AMD Phenom II Black Edition 3.1ghz
4gb G-skill DDR2
Gigabyte GA-MA785GM
ATI 3850
WinXP Pro SP3
My computer has had a few (5?) random BSODs over the past 9 months but nothing too bad. When I inspected the memory dumps before it seemed to have something to do with the driver for my Razer mouse. I updated the driver and this seemed to go away. Anyways, today I had firefox open with several tabs as usual, along with ventrilo, and some music playing in winamp. I was in another room when I noticed the sound was stuck stuttering. I came to the PC to find a lovely BSOD. IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. I tried to reboot the PC but got the same thing. I then unplugged all USB devices and tried it again and got the same thing. I rebooted and was going to try to go into safe mode but after the intial bios screen flashed up the screen went black and all I saw were two random ASCII characters. This made me think it may have been a problem with the video card overheating. I checked all the fans in the system and they all seemed to be working. I pulled the video card and ran off of the onboard video. Still got the BSOD. This time I did manage to get far enough upon reboot to try for safemode. Safemode BSOD but gave no details. I happen to have some compatible (much slower though) RAM so I swapped out the RAM and tried again.. BSOD. This only leaves two components, the CPU and the motherboard. I checked the temp on my CPU in the BIOS and it was staying in the 40-50C range so I don't think it is overheating. My problem is, I do not have another CPU to test out. I booted from Hirens boot CD and ran some diag. Everything passed like normal except for on PC-Check the second core failed? I'm thinking this may just be an issue with PC-check not properly addressing the processor but I'm not sure. My CPU has not been overclocked. I do know that the black edition X2s can be unlocked to X4s, but when I tried it 6 months ago the PC would not boot so I immediately switched back to standard config. I do not think the processor was damaged in any way by this but thought it was worth mentioning as most people can successfully run theirs as a quadcore. I am writing this off of this PC in question. I installed Linux Mint onto a separate hard drive. The fact that (so far) this install seems to be working fine would make me think that there is just something wrong with the Windows install, but that would not explain the BIOS immediately going to a blank screen with nothing but a couple of ASCII characters on it. It goes to this screen on 1 out of ever 4 reboots.
So, I'm not sure where to go with this. I've been a PC tech/IT admin for 10 years now and have never had one of my personal system's CPU or motherboard fail. As a tech, I refuse to take my PC to a shop just because I do not have a processor to test out. For the price of a shop visit, I could just purchase a new CPU hah.
Edited by llamuh, 02 May 2010 - 06:04 PM.
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