Testing motherboards to destruction

[Radium_Angel]

I am considering, strictly for fun (and to post the results here), buying some of those cheap chinese salvage motherboard combos with Xeons and ECC ram (x58, x79, x99, etc) and test them to destruction. In other words, how hard can they be pushed/punished, before they fail permanently.

 

I'd ensure they have proper power, and cooling, (and probably a cheap GT710/730/1030 GPU, just in case) etc and see just how well (or poorly!) these systems are. 

So, what sort of torture tests would you suggest? Given they will have Xeons and ECC RAM, OCing them might be impossible, but I"m willing to take that as an option. Obviously I wouldn't do something silly like outright setting the voltage to 10 watts for the CPU or anything like that, I'd want to give the systems a fair chance to prove their mettle.

 

Anyway, I'm open to suggestions. What say you?

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Modifying the bios to unlock stupid power limits via amibcp, basically unhiding a menu where you can change power limit, craft computing did this on an x99 board but most bioses should be similar cause china boards

 

Oc is very much possible with a xeon e3 16xx series though avoid 4 core xeons since sandy ones need bclk to oc (basically i7 3820) and ivy just dont oc. Use a sandy cpu since those need tons of power and produce tons of heat vs ivy, i would put a sanity limit of 1.55-1.6v for 32m though i doubt youll get anywhere near that atleast without some beefy wc

 

 

For x58 boards there is those 2 dimm crappy matx boards and those can bclk oc as demonstrated in one of tech yes citys vids, the 3 dimm one with proper heatsinks for some reason cant but i suspect crossflashing will fix that, i wouldnt test myself since those boards are worthless now that x58 prices have fallen off a cliff and a x58 classified at 47$ still somehow doesnt get sold after a few weeks on fb marketplace in a developing country

[RONOTHAN##]

35 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

So, what sort of torture tests would you suggest?

Prime95 Small FFT will kill a lot of poorly designed motherboard VRMs, especially with high core count CPUs, so if you want to see some destruction, that's probably the way to go. 

[thrasher_565]

you can oc with xeon on x58 with thredstop but its all or nothing. do you get 4.0 or you dont... and you need w3670/80 cpus probly could get 4.0 with the w3690 but wast of moeny imo...