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Z170M-E D3 TWO(2) CPUs failed in this board over 5 years

N8LBV
Level 7
I am not really looking for help or anything on this post other than to make a note in case anyone else may have experienced similar issues with this board or
chipset.

I built a customer a Desktop PC in Late 2016 on this board and installed an I7 6700K with quality good air cooling.
The PC has NEVER been overclocked and has only been run at motherboard default settings.
Throughout its life the cooling has worked great and the CPU has never ran hot EVER.
The power supply is a premium quality Corsair 850W supply, and for the first 3 years of it's life only used Intel Integrated graphics.
After the first CPU failed I replaced the power supply just to be safe with a similar new 850W corsair supply.
With the original CPU The PC worked fine for about 3 months then he started getting blue screens/crashing in Windows 7 (at the time).
I took the PC back and determined that the CPU was failing.
Constant crashing and blue screens.
Dropped in a test CPU and all was fine.
Put the original CPU back in and a was bad.
CPU looked fine, contacts all looked perfect not bent or discolored.
At the time this was financially stressful to me as I had to buy the customer a new CPU as I warranty my work and equipment.
And I had to send the bad CPU to Intel for RMA replacement which they did without question.
About 3 years later and he is having the same or very similar acting problem with his CPU again and I have determined the CPU is failing.
Tested the CPU in another system and it is definitely bad.
I can get it to work for about half a day if I turn off hyperthreading and only activate one or two CPU cores in the bios.

I played with a lot of settings to try to get it to work better/be more stable.
It crashes quickly if hyperthreading is on.
And if all 4 cores are on much worse, and with hyperthreading on (windows or Linux won't even boot)
And crashes extremely frequently within a minute or two of use with all 4 cores on and no hyperthreading.

It's most stable with only one CPU core on (hyperthreading off) and using a PCIe graphics card.
Any combination using integrated graphics is noticeably less stable.
Anyhow the CPU is definitely faulty.

I have told the customer that the motherboard cannot be trusted after losing two CPUs over 4 years like this when he has never overclocked and doesn't do anything anything overly stressful to the CPU or motherboard.
This machine ran it's life in a clean climate controlled office environment.
The client just rand their business operations off of it.

Again the primary purpose for my post here is to file this incident for anyone else that may run across a similar issue who like myself may be wondering if it's only me or are there more like this out there that had this type of issue.

In case you are questioning "why the 850W supply if you're not overclocking or gaming".
At time they were inexpensive, we bought those supplies in boxes of ten and we also built systems intended for gaming and overclocking.

I build gaming class systems all the time for office users for the reliability, ease of servicing the hardware and ease of upgrading.
I have far less problems and happier customers with systems we build than off the shelf desktops they can pick up at the local stores.
Many clients get a good solid 5 and sometimes 10+ years of use out of the desktops we build for them.
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