System freezes when BurnInTest starts - Gigabyte MW70-3S0

[David (PassMark)]

We had one customer report this problem. So we are just documenting it here in case someone else encounters it, or has some more information about the root cause.

Symptoms were that the system freezes when BurnInTest starts up.

Collecting logging information from BurnInTest shows the machine crashed while measuring CPU clock frequency.

Log looked like this,

3.416s - SysInfo: Measure CPU frequency with Turbo mode enabled
3.416s - SysInfo: CPUID(0xA): 0x07300803 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000603
3.416s - SysInfo: CPUID(0xA): 0x07300803 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000603
3.416s - SysInfo: MSR 0x0000038F: 00000000000000FF
3.416s - SysInfo: MSR 0x0000038D: 0000000000000000
3.416s - SysInfo: MSR 0x00000199: 0000000000002000
3.416s - SysInfo: MSR 0x00000198: 00001A2000001800
<Lockup here>

After investigation the problem turned out to be provoked by the Intel Rapid Storage Driver (Also known as Intel RST).

System details were:
Motherboard: Gigabyte_MW70-3S0
CPU: Xeon CPU E5-2620 v3 @ 2.40GHz
Operating System: Windows 7 Professional Edition
Video: NVIDIA Quadro M5000 & NVIDIA NVS 810
HDD: SVRC-C600S & Four Ut163 USB2FlashStorage
Freeze Driver : Intel Rapid Storage Driver(RST) version 4.5.0.1333

It isn't clear at this point why RST caused this problem where it did, for just this system.