CPU Contact pad discoloration
 

As many of y'all tend to do extreme overclocking all the time, I figured I'd post here for any advice and thoughts.

Has anyone noticed discoloration of LGA1366 CPU contact pads... just without any apparent socket damage? For any reason whatsoever? Also, any idea what sort of voltage/current/heat would be required to cause this discoloration of the contact pads?

I ask because I appear to have a board that turned nasty after one year of good hard use. At first I thought my own overclock/settings had eventually damaged my 920 with over a year of 24/7 Folding@home load... but then I saw what the motherboard did to my three week old Core i7 930 I replaced it with. With the 930 I was using 1.36vcore (by CPUZ), 1.60v RAM, and 1.225QPI/VTT @ 4Ghz under an Apogee GTZ.

The photos don't show it well, but the discoloration is more apparent in person and can even be visibly seen in a few of the same pads in the 920. The 930 is on the right, which is astounding given I've used the 930 for less than 3 weeks... much of that time not even overclocked.




Both CPUs are now damaged. The 920 is not stable even at stock frequency. The 930 now requires excessively high VTT for stability.... at stock the ASUS Rampage Extreme II is defaulting to 1.36v VTT just for stock operation.... when I first tested the 930 before installing it into the Gigabyte UD5, the Rampage defaulted to <1.20v VTT. Any thoughts?

Damage is worse than I thought, the 930 began giving quite a few "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." driver resets unless I give it the 1.36 VTT/QPI voltage the Rampage defaults to.

That's $600 in CPUs and $250 for the EX58-UD5 up in smoke. Does anyone here have any advice before I call Gigabyte to try and get this situation resolved?

I would contact Gigabyte at the least
I would also try to contact Intel RMA service: you used reference cooling and stock speeds. maybe they have had similar experience in the past

I didn't want to try Intel's RMA service given their CPU was fine... it was Gigabyte's motherboard that ruined both CPUs and therefore they should replace at least the new one.

I will ask Intel if Gigabyte refuses... but given the visible "scoring" on the CPU pads I suspect Intel will refuse.

Damn man that's real bad luck, are you sure the Swiftech block doesn't have a leak ? Hopefully you get a new board and two new CPU's...

Aye, there was no leak. :) Probably did 15+ remounts when testing both CPUs in both motherboards trying to figure out the problem. The socket looks pristine, pins look like new. I would never suspect that it could kill a CPU in just a couple weeks.

Not sure what happened to the photo links, I think it resized the thumbnails.