Xeon W3550 Craps out on memory...

Okay, so I aquired a Xeon W3550 ES from someone on another forum and it's not playing nice with me. CPU is running at stock speed. It craps out on me every single time if I manually set the memory to 1333 or 1600 with 1.65V vdimm and 1.35v QPI. Memory timing is left at Auto. If I let memor speed on Auto and it picks 1066 as the speed, then it works okay. As soon as I up the speed, the system wouldn't POST. I know it's not a problem with the memory because they work perfectly at 1600 (same voltages everything else) on my 920 D0. Is the W3550 having a bad memory controller?

This is on my MSI Eclipse Plus, by the way.

Help! Half of my hair is already gone...

I was told that some mobo just isn't compatible with certain model of CPU, in this case my MSI Eclipse Plus is just not compatible with this Xeon W3550. Is there really such? I have tried four different BIOS versions and anything I could think of. It is having random crash even though when I tried a LinX 20 passes without any an error. It would just randomly crash for no apparent reason at all. I really like to believe that maybe this combo just isn't compatible with each and that there is nothing wrong with CPU.

I wish someone can shed some light about my problem. But it looks like this may be too rare and no one has anything to say.

I've used the Xeon W3520, W3540 & W3570 (production chips) on many X58 motherboards without any notable problems. Just like the i7 equivalents. Sorry, I've never had the MSI Eclipse or Eclipse Plus on the bench.

If you posted your memory speeds (use the memory profile from Sandra or Everest or just copy it off BIOS), you'll give us something to go with.

The board went south, I had it running last night downloading something, woke up this morning to find that it was off, tried to turn it on, nothing. Unplugged power cord for thirty seconds, plug it back in, push power button, it came on (or flickered) like 1/4 of a second, went off again. Thought there may be a short somewhere, took the board out of the case, same thing. Took off everything (memory, video card, all other cables and even the CPU), same thing. I unplugged the 12V cable, it power on, but you all know it wouldn't work w/o that cable. Plugged the 12V cable back in, turned on (or just flickered) for 1/4 of a second then went off again. Tried different PSU, same thing. Narrowed down to the 12V component/connector/voltage regulator or whatever that has something to do with the 12V plug. Contact the seller I bought it from, it was sold as a Review board (sent directly to the seller from MSI), not sure how he's going to handle the RMA. I hope something good can come out of this.

This W3550 is worth crap. Any OCing at all ends up in BSODs or freeze. I got a R2 Gene with me here and it's able to work with memory speed higher than 1066 but this CPU can't OC crap. My 920 runs circle around this Xeon. I guess I will just have to run it at stock.

Engineering samples are known to have problems at times and usually don't overclock that well compared to the ones released retail. But you got the ES for free didn't you?

burningrave101 said:

Engineering samples are known to have problems at times and usually don't overclock that well compared to the ones released retail. But you got the ES for free didn't you?

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No, I didn't understand how the ES thing work so I paid for it...got lured into the trap.

JCNiest5 said:

No, I didn't understand how the ES thing work so I paid for it...got lured into the trap.

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That thing should OC like a monster.

SKL1 said:

That thing should OC like a monster.

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Sigh...

Why the hell is this misconception still around? ES chips are NOT faster or more overclockable than production chips, usually its the complete opposite.

Sometimes Intel cherry picks CPU's to hand out to famous overclockers and these cherry picked ES chips fall out onto the market, but RARELY is this the case, 95% of ES chips are not cherry picked, they are just pre-production run chips, often times with many issues and problems, due to not always being the final silicon, and the abuse they are given before the fall onto the market.

JCNiest5 said:

No, I didn't understand how the ES thing work so I paid for it...got lured into the trap.

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Have you asked the seller if he'd let you return it and get your money back? Intel doesn't allow selling of ES chips and there was actually a thread posted about it on XtremeSystems recently so if you made him aware of this fact he may be more inclined to let you return it.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=228176

Chilly said:

Sigh...

Why the hell is this misconception still around? ES chips are NOT faster or more overclockable than production chips, usually its the complete opposite.

Sometimes Intel cherry picks CPU's to hand out to famous overclockers and these cherry picked ES chips fall out onto the market, but RARELY is this the case, 95% of ES chips are not cherry picked, they are just pre-production run chips, often times with many issues and problems, due to not always being the final silicon, and the abuse they are given before the fall onto the market.

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Sigh...

I didn't mean because its a ES.....out of the 8 Xeons I've tested they ALL clocked 4.2 or more, the highest being 4.8.