Intel Core i7 3960X LGA2011 conflict with ASUS Sabertooth X79 board

[idata]

Hi, I have the above PC with an nVidia Quadro 2000 graphics card and 32Gb RAM for video editing.

Problem: the processor keeps crashing the system with kernel faults between it and the graphics card, plus mouse freezes and OpenGL errors in software.

I know it's the CPU because my technician has swapped out every component, the CPU being the last one to swap and every time the problems still happened except when the CPU was swapped for a 3930 edition.

Does anyone else have any experience of anything like this or is it likely to just be a dud CPU?

I'm currently waiting for a replacement unit, but I just want to find out whether this is an aberration or a design fault (if known)?

[Adolfo_S_Intel2]

At this moment we have not received any notification about a processor issue like the one that you are reporting, so this seems to be just one of those very few defective processors.

[idata]

I thought I might mention firstly, that I use forums very regularly; however, this is my first post.

I am not sure if I had the exact same issue, as it last happened a few months ago. But I built a custom computer with the same motherboard an Intel chip and I believe I had the same issue.

I noticed that the RAM timings were not set to the values printed on the physical RAM sticks - after changing the RAM timing to the suggested values the crashes have ceased to occur. However, while running a stress test (Prime95) 2 cores out of the 12 failed after 2 hours, while the other cores were fine after 12 hours of Prime 95 (Can't remember if it was a Blend or Small FFT's test, I believe it was a Blend test).

No crashes or any other issues have occurred since I have changed the RAM timing (Except the 2 cores failing during the stress test)

I have an NVidia Quadra 4000 with 32Gb RAM.

But I will now attempt to overclock the CPU - the issue with the 2 cores failing during the stress test may limit my ability to overclocking. Since I cannot revert back to the previous default RAM timings as I will return to the crashes and kernel failures I may have look into compatibility of the Sabertooth X79 motherboard and Intel 3960x chip as you had mentioned you had narrowed the issue down too.

Have you received the replacement chip yet?

[idata]

I believe I had also stumbled upon a defective processor - Replacing the chip seemed to fix the issue.