HELP! Looking for replacement for P6T WS Pro

[ronplante]

I have just been through an ordeal. When MS stopped supporting XP, I upgraded to Win7-64bit. I decided to upgrade to an SSD and 24 GB of DDR3. I started having BSODs as often as every two minutes. It finally died during troubleshooting and I need to know which way to go on MB and CPU.

Previous setup: Asus P6T WS Pro, CPU- i7-920, 6GB DDR3-1600, 2x2TB HDD, NVIDIA Quadro 1700 XP32bit.

Recent setup: Asus P6T WS Pro, CPU- i7-920, 24GB DDR3-1600, 256GB SSD (Samsung 840Pro), new 2TB WD HDD plus the two old ones, NVIDIA Quadro 1700.

During the upgrade, I ran MEMTEST86 for 16 hours (3 complete cycles) with no errors. Clean install of Win7-64bit on SSD. After a week or two of testing and installing applications (part time) I started to notice a few BSOD. A relatively new experience after years of NT Advanced Server, and XP. I first turned to the memory and tried different settings (never went above 1.65v). I was able to make things worse, but never better. I even tried putting the original memory in and it BSOD'd in two minutes. The BSOD happened more frequently when viewing videos, but still happened other times. I read in the BIOS that with a "Locked" (CPU if I remember) that you could only use speeds of 800 or 1033. My last setting was at 1033. I also read somewhere that with that particular chipset, and 1600 modules, you could only use the first slot in each of the three channels, which cut my memory in half to 12GB. I only had three sticks in when it failed (slots 1, 3, and 5). The typical BSOD message was "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval" and 0x00000101. Usually, when watching a video clip, after 2-10 minutes, I would get a loud buzzing feedback type of sound accompanied by the screen locking up, then it would bluescreen. It seldom finished the minidump stopping at around 70-85% before rebooting itself. I talked to a tech in New Dehli for about 8 hours over three days, and ASUS for about 2 hours while working through this situation.

I finally decided to turn to the SSD. A local shop thought that maybe the 5-6 y.o. motherboard might not be able to handle the SSD. A call to ASUS confirmed that they had not tested this particular board with an SSD. I was in the process of planning for moving my operating system to a clean HDD and suddenly the screen went black. I tried rebooting but no luck. I figured it might have shut off for thermal reasons, so I shut it down overnight, but got the same results (or lack thereof) in the morning. The HDD access light on the front flashed like it was reading a HDD, and I got no beep codes. Thinking it might be the video card, I borrowed a castoff from my son (A relatively high end GEFORCE with 1024MB of ram) but nothing changed. I have come to the conclusion that I need a new CPU/motherboard.

My dilemma: I have found that very few motherboards are set up for triple channel memory. Basically only i7-9xx and Xeon processors. I figure that unless something was already failing, the setup I had was not going to work, so I may as well upgrade to a newer type of CPU. I hate the idea of trashing 24GB of brand new memory (or even part of it); however, am I being dumb in trying to fit what I have to what is available? I don't have an unlimited budget, so I would rather not have to revisit the memory situation if possible. I have 6x4GB of DDR3-1600. I also need something that can work with my SSD. I don't have to (or ever really desire to) have the latest and greatest, one gen removed is probably fine. What direction should I go in looking for a new MB and CPU. I'm not a gamer, so not really interested in OC. I do; however, use 3D CAD applications (CATIA and NX), and Photoshop, so I need something that can handle heavy graphics, but I am more interested in reliability than pure speed.

 

[dwatterworth]

As far as your memory modules are confirmed, you don't need to get rid of them at all. I'd guess the memory controller could not handle the additional load of the added memory modules and burned out.

Anyway, the channel kits only refer to them being tested to work together as a set, not that they are different internally from a dual channel kit of the same modules etc.

Let me know if you would like a specific list of parts and I can put them into a partspicker list etc.

I'm an architect/structural engineer and make all of the workstations for my firm as well as others in the area and can give you a good build list at any budget point that you need to hit.
I imagine your problems did not surface due to an SSD and the SSD certainly wouldn't cause your motherboard to crap out. I had some old asus Z7S-WS DP e5472 boxes for rendering and 3dsmax/photoshop/revit workstations and they all had SSD added once they became affordable with no issues.

I would look into a Z97 workstation board with the 4790k processor. I use that chip now in a revit/3ds/photoshop station and it is amazing. The high stock clocks just blow everything else away as far as viewport navigation/updating etc.

The gaming Z97 boards from Asus along with the 'pro' line of z97 workstation boards are all fantastic. I'd look for something with substantial heatsinks on all critical components (not the z97-A entry level boards etc) and it should support your current memory and ssd with no issues.

There will be undoubtedly someone telling you to get the new Haswell EP i7's but those chips have lower clocks and if you aren't interested in OC, past doing long-run renderings, they will perform well but to a lower level of responsiveness in workspace navigation.

 

[ronplante]

As far as your memory modules are confirmed, you don't need to get rid of them at all. I'd guess the memory controller could not handle the additional load of the added memory modules and burned out.

Anyway, the channel kits only refer to them being tested to work together as a set, not that they are different internally from a dual channel kit of the same modules etc.

Let me know if you would like a specific list of parts and I can put them into a partspicker list etc.

I'm an architect/structural engineer and make all of the workstations for my firm as well as others in the area and can give you a good build list at any budget point that you need to hit.
I imagine your problems did not surface due to an SSD and the SSD certainly wouldn't cause your motherboard to crap out. I had some old asus Z7S-WS DP e5472 boxes for rendering and 3dsmax/photoshop/revit workstations and they all had SSD added once they became affordable with no issues.

I would look into a Z97 workstation board with the 4790k processor. I use that chip now in a revit/3ds/photoshop station and it is amazing. The high stock clocks just blow everything else away as far as viewport navigation/updating etc.

The gaming Z97 boards from Asus along with the 'pro' line of z97 workstation boards are all fantastic. I'd look for something with substantial heatsinks on all critical components (not the z97-A entry level boards etc) and it should support your current memory and ssd with no issues.

There will be undoubtedly someone telling you to get the new Haswell EP i7's but those chips have lower clocks and if you aren't interested in OC, past doing long-run renderings, they will perform well but to a lower level of responsiveness in workspace navigation.

Thanks for you quick reply. I just started looking, but what you suggest sounds reasonable. I just wish I could use all of the memory I recently purchased. It looks like all current motherboards use 4 or 8 slots. Since I have six sticks of 4GB, it looks like I will not be able to use 2 of them. If I go that route, I might get one with 8 slots and start using 4 sticks. Even though they will not be a matched set, I guess I could get two more from Corsair and hope for the best.
I am also a Civil Engineer; however, I’ve been working in the Electrical/Mechanical arena for the past 34 years.
Yes, if you could suggest a specific list of parts, I would appreciate it. I realize that neither the memory or the SSD caused serious death; however, something seems to have been incompatible. Are you pretty certain that my memory (Corsair DDR3-1600, 4GB/stick) and SSD (Samsung 840 pro, 256 GB) will play nice with the Z97 and the 4790 CPU? Also, I looked at the Sabertooth version of ASUS's Z97, and was intrigued with the controlled airflow concept; but, I was also concerned that the small channels would become seriously clogged with dust. They claim that the fan is designed to occasionally reverse direction to clear dust. Any thoughts on that one? Also, they mention that it uses a small fan, and it seems that most OEMs had gone away from small fans (such as on the northbridge) due to low reliability. Beyond that, I noticed that ASUS does not seem to keep up with BIOS upgrades. The most recent one for my now deceased P6T WS Pro is 4 years old (and I only purchased it 5 years ago.) A friend at work seems to like Gigabyte. Any thoughts on that?
Thanks again,
Ron Plante :^)

 

[dwatterworth]

In order to use all 8 sticks of memory, you would be looking at an x79 platform to support the ddr3. It's kind of a toss-up on the overall performance between an Ivy Bridge-E chip and a haswell refresh chip. The haswell refresh, 4790k will have easily the highest single and multi-core performance in most work loads that do not fully load each core. If you are performing a lot of analysis / simulation programs that are well threaded, then the x79 platform makes more sense. Also, programs that fully utilize the quad channel memory bandwidth will benefit over the Z97 dual channel.

I'd still recommend the z97 platform if you want to keep your DDR3 memory, even though I am not aware of any LGA 1150 socket boards that have 8 dimm slots, so like you said, you'll be down to 16gb.

As far as motherboards go, personally I don't recommend anything but Asus boards. I've used gigabyte a few times with mixed success, but across the 6 boards I used, 50% were DOA. Those were ITX boards so I'm not sure if their mainstream boards would be similar, reviews seem fairly positive.

I haven't used the Sabertooth board yet, but I have used the Z87 Gryphon for a large number of workstations. I've also used it for some SMB server applications to be located in an occupied office. The large heatsinks let me run much lower fan speeds in the case which housed a 4-disk raid 10 array and some BIM program server VM's.
I've used the thermal armor kit which has the same dinky 40mm fan at the rear I/O area. I don't like the idea of constricted airflow spaces, no matter the manufacturer claims about dust.
Thinking about video cards that use reference style blowers which are also high speed, smaller fans, those accumulate a heavy coat of dust over time so I just can't believe a 40mm fan blowing through very very restricted paths with tons of obstructions would keep dust out.

I think the best way to avoid dust buildup is to use a good case with filtered intake fans in a positive pressure setup. I've used the Fractal Design Arc Mini (Arc Midi for an ATX mobo) for a number of workstation builds along with the Corsair 350D. Both have strong air flow designs of front to back with clear paths of travel to the CPU cooler and across all major chipset heatsinks. They both have compatibility with all the major AIO liquid coolers as well, though I shy away from those for workstation builds, I use them for gaming stations but am skeptical of their >2-3 year service life vs an dual fan air cooler that is virtually failure-proof (especially if you set fan speed warnings to detect failure of a single fan).

Either way, I wouldn't use the armor kits for the sabertooth or the gryphon after seeing how it goes on and what is exposed/restricted. I think the open air-flow that a well designed case can afford is much more reliable and straightforward than a small, ineffective, noisy fan.

As far as the memory and 840 pro compatibility, Corsair memory is virtually universally accepted. I've not seen any board that wouldn't run any corsair module. The 1600mhz sticks doubly so. I have samsung 830, 840 pro/evos on multiple platforms ranging from old LGA 771/775 builds to the newest z97 boards and have never seen a hint of incompatibility there either. I usually install the Samsung magician software and set it to the max reliability just to minimize writes to the drive as well.


I've put the platform parts you would need to change in the partspicker list below.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/NVJqBm

The 4790k CPU is the way to go since it will give you the highest stock clock rates. If there was an H97 board that had substantial heatsinks and additional reliability testing, I'd recommend that since you aren't overclocking but I'm not aware of a non-server oriented board that has those features.

The power supply you currently have should be perfectly compatible with the new platform, the lowest C-states for the CPU power savings are disabled by default on the new motherboards shipping now due to the number of problems with that feature when Haswell was released.

 

[ronplante]

In order to use all 8 sticks of memory, you would be looking at an x79 platform to support the ddr3. It's kind of a toss-up on the overall performance between an Ivy Bridge-E chip and a haswell refresh chip. The haswell refresh, 4790k will have easily the highest single and multi-core performance in most work loads that do not fully load each core. If you are performing a lot of analysis / simulation programs that are well threaded, then the x79 platform makes more sense. Also, programs that fully utilize the quad channel memory bandwidth will benefit over the Z97 dual channel.

I'd still recommend the z97 platform if you want to keep your DDR3 memory, even though I am not aware of any LGA 1150 socket boards that have 8 dimm slots, so like you said, you'll be down to 16gb.

As far as motherboards go, personally I don't recommend anything but Asus boards. I've used gigabyte a few times with mixed success, but across the 6 boards I used, 50% were DOA. Those were ITX boards so I'm not sure if their mainstream boards would be similar, reviews seem fairly positive.

I haven't used the Sabertooth board yet, but I have used the Z87 Gryphon for a large number of workstations. I've also used it for some SMB server applications to be located in an occupied office. The large heatsinks let me run much lower fan speeds in the case which housed a 4-disk raid 10 array and some BIM program server VM's.
I've used the thermal armor kit which has the same dinky 40mm fan at the rear I/O area. I don't like the idea of constricted airflow spaces, no matter the manufacturer claims about dust.
Thinking about video cards that use reference style blowers which are also high speed, smaller fans, those accumulate a heavy coat of dust over time so I just can't believe a 40mm fan blowing through very very restricted paths with tons of obstructions would keep dust out.

I think the best way to avoid dust buildup is to use a good case with filtered intake fans in a positive pressure setup. I've used the Fractal Design Arc Mini (Arc Midi for an ATX mobo) for a number of workstation builds along with the Corsair 350D. Both have strong air flow designs of front to back with clear paths of travel to the CPU cooler and across all major chipset heatsinks. They both have compatibility with all the major AIO liquid coolers as well, though I shy away from those for workstation builds, I use them for gaming stations but am skeptical of their >2-3 year service life vs an dual fan air cooler that is virtually failure-proof (especially if you set fan speed warnings to detect failure of a single fan).

Either way, I wouldn't use the armor kits for the sabertooth or the gryphon after seeing how it goes on and what is exposed/restricted. I think the open air-flow that a well designed case can afford is much more reliable and straightforward than a small, ineffective, noisy fan.

As far as the memory and 840 pro compatibility, Corsair memory is virtually universally accepted. I've not seen any board that wouldn't run any corsair module. The 1600mhz sticks doubly so. I have samsung 830, 840 pro/evos on multiple platforms ranging from old LGA 771/775 builds to the newest z97 boards and have never seen a hint of incompatibility there either. I usually install the Samsung magician software and set it to the max reliability just to minimize writes to the drive as well.


I've put the platform parts you would need to change in the partspicker list below.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/NVJqBm

The 4790k CPU is the way to go since it will give you the highest stock clock rates. If there was an H97 board that had substantial heatsinks and additional reliability testing, I'd recommend that since you aren't overclocking but I'm not aware of a non-server oriented board that has those features.

The power supply you currently have should be perfectly compatible with the new platform, the lowest C-states for the CPU power savings are disabled by default on the new motherboards shipping now due to the number of problems with that feature when Haswell was released.

 

[ronplante]

You aren't going to believe this. When the monitor black screened, I tried another video card, I checked every line on the power supply, I reseated all of the cards and memory, I talked to a local repair shop, all pointed to needing a new CPU. Last night, out of desperation, I tried a different monitor. I never thought to do that as my HP x 2301 is four years old and looks brand new, and the onscreen menu still works, so it is not completely dead in the water. I was completely surprised when I hooked up a different monitor and the regular boot sequence appeared. I feel embarrassed to have taken your time on this. I will still hold onto the parts list you sent as I still want to upgrade as soon as I can actually afford it as opposed to going into debt to buy something I have no choice about replacing. Now, I am back to dealing with my BSOD problem, but at least I can use my computer in between bluescreens. (i.e., things can always be worse.) Thanks for your help!

 

[dwatterworth]

Oh wow, that's great. Good luck, feel free to send me a PM if you want an opinion on anything etc in the future.