Intel X99 Motherboard Goes Up in Smoke For Reasons Unknown
This morning I woke up bright and early to benchmark some DDR4 memory kits and found myself waking up not to Folgers in your cup, but the smell ofburnt electrical after loading the XMP profiles on a memory kit and restarting the system. Let me tell you what happened, the best I can.
On Friday I spent the day wrapping up the benchmarks on the Kingston HyperX Predator DDR4 16GB (4x4GB) 3000MHz quad channel memory kit (part number HX430C15PBK4/16) that runs at 1.5V. It posted fine, so I went into the UEFI and set it to run at the only XMP profile on the kit. The UEFI changpatagonia better sweater full zipes were saved and the system restarted. It was during the next seconds that both the board and the processor would be killed off in a rather unspectacular death. The system came up, hung for a very short time and then powered off with a audible click of the Corsair AX860i power supply. If you ever heard the loud click of the Over Current Protection (OCP) shutting down the PSU you know exactly what click I heard. Now when I press power button on the motherboard the system clicks after being on for a split second. I unplugged all the cables on the power supply and did the built in self check and it passed with flying colors. I swapped out the PSU with a backup Corsair AX860i and the same click was to be heard. After clearing the CMOS, removing the memory, SSD and video card the system still wouldn post. At that point in time I switched to a non digital power supply (Corsair AX1200) and it did the same thing although this time the OCP took a little longer to kick in. There was some audible crackling noises, followed by some smoke near the CPU VRM heatsink. So, the heart shattering smell of burnt electronics filled the room and I knew my day wasn going to be a good one.
I removed the board from the test bench and started to do a visual inspection and couldn see anything wrong with any of the components on the front or back of the bopatagonia guide jacket measurement1ard. I know where the smoke came from, so I removed the VRM heatsink and the burnt electrical smell got stronger. There was some discoloration new to where one of the mosfets sits on the thermal pad, so clearly it was a failure of CPU voltage regulation system and one of the eight 60 Amp phases (Dr. MOS IOR 3550M mosfets) has appeared to fail.
It isn burnt badly at all, but you can some of the signs of an electrical failure on the second power phase from the bottom.
Looking at the board we can see that the failed component in question is part of the PQ1004, which is part of the VCCIN or basically the processor input voltage. Crap! On these Haswell E processors, Intel has moved the voltage regulation on CPU as part of the new Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator (FIVR). Previously there were five separate input voltages the motherboard handled: Vcore, Vgpu, VCCSA, VCCIO, and the PLL. On Intel Haswell E processors all five internal power rails are pulled from the single VCCIN and the components on ours just had a nuclear meltdown.
You can tell things got pretty hot as there were actually solder balls where they weren supped to be!
Our worst fears were confirmed when we pulled out our backup ASUS discount patagonia fleece vestX99 Deluxe motherboard and put the original Intel Core i7 5960X processor in and the system wouldn post. The boards debug display showed Q Code 00, which is a bad sign. We tossed in our backup Intel Core i7 5960X processor and the system booted up just fine and we are off and able to benchmark again. The bad news is that I managepatagonia fly fishing waders reviewd to kill an ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboardpatagonia guide jacket measurement0 ($398.99 shipped) and an Intel Core i7 5960X processor ($1049.99 Shipped) after using it for less than two weeks, which is a bit unusual and why I am sharing information about this failure to the readers of Legit Reviews. It is not an everyday occurrence where $1450 in hardware gets put out to pasture.
LR isn the only site that has had a board go up in smoke as Michael Larabel over at Phoronix had an X99 board go up in smoke as well. He was not using the same brand of motherboard or power supply model, but to see X99 boards failing this early in the gpatagonia houdini pants reviewame is alarmpatagonia opens headquarters store in australiaing.
I been in contact with ASUS, Intel, Corsair and Kingston and no one is exactly sure what happened to our system. Wpatagonia m mixed guide hoody 84080as running 1.50V on the DDR4 memory too much? Is there something wrong with the VRM design or did we have a bad component on our motherboard? Was the power supply faulty? We aren sure, but we are gpatagonia guide jacket measurement2oing to be overnighting this boapatagonia guide jacket measurement3rd back to ASUS Taiwan on Monday (9/8/2014) and we have arranged for Corsair to put our PSU on their scopes and test equipment to make sure it is working properly.
We let you know what happens if we find anything out in the weeks ahead!
Update 9/9/2014 ASUS has received the X99 Deluxe motherboard that failed along with the power supply that was in the unit at the time of the failure. An ASUS employee will be taking the PSU to Corsair for testing on 9/10/2014. The board will be looked at here in the US and then will be shipped to ASUS HQ in Taiwan. In the meantime we have two ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboards being used by staff members that are still up and working properly and we have been told by ASUS that they have replicated out exact system and that they tested it overnight and haven experienced any failures. We keep you updated and will post the actual Chroma test results from the PSU once we get them from Corsair. It was also learned in the past 24 hours that the DDR4 voltage (1.35 to 1.5V) that we were using on the board shouldn have caused any issues since the memory controller in Haswell E can actually support DDR3 and DDR4, although only DDR4 is being implemented. DDR3 memory kits run at 1.5V, so that almost eliminates that from being the issue. The good thing about posting publicly about this failure is that all the companies involved are taking this seriously and are working overtime to ensure there isn an issue somewhere. We are really glad about that as we have recommendepatagonia men's upslope fulld the board, processor and power supply and want to ensure that the platform works if our readers purchase the parts based on our recommendations.
Update 9/11/2014 ASUS HQ in Taiwan has the motherboard and is looking at it now. ASUS and Corsair were unable to get the power supply tested on Tuesday and scheduled a time with Corsair to get the power supply on the Chroma tester on Friday 9/12/2014. This was the earliest that the Chroma tester was available for use during business hours.
Update 9/13/2014 Corsair along with ASUS tested the pair of AX860i power supply that Legit Reviews was using on the test bench at the time of failure on Friday the 12th. Both power supplies passed the initial Chroma test passes, but we learned something that we previously did not know. When the Corsair AXi series of power supplies came out in 2012 they featured a single rail design. Corsair switched to a multiple rail design for the power supply series in 2013 (previously unknown to us). This is obviously a significant difference in the design of the power supply. We also learned that the earlier single rail power suppliesdid not have OCP enabled by default. One would have to install theCorsair Link Software package and manually set the OCP limits manually for that to function on the earlier models. We were not using the Corsair Link Software on the test bench, so therefore our power supply could have 90A or more potentially running down the rail. This might have exacerbated the damage to the CPU VR circuit if there was a bad component or solder ball joint present.
We looked around at Newegg, Amazon, Scan and other major online retailers and have the Corsair AX860i as having a single +12V rail.
ASUS is still working with the failed board and is going to be replicated our setup with the power supplies in Taiwan. Yes, these two power supplies have now been shipped to Taiwan where ASUS HQ will be able to test our first revision AX860i Power Supplies as the ones they were testing with this past week trying to replicate our system without failure was done using the new post 2013 power supplies. The exact cause of the fault is not known, but much is being learned by everyone and most of it is valuable information that will help the community. We report back with more once ASUS is ready to give us an update that is ready for public consumptiopatagonia discount code zaggn. That will happen after additional testing is done on the board over the days ahead.
Update 9/16/2014 We are still working with Corsair to find out more on the firmware update that was done on their power supplies back in 2013. We have asked for dates and power supply lot numbers, so users can find out if they have one of the original AXi series power supplies that has no OCP by default. We also pointed out to Corsair that there is no mention of this in the instruction manual and that many users might not be aware that their flagship PSU has features that aren enabled unless they do so manually. From the sounds of it Corsair just updated the firmware and went to a multi rail configuration. We talked to several people about this issue and it was unclear if there was a hardware change and that is still being looked into. The bad news is that the firmpatagonia everlong review synonymware is not end user upgradable. We have asked Corsair what if anything current customers can do since the firmware can be upgraded in the field. If you have an AXi series power supply we highly suggest downloading the Corsair Link software and programming the OCP setting.
Kingston Technology contacted us today and informed us that they will be lowering the voltages on the pre production DDR4 memory kits that were sent out at 1.5V to 1.35V when they are shipped out to consumers. Kingston never shipped any DDR4 memory kits at 1.5V and won be. It doesn appear that the memory running at 1.5V had anything to do with our failure, but ASUS is still testing. We haven heard from ASUS in the past 48 hours and last we heard they were still looking into things in Taiwan now that our power supplies without OCP have arrived. ASUS said they will be giving us an official statement about the failure when the research is completed and we hope that will be sometime soon.
Update 9/17/2014 Replacement ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard was delivered (11 days from point of failure to replacement board being delivered).
Update 9/18/2014 Corsair has gotten back to us with some answers to some questions that we asked earlier this week. It patagonia guide jacket measurementturns out Corsair shipped AX760i/AX860i/AX1200i power supplies for about four months before they changed the firmware on them without notice. The firmware is not field upgradeable and Corsair will not be offering exchanges for anyone with an model that wants to swap out a PSU for one with the latest firmware on it. Corsair also said that by the motherboard makers [ASUS] own admission, the X99 Deluxe motherboard was the root cause for the failures. Corsair also said this which we will directly quote: an OCP defaulted AXi or a competitor OCP enabled PSU have save the CPU? We re skeptical, but maybe. So, right now it looks like the board had a failure and then when the system was restarted the PSU without OCP may or may not have taken out the CPU through the boards failed VR circuit. We are still waiting on ASUS to give us an official statement as to what happened to the board and were told that a typhoon in the region this week has slowed things down. In the meantime here are some answers to a Q that we gave Corsair that you can take a look at.
When did Corsair change the firmware on the AXi series of power supplies?
Corsair shipped the AX760i/AX860i/AX1200i for about four months before they changed the firmware on them. If you bought one of these models when they first came out you likely have one with old firmware. The Corsair AX860i first was made available for sale with Amazon on November 1st, 2012, so just a heads up to early adopters.
Can you please highlight what all changes with the new firmware?
PSU set to multi rail (which by definition is OCP).
So, you went from a default configuration of one +12V rail with no OCP to a virtual multi rail setup with OCP enabled by default?
Why was this change not made public?
We saw no need for an announcement. The PSU design and its features stayed the same and this isn t a design fault.
