Before I RMA...

[xMrBunglex]

i recently upgraded from an Asus P5W DH Deluxe to a new Intel Bone Trail. everything was great for the first three days - i had a nice stable 4.05 GHz and was very happy. then it crashed while i was running CoD4. i rebooted, ran Orthos, and it failed after 2 minutes. then i tried to reboot again and couldn't even make it into Windows.

i reset my overclock and was able to boot into Windows Safe Mode. i ran Orthos CPU test and the Blend test with no errors. rebooted and ran the Windows memory test from a floppy. again, no errors. i still couldn't get into Windows though. i reset my RAID array, created a new one, and tried to reformat and reinstall Windows. the computer crashed right at the final stage of Windows setup every time. i'm wondering if my south bridge fried. NB volts were never high - vFSB was at 1.325 and vMCH was at 1.450. i hadn't even tried to get an extreme overclock out of it yet.

before i go through the sometimes painful RMA process, i wanted to run this by you guys to see if i missed anything. here is what my troubleshooting has shown:

CPU: Intel E8400 was stable on my P5W before i got the new motherboard. i have since put the P5W back in, reinstalled Windows, and everything is running smooth.

Memory: 2 GB Patriot Viper Extreme DDR3 1600. i ran Orthos and the Microsoft memory test and got no errors. i don't have another DDR3 motherboard, so i don't know how else i can test it.

Power Supply: should be the last of my worries. if i can run games on my P5W and can't even boot into Windows with the Bone Trail, i'm assuming it isn't the PSU. Everest shows all volts within spec.

Hard Drives: no errors or warnings from the S.M.A.R.T. manager. i've never had any trouble with them before - and they're working well on my P5W.



so do you guys think i've gone through this well enough to request an RMA from Intel? i honestly don't want to return it if it's working and i'm just being stupid. i'm sick of building and rebuilding this computer, but i'll gladly put the Bone Trail back in if anyone can think of something else i should do to troubleshoot/fix the problem.

[bobov]

Try vFSB = 1.10v. 1.10v is default for 45nm cpu. Can you boot into windows @ 3.0GHz?

Edit:// If you cannot boot into windows @ default speed, then try to up vdimm a little bit. Also try to run 2Xsuperpi 32M to test memory. Sometimes memory pass memtest & orthos but fail in superpi 32M test.