GX740 crash on boot / BIOS

Hi everyone,

Just got my MSI GX740 with i5 450M.

When I first started my computer, I decided to go to BIOS just to check if there were any dead or stuck pixels on the screen with the help of light grey background of bios.

Well, suddenly MSI shuts down on its own!

I just started it again, and tested Furmark under Windows 7, everything went fine, temps were at about 100C after 3-4 minutes, I think this is normal? Idle was around 45-50C.

It checked the BIOS, EC firmware and VBIOS, all were newest, so no need to flash them.

However, the problem is when OS hasn't loaded. I measured that if I idle at BIOS for 26-30 seconds, GX740 shuts down.

If I'm at bios for say about 20 secs and then quit from there to continue loading Windows, it crashes with or without BSOD in 6-10 secs (so in total here too 26-30 secs).

So little under 30 secs when in DOS mode or in BIOS until it shuts down - is this normal when Boot performance mode is Max Performance (which is default mode)? Any suggestions, or should I just send this machine back? (If I set Boot performance to Max Battery it doesn't seem to crash).


(I think this would also mean that I could never do BIOS or firmware upgrade in DOS mode as it would shut down under 30secs. What is strange that under Windows it seems to be quite stable, but I haven't really benchmarked CPU, only GPU.)

Hope you can give suggestions!

 

reset all bios settings to default and reboot

otherwise sounds like RMA

 

You said bsod, use whocrashed and post crash details, maybe we can find more about this.

 

Thank you for your quick responses, I appreciate your suggestions very much! Especially now when i have just few hours ago opened the box and found out all this mess with my laptop.

Bsod was isolated case, as it has just earlier crashed during boot because of that 30s power off.

I restored bios defaults but that didn't help.

I even updated bios, ec and vbios using usb boot stick (as I wrote earlier, they all were already latest versions). Just to make sure, After every update I shut down, removed battery and psu for 5 minutes and then restored bios defaults.

This didn't help either. As the machine had cooled down or something like that, it lasted 50 sec in bios until it shut down by itself, after that it returned to this 30s.

Suprisingly it did work just fine in DOS (usb boot stick I was using for updates). Also in bios it seems to stay on if Boot performance mode is "max battery" instead of default value "max perf."

Even though this happens only in bios (however, i've to admit that i didn't put that much load on cpu under windows, only gpu), it doesn't feel right for brand new computer.

I already packed it up to return it, but I'm wondering if I should get new gx740 or try some other brand. (is any other major well known and big manufacturer using 5870 than msi and asus?)

 

Btw., at one time when I quit BIOS just before that 30s had passed, I saw very quickly some message about loading firmware from default location or something like that, after this is powered off. This was before i restored defaults or reflashed all.

 

GX660R is looking really nice, a great price with 1080P + 5870 Mobility.

 

Had it been a week earlier I would have batted for msi, bt after a few probs I am started to have of late, makes me suspect msi quality especially it terms of heat dispersion.
The only other brand would be clevo,sager and alienware.