OT: Weird Hardware Problem

[Tim Daneliuk]

I was recently given a Dell Inspiron 3847 which has an i7-4790 and 16G
of memory.  Perfect for multibooting BSD and Linux.  It needed a new power
supply but now that this is installed, it's exhibiting a very strange
problem.

The machine will work for hours flawless and then - for no apparent reason -
reboot randomly.  The former owner reports that this was also happening
when they last had it running Win8.

I've run very heavy loads on it with load averages up to almost 50 - no
problem.  I've run overnight memory tests which return 0 errors.
I've run CPU stress tests flawlessly and temperatures were fine.

One hint here:  I can consistently force the problem to happen if I start
a Linux installation and request full disk encryption as part of the install.
I doubt it has anything to with encryption per se, but there is some kind
of pattern of use that it causing the reboot.

Has anyone else ever seen something like this and/or have resolution?

Is there a known bug with that processor?

My first instinct was to blame flakey memory (DDR 1600 2x8G Hynix) but -
as I said - memory testing is flawless.

Thoughts and ideas most welcome.


TIA,
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Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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