Anyone noticed similar 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 I cooked my 920 with my overclock and over a year of 24/7 Folding@home load... but then I saw what it 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 clearly apparent in natural light 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.



Suffice to say the 920 is no longer stable at stock frequencies regardless of voltages, and the 930 is no longer stable at 3.5GHz+. The 920 seems to only respond to 1.42+ VTT, and worryingly the 930 seems to require unusually high VTT now as well just to run stable. 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. Not happy at all just now...