I've got a problem with a gaming rig and figured I'd throw out everything that's going on with it to see if you guys come to a similar conclusion as myself.
First of all, rig specs:
CPU: AMD Phenom II 965 BE
MB: MSI 890GXM-G65
HD: Samsung F3 500GB
RAM: GSkill 8GB (4x2)
VID: Asus 460GTX
PSU: Corsair 850HX
OS: Win7 Pro x64
That really should cover what needs to be known from a hardware perspective, also I don't overclock so nothing goofy as far as that is concerned. I haven't used this rig that much as of late due to work keeping me really busy. So about 2 weeks ago I added another HDMI device to the entertainment center. I had the PC hooked up to the TV via HDMI but figured I could go back to VGA. I swapped out the cabling and fired the PC up, no problems, except I soon realized that I had problems. When visiting sites such as gmail.com I would get a blue screen (afd.sys and 0xd1). I also was unable to open any exe files that I had downloaded AFTER the cable swap (APPCRASH). I don't have any of the files anymore, so ya really can't help me here, but keep reading.
Prior to the cable swap it had probably been 2 weeks or so since I had fired the rig up.Well, the only change I had made was the cable swap, so I went back to HDMI and at first thought all was well, but the same symptoms were still there. I should also mention that the blue screens occurred with IE, Firefox, and Chrome.
Now is probably a good time to mention that about a year ago we had a very very close lightning strike. My wife was using her netbook and got sparked when it hit. I was on my office rig and my screen turned white. After that strike the onboard NIC to this rig went South. It was always recognized but you couldn't get it to work. For a while I could enable/disable it repeatedly to get it going. I picked up a DLink E100 USB NIC and was a dummy and didn't realize it wasn't Win7 compatible. It does work perfectly using the Vista x64 drivers, so no complaints really. The point of bringing this up is that I believe the 0xD1 blue screens could be network related, at least that's one path my research led me down. I had the onboard NIC disabled and tried the USB NIC in several other rigs and it works perfectly there. I did this to eliminate that piece of hardware as a potential problem.
During all of this NIC testing I was running scans against the rig. I had M$ SE and Superantispyware and ran complete scans with each. I also ran the AVG Live CD, as well as scans from several AV programs on a UBCD4Win DVD. None of my scans produced any results (other than tracking cookies) which is what I would expect. This rig is pretty light weight and other than some occasional light surfing it's used for gaming or playing DVDs.
At this point I'm still torn between this being a hardware issue and a software issue. I nuked the drive and re-installed the OS - same issues. Poof - DVD drive no longer works. It's recognized by the MB, I see it during POST, but I no longer can boot from it. I plug the SATA cable into a different port and hey, the DVD drive is back (for now). Like most of you (I'm sure) I keep plenty of tools laying around. Once I got the DVD drive back and realized that a fresh install of the OS still had the same behavior of a possibly infected install I pretty much ruled out a software problem. Next I throw a Ubuntu Live CD on and experienced frequent app crashes. Luckily it's a modular OS, so everything didn't go down when one app failed, but it was pretty bad. In fact I've never seen it that bad before. I also threw Knoppix at it and kept getting kernel crashes - was totally unusable for this problem.
So in the back of my mind the whole time is the lightning strike and the already failed onboard NIC.
Now to eliminate hardware. Removed the vid card and enabled onboard vid from the motherboard. All behavior still exists.
Removed HD, ran Ubuntu Live CD - still unstable.
Ran Memtest against the RAM - 9 passes each module - 0 errors. I'd say RAM is fine.
[Edit: Also tested the CMOS battery - holds steady at ~ 3.087 V]
So that leaves me with pretty much the MB and the CPU. My hunch is that it's the MB (remember the lightning?), but I don't have definitive proof. Thoughts?
And my apologies for this long of a post this early in the morning.
[Edit#2: I noticed a high pitched sound coming from the MB speaker prior to the POST beep. It's high pitched but quiet - and I've never heard that sound from a MB before. Not sure if that helps or not. Heck, it could have been there the whole time and I probably wouldn't have heard it. I just happened to have the guts pulled apart and noticed it.]
