Diagnosing a Machine Check Exception

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shadowbreaker513

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 15, 2005
Messages
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Earlier today I booted up my computer, hopped on vent with some of my friends, and went to go let my dog in from outside. When I came back, I saw on my moniter a BSOD with the message Machine Check Exception on it. The machine went to reboot itself like normal, except when it tried to........nothing. I turned the computer off, let it sit for a second and tried to boot it up. Nothing. Unplugged the power cord, drained the power, and went to boot it up for a third time. Nothing. Unplugged my extra hard drive. Nothing. Pulled out 3 sticks of my RAM. Nothing. I pulled out all 4 sticks to see if I could even get an error beep on bootup. Nothing at all. When I press the power button, everything spins up but yet nothing appears on the moniter. I did some research on Machine Check errors and it seems most are either overheating problems or some corruption between the motherboard and CPU. My temperatures are fine, and I even reapplied thermal paste a few weeks ago. I'm leaning towards the motherboard atm because I'm not getting error beeps.

Also, in what I believe is related, I had some isolated problems a few weeks ago with my computer. At a lan party I was fiddling with Trackmania Nations when after about 3 minutes of play, the screen would go ballistic and the computer would BSOD shorlty after. This happened the following time I tried to boot up the game as well. I uninstalled the game and thought nothing of it. Then last month when I got back from another lan party, my computer spontaneously shut itself off and rebooted twice. I figured this was due to overheating as I had not cleaned it in a while (this is when I reapplied thermal paste to the processor) and I cleaned the inside, reseated everything, and it has been working fine since.

Does anyone know of any way for me to try to further diagnose this problem? My computer is the most advanced in the house, so I don't have any other processors, motherboards, or Ram that I could use to test. I do have another PCI-Express video card, but from the way the problem has been acting, I doubt that is the cause.
 
Small bump and update. Just tried tossing in my spare video card (7950 GT, never been used, so compatable and working) and it still won't boot. I'm starting to hate life.
 
Kinda hard to troubleshoot when you have no other known good parts work with. Though I'd think its pretty safe to say that its either the PSU, CPU or mobo. Time to start calling your LAN party peeps to borrow some of their parts to weed out your problem.

Btw, did you reset CMOS?
 
Took the CMOS out of the computer for about an hour to reset it (unsure if there were jumpers/configuration of them) same result. Think a Thermaltake 480w would be able to support the computer log enough to try to get it to boot up? It's the only other PSU I have. None of my friends have the same socket motherboard or CPU I do, so I'd have to start dropping hundreds of $$ on new parts or RMA parts that may or may not work in a hope to that either the CPU or the Motherboard would be the problem and seeing as I'm in college and can't even afford to pay for shipping for RMAs, I'd really like to be able to fix this if at all possible.
 
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