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So much for "It's not the CPU"

B

bsoft

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 11, 2004
Messages
268
I have built many, many PCs over the years for myself, friends, and others.

Most of the time everything works fine. Some of the time, of course, you get bad hardware and experience weird problems. Throughout my years I have had a pretty simple slogan when bad hardware strikes:

"It's not the CPU"

In 10+ years of building PCs, not once have I seen a bad CPU. Lots of bad RAM, bad GPUs, bad motherboards, bad disks, bad PSUs. Never a bad CPU.

Until now.

I just built a new somewhat-unbalanced gaming system for myself (although that depends on whether the game is CPU-bound or GPU-bound) with an i3-530.

In the course of 24 hours of Prime95, gaming, and just general usage, I encountered practically every bugcheck there is: 0x24, 0x50, 0xFC, 0x101, and a whole bunch of others.

Upgrade the BIOS. No dice. Reseat the memory. No change. Pull out everything but 1 DIMM. No change. Switch the 1 DIMM with another DIMM. No change. Remove the GPU and run on the integrated GPU. Nothing. Check the voltages on my X-650. They're fine. Disable EIST and C-states. No change.

That basically leaves the CPU and the motherboard. Against my past experience, I guessed CPU.

Got a replacement i3 today. Popped it in, 5 hours of Prime95 and no problems.

So there you have it. It was the CPU. New, in-box, retail, from Newegg Intel CPUs can be bad.

The moral of the story is that you have to consider everything a suspect. Even when it's traditionally not.
 
no, the pain in the ass is when you send shit back to newegg, get new stuff in and then determine it is a problem with some of the other new components. (ie: platform upgrade w new memory, cpu board)
 
I am like you. I have in recent years started going through and getting rid of old hardware. I got rid of a lot of hardware that I had remembered being bad, but couldn't think of any CPU that was bad. 486's, K6-2's, and Pentium 1's that are ten or more years old had no problem functioning.

Never once have I ran across a bad CPU. I realize it happens, but given a problematic system I would always start with the RAM, followed by the PSU if looking at Prime95 errors.
 
The only bad CPU I've ever had is the current one in my system. It's a 1055t that would just give me blue screens out of nowhere randomly, and eventually got to the point where it wouldn't get into windows. Long story short after changing out every single part I found that my core 3 is bad...I disable that and everything works perfect.
 
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