Intel X99 Motherboard Goes Up in Smoke For Reasons Unknown

Fulgrim · September 8, 2014

Edit: Meh, seems this is a repost, damn the search forum bar, never bloody works.

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. This morning I wanted to get another kit of DDR4 memory tested, so the system was powered down, the CMOS was reset and a G.Skill 16GB (4x4GB) 3000MHz memory kit (F4-3000C15Q-16GRR) was installed and powered up the system. It posted fine, so I went into the UEFI and set it to run at the only XMP profile on the kit. The UEFI changes 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’ve 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’t 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’t going to be a good one.

I removed the board from the test bench and started to do a visual inspection and couldn’t see anything wrong with any of the components on the front or back of the board. 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’t 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’t supped to be!

Our worst fears were confirmed when we pulled out our backup ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard and put the original Intel Core-i7-5960X processor in and the system wouldn’t 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 managed to kill an ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard ($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’t 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 game is alarming.

I’ve been in contact with ASUS, Intel, Corsair and Kingston and no one is exactly sure what happened to our system. Was 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’t sure, but we are going to be overnighting this board 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’ll let you know what happens if we find anything out in the weeks ahead!

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