6 Motherboard with 24GB of Memory.
So the most logical upgrade was socket 2011. I needed more than 4 cores but an upgrade to a Core i7 970 didn't feel like a big enough upgrade to me. And as the P6T6 was quite old it didn't support SATA 6.0Gb/s and it didn't support USB3.0.
So I set out to do a total overhaul. New SSD, new motherboard, 3930K CPU.
I had a few requirements for the motherboard. It needed to be cost effective, have 5 PCIe full length expansion slots and 8 DIMM slots.
This is where the MSI GD-45(8D) comes in. Now to start with this board isn't cheap it's £145-£160 depending on where you're buying it from. But on paper it ticks all the boxes. It has SATA3, USB3, 8 DIMM Slots with 128GB RAM Support, LGA 2011. Perfect right?
... The day of the build ...
First time I power the system on I enter the EFI and things don't look correct. The EFI menus are flickering and overlapping each other. I think .. crap! my graphics card a Quadro NVS 290 by NVIDIA must be broken! .. so I change the graphics card and the same thing. So I think okay, maybe it's the cable! - So I change it. Same thing.
Now I'm getting worried because when I tested the motherboard outside of the case several days prior this didn't happen, could it be that the motherboard is at fault? I tried differen't graphics, cables and even displays and yet the problem with the garbled EFI persisted. I tried CMOS resets, RAM sets, I even tried firing it up with 1 stick of RAM. And yet the problem persisted.
So I hit up Google and I start trying different things. Then I remember one condition that changed between the out-of-case test I did before and the build today. I was using DVI before and now I'm using HDMI.
That couldn't be it right? Aren't DVI and HDMI just using the same communication protocol anyway? .. Well as it turns out MSI's EFI firmware for this and even other boards they sell simply are not compatible with HDMI. I know what you're thinking, this is crazy how can in 2013 can their UEFI implementation not support something so basic as HDMI. Well so did I, so I physically asked them and got through to a technology evangelist who confirmed to me not only is this there problem but that they've known about it for more than a year and that they have no planned fixes to correct the problem.
Now at this point I'm thinking, okay not such a big deal it's poor service but at least I can change the settings over DVI and then the system does boot in to your OS without problems or graphical anomalies. Right? .. well kind of.
The graphical glitches do not follow you in to the booting of the OS. But then another problem begins. You see some reason this motherboard believes the default recommended "auto" voltage for an LGA 2011 processor is 1.1v - This voltage is simply too low and my system kept crashing just trying to get in to the Windows Server 2008 R2 installer.
Jesus christ .. after spending 5-6 hours trying to fix this problem I find a brand new problem, but I don't know the voltage is too low because the EFI says Auto and I have never in my 15 years of computer building encountered this problem where by the Auto setting is set too low.
So this takes me another few hours to work out, meanwhile I'm checking everything else I can imagine. RAM Sticks, Graphics (again). I'm about to file an RMA for the board because I'm convinced it's just trash when I go to bed on day one and I'm thinking over in my mind what I could try the next morning it hit me, lets just try raising the voltages and see what happens.
So build day.. 2..
First of all it takes me about 30 minutes just to work out how to change the voltages. I know what you're thinking, man you must be a real noob. How on earth could you not work out how to change the voltages? :lol: But I'm not a noob. I'm a very competent computer programmer and my company even develops firmware for devices. My own main rig is custom water cooled by myself.
This EFI implementation is just so unintuitive and goes against all established computing norms that it literally stumped me for half an hour.
The problem was, sometimes you see a field where you can enter text. You click on it and a cursor would appear indicating you could then type something. But on other options there was no box. And if there was, clicking on it did nothing, no cursor.
In a word the UEFI implementation is inconsistent. So inconsistent it took me half an hour just to work out how to enter in manual voltages. If we were judging this EFI on a scale of 1 to 10 and my Asus RAMPAGE IV Extreme was on the same scale, this MSI board would be -12 and my Asus RIVE would be 12 Million.
And the thing that even grates me more about MSI's UEFI is that it isn't even densely packed with options it is one of the most basic UEFI's I've ever seen and I was running the very latest version of it. It felt pre-release and yet this board has been out for a long time.
So to cut this problem short, I did eventually work out how to change the voltages. You must click in an invisible part of the screen somewhere around the voltage and then just begin typing. And if you're a magician you'll sense you did it correctly.
So that must be the end of it right? Save and done. Wrong. That would be too simple. You see once you change a voltage in the UEFI regardless of if it's the CPU, Southbridge or RAM voltage when you save it nothing happens. It says it has saved, it even restarts the system for you. But your voltages are not actually applied. Even a cold restart by turning the system completely off and back on again doesn't change the voltages and re-entering the UEFI menu shows them back at their Auto values.
Did these jokers not even implement a proper save system? Seems so because to actually get your voltages to save you have to change another setting a non-voltage related one. Like for example switching the USB chipset on and off. Only then will your settings be changed.
So I solve that. By this time I've now been working on getting this server back up for 36 hours and I'm really just glad to finally be booting the Windows installer without a BSOD or lockup.
I finally get in to the Windows desktop and I see that the networking is X'd out. I figure no big deal I already expected this because before I bought the motherboard I looked up its specifications on MSI's website and saw it uses the Intel 82579 chipset. In-fact I was very glad it used that and not a Realtek chip and I had specifically gone and pre-downloaded the 140MB driver package I would need for the install.
So I put my USB stick in to the system and launch the Intel Installer only to be met by a message stating something like this: "No compatible Intel Adapter was detected". I think to myself.. okay maybe I picked the wrong networking driver bundle even though I was pretty sure I didn't.
So to skip ahead through all the things I could have done to diagnose this issue it actually turned out MSI had lied on their specification sheet. It isn't using an Intel 82579 chipset. It is using an Intel 82579V chipset. What is the significance of that V you might ask? Windows Server 2008 R2 compatibility that's what.
Yes can you believe it? Intel only supports the 82579V on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8. But they support the 82579 which MSI claimed the board used in XP, Vista, 7, 8, 2008, R2 and 2012.
So at this point I'm really angry. I had specifically bought this motherboard for its 5 PCIe full length expansion slots. Now I have to go out and buy an Ethernet 1000CT Pro adapter and use up one of my precious slots that I intended to use for something else.
In the interim though I really badly need to get this server online at this point. It has been down two days and I had gone over my window that I had originally set for the upgrade. So I modify the Intel driver stack to work with this adapter by fooling it in to believing it could be installed on 2008 R2. Thankfully that worked until I could get the Intel Pro 1000CT several days later.
And so that ends my rant. Every problem I encountered in this build were due to MSI. From the EFI problems to the networking chipset discrepancy it is all down to MSI's incompetency. They don't value us as customers even their evangelist said to me they have known about that HDMI problem for a year and have chosen not to do anything about it. The fact they even have their specification pages wrong is surprising to me, it's them who made the board and they can't even list its specifications properly.
In short this will be the last MSI product I ever purchase and I definitely will not be recommending them to anyone.
Here are some pictures of the board I took just as general proof that I do in-fact own this piece of shit.
http://i.imgur.com/DBv9MSx.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/UAu5n36.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/1C2k3Z6.jpg
In february I decided to upgrade my home server. I use this machine for a lot of stuff and it was starting to show its age. It was a Core i7 940 based system on an Asus WS P6T6 Motherboard with 24GB of Memory.
So the most logical upgrade was socket 2011. I needed more than 4 cores but an upgrade to a Core i7 970 didn't feel like a big enough upgrade to me. And as the P6T6 was quite old it didn't support SATA 6.0Gb/s and it didn't support USB3.0.
So I set out to do a total overhaul. New SSD, new motherboard, 3930K CPU.
I had a few requirements for the motherboard. It needed to be cost effective, have 5 PCIe full length expansion slots and 8 DIMM slots.
This is where the MSI GD-45(8D) comes in. Now to start with this board isn't cheap it's £145-£160 depending on where you're buying it from. But on paper it ticks all the boxes. It has SATA3, USB3, 8 DIMM Slots with 128GB RAM Support, LGA 2011. Perfect right?
... The day of the build ...
First time I power the system on I enter the EFI and things don't look correct. The EFI menus are flickering and overlapping each other. I think .. crap! my graphics card a Quadro NVS 290 by NVIDIA must be broken! .. so I change the graphics card and the same thing. So I think okay, maybe it's the cable! - So I change it. Same thing.
Now I'm getting worried because when I tested the motherboard outside of the case several days prior this didn't happen, could it be that the motherboard is at fault? I tried differen't graphics, cables and even displays and yet the problem with the garbled EFI persisted. I tried CMOS resets, RAM sets, I even tried firing it up with 1 stick of RAM. And yet the problem persisted.
So I hit up Google and I start trying different things. Then I remember one condition that changed between the out-of-case test I did before and the build today. I was using DVI before and now I'm using HDMI.
That couldn't be it right? Aren't DVI and HDMI just using the same communication protocol anyway? .. Well as it turns out MSI's EFI firmware for this and even other boards they sell simply are not compatible with HDMI. I know what you're thinking, this is crazy how can in 2013 can their UEFI implementation not support something so basic as HDMI. Well so did I, so I physically asked them and got through to a technology evangelist who confirmed to me not only is this there problem but that they've known about it for more than a year and that they have no planned fixes to correct the problem.
Now at this point I'm thinking, okay not such a big deal it's poor service but at least I can change the settings over DVI and then the system does boot in to your OS without problems or graphical anomalies. Right? .. well kind of.
The graphical glitches do not follow you in to the booting of the OS. But then another problem begins. You see some reason this motherboard believes the default recommended "auto" voltage for an LGA 2011 processor is 1.1v - This voltage is simply too low and my system kept crashing just trying to get in to the Windows Server 2008 R2 installer.
Jesus christ .. after spending 5-6 hours trying to fix this problem I find a brand new problem, but I don't know the voltage is too low because the EFI says Auto and I have never in my 15 years of computer building encountered this problem where by the Auto setting is set too low.
So this takes me another few hours to work out, meanwhile I'm checking everything else I can imagine. RAM Sticks, Graphics (again). I'm about to file an RMA for the board because I'm convinced it's just trash when I go to bed on day one and I'm thinking over in my mind what I could try the next morning it hit me, lets just try raising the voltages and see what happens.
So build day.. 2..
First of all it takes me about 30 minutes just to work out how to change the voltages. I know what you're thinking, man you must be a real noob. How on earth could you not work out how to change the voltages? :lol: But I'm not a noob. I'm a very competent computer programmer and my company even develops firmware for devices. My own main rig is custom water cooled by myself.
This EFI implementation is just so unintuitive and goes against all established computing norms that it literally stumped me for half an hour.
The problem was, sometimes you see a field where you can enter text. You click on it and a cursor would appear indicating you could then type something. But on other options there was no box. And if there was, clicking on it did nothing, no cursor.
In a word the UEFI implementation is inconsistent. So inconsistent it took me half an hour just to work out how to enter in manual voltages. If we were judging this EFI on a scale of 1 to 10 and my Asus RAMPAGE IV Extreme was on the same scale, this MSI board would be -12 and my Asus RIVE would be 12 Million.
And the thing that even grates me more about MSI's UEFI is that it isn't even densely packed with options it is one of the most basic UEFI's I've ever seen and I was running the very latest version of it. It felt pre-release and yet this board has been out for a long time.
So to cut this problem short, I did eventually work out how to change the voltages. You must click in an invisible part of the screen somewhere around the voltage and then just begin typing. And if you're a magician you'll sense you did it correctly.
So that must be the end of it right? Save and done. Wrong. That would be too simple. You see once you change a voltage in the UEFI regardless of if it's the CPU, Southbridge or RAM voltage when you save it nothing happens. It says it has saved, it even restarts the system for you. But your voltages are not actually applied. Even a cold restart by turning the system completely off and back on again doesn't change the voltages and re-entering the UEFI menu shows them back at their Auto values.
Did these jokers not even implement a proper save system? Seems so because to actually get your voltages to save you have to change another setting a non-voltage related one. Like for example switching the USB chipset on and off. Only then will your settings be changed.
So I solve that. By this time I've now been working on getting this server back up for 36 hours and I'm really just glad to finally be booting the Windows installer without a BSOD or lockup.
I finally get in to the Windows desktop and I see that the networking is X'd out. I figure no big deal I already expected this because before I bought the motherboard I looked up its specifications on MSI's website and saw it uses the Intel 82579 chipset. In-fact I was very glad it used that and not a Realtek chip and I had specifically gone and pre-downloaded the 140MB driver package I would need for the install.
So I put my USB stick in to the system and launch the Intel Installer only to be met by a message stating something like this: "No compatible Intel Adapter was detected". I think to myself.. okay maybe I picked the wrong networking driver bundle even though I was pretty sure I didn't.
So to skip ahead through all the things I could have done to diagnose this issue it actually turned out MSI had lied on their specification sheet. It isn't using an Intel 82579 chipset. It is using an Intel 82579V chipset. What is the significance of that V you might ask? Windows Server 2008 R2 compatibility that's what.
Yes can you believe it? Intel only supports the 82579V on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8. But they support the 82579 which MSI claimed the board used in XP, Vista, 7, 8, 2008, R2 and 2012.
So at this point I'm really angry. I had specifically bought this motherboard for its 5 PCIe full length expansion slots. Now I have to go out and buy an Ethernet 1000CT Pro adapter and use up one of my precious slots that I intended to use for something else.
In the interim though I really badly need to get this server online at this point. It has been down two days and I had gone over my window that I had originally set for the upgrade. So I modify the Intel driver stack to work with this adapter by fooling it in to believing it could be installed on 2008 R2. Thankfully that worked until I could get the Intel Pro 1000CT several days later.
And so that ends my rant. Every problem I encountered in this build were due to MSI. From the EFI problems to the networking chipset discrepancy it is all down to MSI's incompetency. They don't value us as customers even their evangelist said to me they have known about that HDMI problem for a year and have chosen not to do anything about it. The fact they even have their specification pages wrong is surprising to me, it's them who made the board and they can't even list its specifications properly.
In short this will be the last MSI product I ever purchase and I definitely will not be recommending them to anyone.
Here are some pictures of the board I took just as general proof that I do in-fact own this piece of shit.
http://i.imgur.com/DBv9MSx.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/UAu5n36.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/1C2k3Z6.jpg
