Maximus Formula dead, important info inside

Guys

If you have the Max formula before you push this board hard make sure you reseat/make sure the heatsinks covering the mosfets are sitting correctly and doing their job. i just started testing Q6850 at 4GHZ 1.5V with 8GB ram 1000MHZ 1.8V and within 5 mins 1 phase has blown off the board thru poor cooling to the fets.

See pics below:

4 fets blown...awesome board while it lasted:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/st...ead%20fets.JPG
Here you can see the poor contact from the heatsink...4GHZ load was just to much

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/st...%20cooling.JPG

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/st...n_CIMG2428.JPG

Be clever and make sure the heatsinks are seated right...mine were not it seems :(

Side note, CPU was watercooled and had a bloted thru backplate, in no way was this board bowing thru to much pressure on the CPU mounting. Applied force to CPU was 55LBS which is well within Intels specs, Ambient room temp in the workshop is 12C also and i had fans blowing over the board.

It is better to remove those heatsinks altogether.

Also, notice that installation of CPU heatsink or waterblock without backplate will lead to MB warping and some FETs in the centre may loose contact with heatsink.

had the backplate man...its how I helped design OCZ's new block ;)

This is just poor QC on the board....the guys here push boards hard and this should not happen

Damn, that's really quite dodgy. Still, could be just the one bad apple.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SoulsCollective

Damn, that's really quite dodgy. Still, could be just the one bad apple.

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Nope, TONY is 100% correct. My Max Formula had the worst contact on the FET's.

its not a Maximus Issue.

its a total Asus Heatsink Issue.
I've had many many 775 boards in the last year or two with these mosfet heatsinks on them.
they never make good contact with all mosfets, especially in actual use of the board, when they start to warp alittle from just about anything. crooked case, torqing the board. heavy watercooling pulling the board. heavy heatsinks warping the board over time.
waterblocks with no backplate, or cheap backplates.
every single time I took my heatpipe/heatsinks off the board, the contact in the thermal pad was near non existant in the middle. or very inconsistent.

what I resorted to, was nuts and bots, and my own back plates I made from strips of metal and a drill.
now, I dont have to worry about bowing making the mosfets lose contact.

in my opinion, these heatsinks should come with back plates by default.

Kunaak is correct.
That happens even with the Intel Box Cooler.
Poorly performing heatsinks & heat-pipes, poor contact, poor mounting "system".
The only thing that's not poor is the price...

is there any way to tell without completely removing the heatpipe assembly?

Soz for ya loss Tony... but you will get over it :)

Off Topic : Tony any news on the OCZ Phase cooler ? Will it be produced in big masses and also for Europe ? That would be cool

Wasn't the so called 8 phase power whatever suppose to keep things cooler? I guess not

I couldn't take a better shot because of the lighting conditions of the room, but

http://i26.tinypic.com/2evalba.jpg

I think like Kunaak suggested only backplates on all the heatsinks with screws will make the board more rigid against flexing... gonna take a piccie of mine with the QX cooler on it... Seems pretty straight here when you quickly look at it, but there's a clear bow... but I've seen even worse with some P35DS4 mobo's I put together...

http://users.pandora.be/OAP/SLI%20016.jpg

Which baord is that Bill, P5E3 ?

yea, bad contact on mosfets is style of asus
my p5k3 dlx has same issue, backplate wont help here

One more thing... I don't know why, and if it's only a feeling of mine, but I feel/remember that the old hotties ( the DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR back in the... AMD powah days for example ) needed an enormous amount of pressure ( de-centralized pressure actually ) to bend...hardly.
New boards ( I feel, I repeat ) seem to bend easier [ I'm not sure, could be wrong of course ]

Edit: Mobo in pic is my beloved Asus P5K3 Deluxe :)

That sucks Tony, but at least the informations out. I'm gonna give my board a hard look over this weekend and see what the contacts are like, make sure nothing has burst.

I received the board from Asus so its not my money but I do feel this is a serious issue hence I posted.

I have NEVER blown a board up like this before, the PCB looked as flat as it was unloaded with the block etc but obviously it was not.

5 mins in memtest testing 8GB of ram at 1000...boom board gone...in went Striker II ;-)

Yup those asus sinks/tape have notoriously bad contact.

It sucks but I have to say that's a pretty cool pic of the blown mosfets. I like the microcool mosfet sinks because they are tiny, so you can be sure you cover all the surfaces with no gaps.. I used those on a P5K dlx and it worked great with some airflow.

i use backplates and water blocks on mosfets... typically the board bends when u install heavy heatsinks therefore the mosfet heatsink loses contact with the mosfets.

Just got the board today (awsome price, 100USD for a brand new one, stupid shop :p ) and after pooling all the cooling of to install thermalright instead, I noticed that the stock cooling had perfect contact with the mosfets. It might have been a problem with a batch of them? I got black thermal pads on mine.

sure new board has good contact, but it will bind easily once you install heatsink. and loose contact.

Initially they seem to make good contact.
After you install a cooler ( even Intel's Box cooler ) they don't make good contact in the middle because they board bends ( not like Beckham :p: )

Edit: heh rioja, perfect timing man :D

these need backplates bad.

examine tonys own photo and you can clearly see the pressure is greater at the edges, meaning there was little contact in the center.
plus, the contact is best along the outter edge of the heatpipe side of the heatsink, so mosfets on the other side of the heatsink are more likely to blow out.

which is exactly where tonys burn marks are.

What screw size would I need to reattach them all better?

I ordered some rugged Mosfet-backplates from Chilled PC Uk.
Works just fine!

http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/5...baksidehc4.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tony

5 mins in memtest testing 8GB of ram at 1000...boom board gone...in went Striker II ;-)

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Memtest is single -threaded and creates very very small load on CPU. This is highly unlikely the reason was solely MOSFET overheating.
Under this low load, taking into account highly efficient power design on this board, those FETs power dissipation was not nearly enough to make the blow. They don't even need to make any contact with heatsink - heat can easily travel through PCB.

I think the FETs were somehow defective in the first place or maybe something gets here and shorted them.

On my P5K-Pro (which has similar efficient 8-phase power design) i removed all sinks from mosfets, and with minimum air flow around, those FETs stay cool even under Linpack64!

Would the Blitz series hook mount system be better than push pins ? I can't even remove them on Asus Blitz Extreme/Formula as they're so tight to even check if good contact is made LOL

http://i4memory.com/reviewimages/mot...formula_16.JPG

just wondering if i remove the heatsink and put a fan blowing to it would be a better option :)

I'll have a look later today and take some pics, need to take the mobo out anyway to turn the CPU cooler ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sup3rfly

just wondering if i remove the heatsink and put a fan blowing to it would be a better option :)

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Put some small heatsinks on the mosfets to dissipate heat more quickly, something like Swiftech copper heatsink kit :

http://www.swiftech.com/products/mc14.asp

wow! That is incredible that happened! But it seems not to be a problem with solely asus but also abit aswell. I replaced all the push pins with bolts and nuts and removed the black thermal pads and used arctic silver mx-2 thermal paste no complaints here!

Cronos

The board was a review sample, it has been reviewed by near every tier 1 site and magazine here in the UK before it came to me.

regards memtest this board had run 50hr+ already at much lower CPU clocks, as soon as i wanted to briefly test at 4GHZ 1.5V or so the damage was done....going by how long it lasted in memtest it looks to have blown on test 4 which actually does load the CPU quite high.

Yes its single threaded though...but the heat of an uncooled fet is quite large at 4GHZ and as soon as that 1 fet blew the others on that phase will have gone also trying to carry the load.

The general point here is not my board, its the poor QC on a very expensive board which you would expect to be well made, fact is you should not have to buy backplates or do after market tricks to get the board to survive...it should be like that from the factory.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tony

The general point here is not my board, its the poor QC on a very expensive board which you would expect to be well made, fact is you should not have to buy backplates or do after market tricks to get the board to survive...it should be like that from the factory.

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Exactly.
We're paying premium prices for motherboards that should've been priced at least 50$ cheaper.
Spending 300$ on a motherboard and HAVING the need to mod it's heatsinks or even change them with after-market ones sucks.

I could live with the heatsinks stuff, but another thing that bugs me the most is...those annoying yet easy to find BIOS Bugs ( the EIST bug on P5K3 Deluxe BIOSes after 0910 for example ).

it does need backplates no matter what.

this is what i done.

http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/4016/dsc00800xn1.jpg

http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/2376/dsc00803ne3.jpg

I'll back you 100% on this one tony. When i recieved my board the southbridge heatsink contact was so bad it was visible to the naked eye at just a glance........

Luckily the first thing I do when i buy a board is void my warranty......As with all my mobos I rip off all the HS, lap, apply thermal paste reinstall, remove check contact and if I'm satisfied clean off and reapply paste.

After all that then I fire it up.