Potential Causes for Machine Check Exceptions
MCEs are difficult to debug mostly because of the large number of potential
causes. Some of the potential factors are:
• Violations to board design guidelines. For example, routing traces over
power and ground planes may cause unwanted noise and inadequate
signal spacing may cause signal integrity issues.
• Operating the processor out of specification. Examples include over-
clocking of the CPU and front-side bus speeds. The behavior of the system
cannot be predicted when the processor operates out of specification.
• Environmental factors, such as: alpha particles or cosmic ray hits,
extremely hot, and cold temperatures.
• Improperly fitted heat sinks or fans and incorrect hardware installation.
• Missing proper microcode updates that could contain fixes for known
processor errata.
• BIOS setup issue or OS issue may cause MCE handling scheme to behave
differently.
• Faulty components, such as: add-in cards, DIMMs, etc., can also cause
system errors that may eventually lead to a MCE.
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