It is inevitable that one will eventually come across hardware with a defect, either a flaw during its manufacture or because of shipping or user damage and when you do reviews the increased sample size pits the odds against you. This is why Phoronix has not been able to publish results of the i7 5960X on an MSI X99S SLI Plus motherboard as magic smoke was released upon initial boot up. The board has been RMA'd to NewEgg and MSI has contacted Phoronix directly to let them know they will be sending it off for analysis; a new motherboard and review should be up shortly. It just goes to show you that this sort of thing can happen to anyone but if you keep your temper in check all it is is a small hurdle not a huge obstruction and you will get to where you wanted to go eventually. Similar events involving mysterious smells and old UPSes have never occurred here at PC Perspective; especially not today.
I feel fine!
"This weekend I was planning to publish the first Linux benchmarks for Intel's incredibly powerful Core i7 5960X Haswell-E processor with X99 motherboard and DDR4 system memory. Unfortunately, all I can tell you now is that it's smoking, quite literally!"
Here are some more Motherboard articles from around the web:
- ASUS Rampage V Extreme @ eTeknix
- Gigabyte GA-X99-SOC Force LN2 Motherboard w/ Special LGA2011-v3 CPU Socket @ Legit Reviews
- MSI X99S XPOWER AC @ eTeknix
- Gigabyte GA-Z87N-WIFI Mini-ITX @ benchmark Reviews
- Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5 @ eTeknix
- ASUS Z97 Sabertooth MARK1 Motherboard Review @HiTech Legion
- ASRock D1800M Motherboard @ Hardware Secrets
Phoronix had there MSI X99S
Phoronix had there MSI X99S SLI Plus die and produce magic smoke and so did legit reviews there Asus X99 Deluxe all so died and there Core i7-5960X was killed in the same event you can read about it at http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-x99-motherboard-goes-up-in-smoke-for-reasons-unknown_150008
i hope these are one off events
I think that is like the
I think that is like the third X99 board that blows up on reviewers. Think the legitreviewes article mentioned another board that had died in addition to theirs.
Nevermind the board they
Nevermind the board they mentioned was the board belonging to Phoronix.
A board dies, it happens
A board dies, it happens especially with the release boards that tend to be a little buggy. But poor Phoronix have missed out on all the clicks/revenue that goes along with the article. They will still get some when it finally comes out, but not as many as had they released when they intended. This board failure has a very real impact on their revenue streams, as it does for some people who buy the boards and make workstations out of them.
Its not often Intel ships out a bad CPU, I can’t think of a time when its happened. Motherboards and RAM however are regularly broken, I would say about 20% in my own experience over the last 2 decades of building machines. Yet I haven’t had a single faulty CPU in that time. The difference is the quality of the quality assurance between the companies, MSI/Asus/etc need to do more to avoid this happening, they were faulty from the factory and they ought not to be shipping bad boards.
I work for a system builder
I work for a system builder company and believe me all components can go bad even after we have tested them for hours on end. Then we ship to our customers and for some reason something no longer works. This could be due to shipping damage on some components such as video cards or motherboards of course, but we also get our fair share of bad CPUs, RAM, PSU’s, or other components that more than likely wouldn’t be caused from shipping damage. Most of the time it is unexplainable why such a failure occurs.
Because we work with such a high volume of components we have to calculate the failure rate to decide if something is just a bad product or bad batch, and we if we need to recall or stop selling something. If those failure rates are within acceptable limits than business resumes as normal. As an example we sell about 2,000 computers in a single week quite often. So if we have issues with say 50 to 100 of those computers than that isn’t so bad at all.
We do work closely with manufactures to report issues to try and identify any reoccurring issues of components so that the manufacture can resolve those issues.
So for a business that works with a lot of components, failures are bound to happen, it is less likely for an individual consumer or reviewer to have issues because their volume is much lower.