I blew something in the new machine I'm building. I couldn't get the os to install due to system halts and wildly fluctuating error messages and pretty much narrowed it down to the RAM. I replaced that and still couldn't get it to install. The system even began to freeze while working in the bios setup. The cpu temp (read off the onboard sensor in bios) said it was running in the high 50s c. Since this machine, running a 950 duron, runs at most in the high 30s, I started to question whether it might be possible that bios sensor was not real accurate and the cpu might, in fact, be running hotter. System halts might be explained by an overheating cpu. To that end, I removed the cpu, cleaned it up (per instructions on the Arctic Silver site), reinstalled it.............and nothing....absolutely nothing! No bios beep, no cursor, no evidence of drive activity, nothing. I also smelled a slight odor of burnt electrical equipment. Now my questions are: 1) did the cpu go? 2) did the motherboard? 3) both? 4) can I replace the cpu to see if that is the problem without damaging it if the mobo is bad? 5) the opposite of 4...can I replace the mobo without damaging it if the cpu is bad? I am (or was) using an Epox 8K3AE board, the 1.3 duron and a Volcano 5 ( I know that is a marginal hsf but its still rated by AMD as an acceptable unit for this cpu. This is really frustrating (my first catastrophic failure) since you obviously can't run any diagnostics on a machine that can't run or load a system. Any suggestions on how to procede and not wind up paying an arm and a leg for stuff I might not necessarily need? Thanks Mike

Sounds like you may not have had the clock seetings correct. Is this a jumperless motherboard? The best bet is to replace both the processor and the motherboard. If you want to try one first, I'd try the processor.