Hi all,

I have a GA-M55S-S3 Rev 2.0 (board A) at firmware FD whose onboard sound
broke within warranty. As I wanted to turn the board in but did not want
to wait several weeks for a spare part I got myself a second GA-M55S-S3
Rev 2.0 (board B) for replacement. Having exchanged the boards I had a
closer look at the defective board A and noticed that it showed
darker/brown stains (I would not go as far as to say burn marks). These
stains were located at the board's backside of the south bridge, the
super I/O chip (IT8716F) and three mosfets just south the cpu.
Unfortunately I don't have any explanation for these stains. All fans
are working and the temperatures monitored are ok neither did I ever
overclock anything. The super I/O chip does not even have a heat sink so
it certainly is not meant to become too hot. Up to the exchange the
board was running well except for the onboard sound.

So much for question 1:
Are these stains normal and where do they come from (excessive heat?)?

Having exchanged the boards (1:1 exchange, no further changes in
hardware, I put everything where it had been before) for me the question
was not whether the system would work again at all but what would be
malfunctioning this time. So I was not surprised at all to hear error
beeps when I turned on the system. After some time I figured out that
for some unknown reason the new board B does not like my RAM to run in
dual-channel mode as board A always did. Only when I place both bars in
slots of different color (same won't work) the systems starts with the
ram in single-channel mode. Well, I thought, board A was firmware FG,
board B is FI so for tests I flashed board B back to FG but that did not
change anything apart from the fact the board did not even beep anymore.
Even if board B's FI bios had been damaged the problem should have been
solved with flashing back board B to FI but to no effect.

So much for question 2:
How come board A supports dual-channel but board B doesn't although the
boards should be identical and even temporarily had the same firmware?

Gigabyte support told me to also turn board b in and I will as soon as I
get back a replacement for board A.

Last but not least both boards independent of a certain firmware show
another malfunction:
Occasionally, once every two weeks or so the system will boot but when
the windows screen with the loading bar (win xp prof) appears the bar
will be extremely slow and just a few seconds later a bluescreen alway
tells me something about my bios not beeing acpi-compliant. Once in a
month the system suddenly freezes during normal work. Rebooting the
system the screen suddenly reads "Building DMI Pool ........... Flash
Rom protected" - usually it reads just "Building DMI Pool". Some Reboots
later the system will start again as "normal". I have read about this
problem several times but the hint to flash the firmware to the latest
version at least for me did not work.

So much for question 3:
What can I do to prevent this DMI-Pool nonsense from happening?

I'm grateful for any relevant hint.
Thanks a lot.

Greetings

Matthias

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my system:
case: big tower
case fans: 2x Artic cooling 8cm fans thermal control
mainboard: Gigabyte GA-M55S-S3, nF 550 (dual PC2-6400U DDR2) Rev 2.0
cpu: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ EE 65nm
cpu cooler: Coolermaster Hyper TX - AMD CPU-Cooler
ram: MDT DIMM Kit 2048MB (2x1024MB) PC2-6400U CL5 (DDR2-800)
graphics: Gainward BLISS 8500 GT Silent FX 256MB PCIe
power: be quiet Straight Power BQT E5-400W
hdd: Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB SATA II (HD501LJ)
dvd: Samsung SH-D163B schwarz bulk SATA (SH-D163B/BEBE)
dvd-rw: Samsung SH-S203B SATA (SH-S203B)