Why do I now BSOD in every game, but never during a stress test?

[Centauri]

A thought; could having gotten a teeny, tiny tiny bit of thermal grease (AS Alumina) on the pins of the CPU have caused all of my problems? I used a small brush to get off what I could without bending pins and what was left was small enough that you'd really have to look at the CPU pins under the right light and with a good eye to see it.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Hey, on the plus side you've got a good reason to check out Richland now!

 

[Engineer]

Edit: Oops, thought this was an NVidia thread. Sorry.

 

[raildogg]

Check out your memory as well. Run memtest 86 overnight.

 

[Engineer]

Check out your memory as well. Run memtest 86 overnight.

Would recommend memtest86+ over memtest86 at this point. I think memtest86 is outdated.

 

[Silverforce11]

A thought; could having gotten a teeny, tiny tiny bit of thermal grease (AS Alumina) on the pins of the CPU have caused all of my problems? I used a small brush to get off what I could without bending pins and what was left was small enough that you'd really have to look at the CPU pins under the right light and with a good eye to see it.

... thermal grease on cpu pin..

affects conductivity. gg.

 

[MeldarthX]

Silver is right; you're lucky you didn't blow the chip - have you fully cleaned the chip?? used a tim's remover on the pins?

 

[Rvenger]

Was that the issue?

 

[Centauri]

No, it wasn't. I just did a cleaning of the pins.

I have superb vision (with my contacts on) and under very bright light it was very, very difficult for me to find the pins that I knew had some thermal compound on them. Took a paint brush dipped in alcohol to them and spent another several minutes under bright light trying to find any missed spots, didn't see any.

Put the system back together and booted up, still at BIOS defaults, to the same black screen with artifacting that I'd had before.

Tried a few more times to the same result. Tried again removing one of my DIMMs and... I'm posting from said PC now.

I'll give it a few more hours before I jump to any RAM conclusions, but it's certainly a suspiciously coincidental fix. Sucks too because I ran memtest86+ a few weeks ago for a good 12 hours without one error. Worse further is that these Patriot DIMMs are actually the replacement for a prior set with problems. Not sure they're gonna RMA me twice if stuff winds up being the problem.

Worst of all is that as I made the post prior to this, I ordered another 5800K from Amazon which has already shipped.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

No, it wasn't. I just did a cleaning of the pins.

I have superb vision (with my contacts on) and under very bright light it was very, very difficult for me to find the pins that I knew had some thermal compound on them. Took a paint brush dipped in alcohol to them and spent another several minutes under bright light trying to find any missed spots, didn't see any.

Put the system back together and booted up, still at BIOS defaults, to the same black screen with artifacting that I'd had before.

Tried a few more times to the same result. Tried again removing one of my DIMMs and... I'm posting from said PC now.

I'll give it a few more hours before I jump to any RAM conclusions, but it's certainly a suspiciously coincidental fix. Sucks too because I ran memtest86+ a few weeks ago for a good 12 hours without one error. Worse further is that these Patriot DIMMs are actually the replacement for a prior set with problems. Not sure they're gonna RMA me twice if stuff winds up being the problem.

Worst of all is that as I made the post prior to this, I ordered another 5800K from Amazon which has already shipped.

They'd have to RMA it 1000 times if it's under warranty.

I hope it's your ram!

 

[Centauri]

With only one DIMM, the system is definitely more stable, but I still get hangs and blank screen at StarCraft II's menu.

NB/IMC?

 

[WaTaGuMp]

Well it appears my 7950 was causing my BSOD etc etc. Swapped it out for another, no issues yet. Doesn't overclock at all, so I ordered a Sapphire and will take this one back when my other arrives. One bad Gigabyte card and one poor overclocker, disappointing to say the least. Gonna work out well though, better card coming I hope and cheaper, also comes with the games.

 

[Centauri]

I actually considered ordering a discrete card to see if it solves my problems, but APUs are so weird that if I've damaged some part of it then I wonder what other functions will be affected.

 

[Centauri]

I love living in Tucson; Amazon's distribution regionally is out of Phoenix. Ordered the A10 yesterday afternoon with Prime shipping and it arrived this afternoon.

And the verdict is in; I definitely fragged the APU. The new one is running solidly for the past half an hour at overclocked settings.

Weird thing too, I kept toying with the old one this morning and noticed that one DIMM installed bought me more stability than both, but putting both back in and disabling interleaving did as well. So I definitely started to suspect it was a north bridge/IMC issue.

Lesson learned. Over 1.525v~ to the northbridge of the desktop variant of a laptop processor = bad idea.