Motherboard questions

[Be1n]

1. How do you know if a socket has bent pins? They are too small and too closely packed to tell by the eye. Is there some kind of contact diagnostic available for 1155 systems?

2. Are motherboards designed to withstand stress? Sometimes heatsinks require really tight bindings that kind of scare me.

Thank you.

 

[dma0991]

1. Use a loupe and physically look for bent ones.
2. It is important to use the bracket provided and ensure that its a good thick chunk of metal. It will give that portion of the motherboard the stiffness necessary to prevent warping.

 

[Be1n]

Ok so everything seems ok and I ran Prime 95 for 8 hours, and intel's burn test for 20 cycles.

Does Prime 95 have to be run for 12 hours like it says in that sticky?

Also, the memtest thing doesn't let me assign 4gb to each instance. I think you have to pay for larger memory addresses.

This is for testing a 3570k@4.0 with stock voltage.

 

[Kenmitch]

Ok so everything seems ok and I ran Prime 95 for 8 hours, and intel's burn test for 20 cycles.

Does Prime 95 have to be run for 12 hours like it says in that sticky?

Also, the memtest thing doesn't let me assign 4gb to each instance. I think you have to pay for larger memory addresses.

This is for testing a 3570k@4.0 with stock voltage.

Should be stable enough I'd think.

Sometimes everday use or gaming exposes stability issues not seen during stress testing.

 

[dma0991]

Leaving your voltage at stock doesn't mean that it will not exceed the usual amount without overclock. It will still scale the voltage according to the clockspeed automatically and its usually higher than what you would achieve manually. As its higher than using manual voltage settings, stability is usually a given but I still wouldn't consider it to be as rock stable as unaltered stock settings.

You don't have to run Prime95 for 12 hours but its a measure of stability. Prime95 will not give you 100% guarantee that BSODs wouldn't happen in an overclocked setting.

 

[Belial88]

1. Pins reflect light, so when one is bent, it's very obvious. You know if you look at the pins, it sort of has a cascade look to it.

All the pins are the same, but see how the top-right part sort of looks different than the bottom-left section? This is just based on how the light is reflecting off the angle. When a pin is bent, it sticks out like a sore thumb. You'd see the pin that looked like it belonged on the bottom, on the top, kind of thing. Like this:

Just google "lga1155 bent pin" or "motherboard socket bent pin" to see images of this stuff. You can also go on ebay, check out, say, p68 motherboard, then check out the for parts/repair boards being sold for super cheap, they'll often include pics of the boards with bent pins (the most common issue with for parts/repair boards).

It's actually extremely easy to fix bent pins. Just straighten it out, try to boot with CPU, if it doesnt work, bend it right. The problem is that pins are easy to break with too much moving, they can only be bent back and forth so much, before they just snap off (like a coke can top). This is still, a replaceable issue - with AMD chips, for example, just drop a piece of ethernet copper wire (not an actual ethernet cable, strip the ethernet cable down, and use one of the cables in the cables) and mash it into the motherboard socket pin to prevent it from contacting other pins, and walla, replaced amd cpu pin. But on Intel, you can't do this, it kinda sucks, a broken pin = throw the board in the trash.

2. Yes, they are, although some boards are built much better than others (ie msi and asrock have very flimsy quality, gigabyte and asus very sturdy). Boards are meant to withstand more than enough stress though, as they are built to standards. You can attach an H110 on the 'flimsiest' modern board, and hang it upside down, and jump up and down, and it'll hold just fine. The boards will flex way before they break. They are meant to flex.

There's no such thing as a big air cooler, causing too much stress for a board because it's too heavy or big, if that's your concern. You do not need to worry about your motherboard in regards to heatsinks being too heavy or really tight bindings.

 

[Belial88]

Ok so everything seems ok and I ran Prime 95 for 8 hours, and intel's burn test for 20 cycles.

Does Prime 95 have to be run for 12 hours like it says in that sticky?

Also, the memtest thing doesn't let me assign 4gb to each instance. I think you have to pay for larger memory addresses.

This is for testing a 3570k@4.0 with stock voltage.

You really need to run prime95 for about 23 hours. Prime95 blend is a succession of about 80 different tests, if each test is run at 15 minutes (which for prime95 means it rounds up, meaning roughly 16 minutes)... Just because your CPU fails at the 22nd hour, doesn't meant it's any more stable than a chip that fails in 2 seconds (although, generally, it usually is) - it merely means that X test it failed on, revealed the instability whereas the other tests did not.

I've had certain unstable overclocks fail *consistently* at the 23-25th hour of prime95. It made no sense, I pulled my hair, without fail, every time, at the 23-25th hour, I'd fail. Turned out to be a faulty RAM, in fact.

Technically, a truly stable system should last infinite rounds of prime95. But for practical reasons, we can't do that kind of testing. So, there are certain gold standards that we use because we know if you can pass, for example, 24 hours of prime95 custom blend with RAM usage set to 80%+, we know you can likely, 99.99% likely, pass infinite stress testing of any kind, of any program. It's not necessarily 100% true like that, but it almost always is.

However, it all depends on how stable you need. If all you do is game, or browse the internet, there's no need for such stability, as a game barely loads a system (relatively). It also depends on the risk - if you hold sensitive data on your system, or if you stream to thousands of viewers and can't risk a crash in the middle of a stream, then even if the risk is small, the cost is too great, and so you want to opt for more stable rather than less.

So decide for yourself how strict you want to be. Personally, I do h264 codec streaming and have lots of viewers, and I do GPGPU work, so a crash is completely unacceptable to me. Furthermore, I really enjoy knowing the limits of my system, I enjoy stress testing, so to me, it's important to do 50 hours of prime95 custom blend with 90%+ RAM tested. If all you do is BF3, then just use BF3 as your stress test...

Also, make sure you aren't getting whea errors. Check your event viewer, and make sure you dont get WHEA errors while stress testing. My i7-3770K could do 5ghz on a full .08v less if we didn't count WHEA errors (most people don't). Google "How I got out of WHEAville" on a good tutorial on whea errors.

Instability is more than just crashes. If you are just slightly unstable, it means you will collect incorrect registry errors over time. Crashes and program shutdowns will start to occur randomly after about 6 months, and you risk corrupting your OS within a year and having to reinstall. A big no-no if you have any sensitive data at all on your system.