# MCA error, but what to do with that?



## akil (Jun 20, 2013)

Hi,

I've experienced _an_ MCA error, however, I don't know how to interpret them and it is hard to find out any useful documents about error reports.


```
MCA: Bank 0, Status 0x9000004000010005
MCA: Global Cap 0x0000000000000c09, Status 0x0000000000000000
MCA: Vendor "GenuineIntel", ID 0x306a9, APIC ID 3
MCA: CPU 3 COR (1) internal parity error
MCA: Bank 0, Status 0x9000004000010005
MCA: Global Cap 0x0000000000000c09, Status 0x0000000000000000
MCA: Vendor "GenuineIntel", ID 0x306a9, APIC ID 2
MCA: CPU 2 COR (1) internal parity error
```

That refers to _an_ error with parity on _a_ CPU or on _a_ memory bank, or maybe something else. If that occur_s_ again should I send that hardware to my guarantee vendor or is this only an information that it was corrected or not?

Really I don't know what that would mean and how important that message really is, also I don't know if my (and which) hardware is broken?

Can somebody help me with it?


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## akil (Jun 20, 2013)

Oh, *f*inally I found information about that. If you have overclocked your CPU, on high load you may notice above errors, bumping the Vcore may help you with it. To reproduce that I used burnCPU, after increasing Vcore those messsages don't appear again.

Anyway, if someone has any knowledge about that, maybe they can type some replies here because I may be wrong with that.


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## Nukama (Jun 20, 2013)

Use sysutils/mcelog to decode it.


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## akil (Jun 21, 2013)

That is what I've got:

```
HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor
CPU 3 BANK 0 
MCG status:
MCi status:
Error enabled
MCA: Unknown Error 5
STATUS 9000004000010005 MCGSTATUS 0
MCGCAP c09 APICID 3 SOCKETID 0 
CPUID Vendor Intel Family 6 Model 58
mcelog: Unsupported new Family 6 Model 3a CPU: only decoding architectural errors
HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor
CPU 2 BANK 0 
MCG status:
MCi status:
Error enabled
MCA: Unknown Error 5
STATUS 9000004000010005 MCGSTATUS 0
MCGCAP c09 APICID 2 SOCKETID 0 
CPUID Vendor Intel Family 6 Model 58
```


I have change_d_ my FSB from 103 Mhz to 100 Mhz (_d_efault). I will see if MCA appear again, if yes th_e_n _the_ hardware will be sent to _the_ vendor.


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## kpa (Jun 21, 2013)

What kind of system is this? I hope you're not overclocking a server system in hopes of some tiny improvements in performance and throwing away the data integrity protection you get from ECC memory and cache checksumming.


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## akil (Jun 21, 2013)

FreeBSD 9.x, i7-3770, 16 GB DDR3, 6x HDD RAID. That is not my server but my private machine. I've got that message error when I recompile Perl dependencies after last update, however, a few weeks ago I run for 10 hours cpuburn and I didn't observe that kind of message. So I'm curious how compilation processes would influence that error, it doesn't overload _the_ CPU like cpuburn does.


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