Lots of blue screens, hot motherboard components

[twinnie]

I've been having no end of trouble with my machine lately and I'd like some reassurance before I go splashing money out. I've been getting the blue screens in Windows and I've been getting all sorts of feedback from it, mostly surrounding drivers and memory errors, most often the wireless card but sometimes from software such as Visual Studio and Soluto. I've installed both of those and swapped the wireless cards around as well as removing the RAM chips one at a time.

The main issue indicating that it could be the motherboard is that my machine is tri-booting W7, Ubuntu and OSX86 and they're all crashing. They're all running off different HDs and the Windows drive is the only one that all the OSs would mount and OSX will only read from it so unless the Windows drive is REALLY stuffed it don't think it's a wonky HD.

Earlier today I left Ubuntu running with the intention of remoting into it from work to run a few tests but I couldn't connect and when I got back it had crashed out on a black screen which is what it seems to like doing. I pooped open the case and the north and south bridge were blazing hot and the CPU was pretty hot but not so bad, maybe down to the great big heatsink on it. I'm also concerned about the CPU being damaged but since it's booting fine and not choking the instant I power it on I'm crossing my fingers I got away with it.

Can anyone give me any insight into this before I grab another motherboard off eBay? Cheers.

 

[Skippy27]

If it is heat releated then it will typically do it at about the same time every time (assuming same workload). So if it does it after about 10 mins every time, then chances are that is your issue.

You can then try opening up your case and putting a fan right on the MB and see if it will last longer than normal.

Also, have you reviewed your event log and actually looked at the minidump files that are created with WinDbg? Being that it is happening on all 3 OS's there is a good chance it could be MB related, but it could also possibly be a component so eliminate as many of those as you can.

 

[twinnie]

My case is pretty well ventilated, I was thinking that the heat is more of a symptom than a cause. I generally can't run the computer for long enough to do much diagnosing under Windows but I have looked at the minidumps and it's just drivers and dodgy but I think I've pretty much ruled them out.