With A New Motherboard, The Core i7 5960X Haswell-E Lights Up

As an update to my story from Friday about my X99 motherboard burning up when building a Core i7 5960X (Haswell-E) setup, which was followed by another reviewer independently running into a similar situation with his i7-5960X + X99 testing, I now have the system operational with using a new motherboard.

On Friday the motherboard that lost its life was the MSI X99S SLI PLUS. Since then I've been working with MSI and just returning the board for a refund (I had bought it to save time) while MSI will be fully investigating this incident to figure out if it was an isolated case or there's a broader issue at hand.

When the MSI X99S SLI PLUS failed, I bought another low-cost X99 board: the Gigabyte Intel LGA 2011-3 X99 4way (GA-X99-UD4). This board has all standard X99 chipset features, is ATX in size, and costs just about $250 USD that makes it not too bad compared to the many $300+ X99 boards available at this time. I got next-day delivery from Amazon so it arrived earlier today. Those interested in this motherboard can find it via this Amazon.com link that helps support the site.

When assembling the system I was very frightened about the Core i7 5960X review sample being damaged or the Corsair DDR4-2666MHz memory but upon assembling the system, I was relieved and satisfied that the i7-5960X booted up without issues or any problems so far using the Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4 motherboard.

I'm now finally onto running my plethora of Linux benchmarks for this Intel Haswell-E system. I'll also write a full review on the Gigabyte X99-UD4 motherboard in the weeks ahead along with Linux DDR4 memory tests, etc.

Hopefully no further issues will be encountered as so far things are working well this afternoon with the i7-5960X. There were no Linux compatibility problems for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS install with the Linux 3.17 kernel, etc. It's beautifully fast and with a stock environment can lead to 40 second kernel compiles -- more details in our full write-up covering the Linux performance of this eight core CPU.