Ok, I just bought an opteron 170 second hand with the IHS already removed, and it had a small chip on the core. After a good hour wondering why the hell my system beeper was making a siren noise (that was being caused by me plugging the CPU fan into the wrong header so the mobo thought it wasnt there), I got into windows and thought all was good. The system then locked up completely. A hard reboot and it got into windows again, and locked up again after about a minute. I thought it may be a windows issue so i ran ubuntu from a CD and it still locked up after about 5 mins this time. I then booted from a tools CD with some testing software and ran a couple of CPU stress tests and it lasted as long as I could be bothered to leave it (about half an hour). After that I got into windows and ran 2 instances of super pi to 32M completely fine. That took about 40 mins. Then it locked up AGAIN. Thats about where Im at now, its been ok for the last 10 minutes typing this and browsing the net. I should add that the temps are absolutely fine(25c idle, 32c load), even though I didnt bother to modify the heatsink retention bracket to accomodate the removed IHS. Could the lock-ups be caused by the chipped core? Im about out of ideas since I didnt change anything about the system other than the CPU.
Any feedback welcome on this, Thanks.
Any feedback welcome on this, Thanks.