Memory errors from burning MOSFET?

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Dec 23, 2010
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I have an ASUS P5Q-Pro. I was trying to remove a noisey MOSFET fan from the assembly that is connected by heatpipe to the NB cooler when the whole MOSFET heatsink assembly tilted slighty. I imagine this would compromise the thermal compound underneath. I pushed it back down . . .

Afterwards I got 3 BSODs in windows claiming different drivers as the culprits: Video driver, mouse driver and a different video driver file. I thought that this sounded like a memory addressing error and not really a software problem.

So I fire up MEMTest86+ v4.0 and the error count quickly shoots up over 5k errors and counting. Citing problems in all memory modules. This leads me to believe that I have borked my motherboard somehow.

Does anyone have experience with situations like this? Can I reapply thermal compound to my North Bridge\MOSFET and expect to recover from this? Would an overheating MOSFET cause thousands of memory errors? Do you think my memory exploded and this is all just coincedince?

Any positive feedback would be appreciated. I would like to avoid buying a new motherboard but that is the direction I am leaning. I need to get this fixed before I have a blue christmas :(
 
If power isn't stable then electronics won't work right, memory errors are one of the more obvious manifistations of that. And if voltage regulators are overheating their output is likely to be unstable.

You can try putting the heatsink back. Whether it helps depends on whether there was sufficiant overheat protection to prevent permanent damage to the regulator circuit or not.
 
Thanks! I'll reapply some thermal paste and try to get the heatsink attached as well as I can. I'll wash my plugs while I am at it. I certainly hope I haven't melted my poor MB. I did check my Temperatures in the BIOS and it looked like my NB was at a normal temperature. I don't have a thermometer for my MOSFET.
 
Well it must not have been blown. I got it working again. I made sure that the heatsink is making good contact and I added a chipset fan to the NB. No memory errors and no BSOD.

I hope it holds out. I would rather not buy a new MB.
 
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