680i/wolfdale bsod on os install

[ZeroOne]

I’m working on a friend’s alienware after he attempted a processor upgrade and motherboard replacement and am having a hard time trying to determine which piece of hardware is failing, and causing bsod's on windows installation. Looking for a 2nd opinion.

It’s an alienware with;
EVGA 680i (122-CK-NF67-RX) board – P32 bios
E8400 default speed, with alienware’s version of liquid cooling
2GB Patriot DDR2 800
9600GT
2x Seagate 7200.10, sata, 250GB HD’s (originally raid-0, separated for testing after BSOD’s started)
2x IDE dvd-rw

First, the board would reboot (on request, not randomly, like after saving bios changes) and come back with no video. After taking the battery out and clearing the CMOS many times, (and having to WAIT or it wouldn’t work) I realized EVGA sent this board with the fan removed from the northbridge heatsink. With a panaflo in place, the board would finally “act normal” for lack of a better term. So that was obviously overheating.

Moving on, I’ve tried installing vista and xp pro separately, on both, the raid-0 and each individual disk. Both bsod on first boot from the hd. Both disks have been removed and formatted in windows on a working machine with no problems, and tested independently with an XP install. Even replaced the sata cable & tried different ports. Same result.

Ran memtest86+ 2.01 from a USB floppy with no errors, multiple runs.

Occasional post error, “Keyboard error or no keyboard present”
(The keyboard is fine. Used in many systems.)

The BSOD errors for xp are (and remember, this is the first boot after installing from the CD);

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (STOP: 0x0A)

A driver corrupted pool memory used for holding pages destined for disk. (STOP 0xDE)

process1_initialization_failed (STOP: 0x6B)


My only guess is, bad motherboard? Maybe the southbridge overheated and is causing data corruption to the hard drives? I think the –RX at the end of the code means it is a refurbished unit.

Thanks for any input. I feel like I’ve tried everything but wanted a 2nd opinion before I have him RMA or buy a different board.