Bossnass

I bought and assembled a system about a month ago.

Athlon 3500+ (x64) on a MSI nForce4 Ultra board. 4x512 of kingston ram. MSI 6600GT. 2x Maxtor SATA 200GB. Some generic card reader and dvd burner. Running Windows Media Center.

I played a monster session of games last night. A couple hours of AOE3, followed by about an hour of HL2. I wasn't overclocking, but the system got a little hot, speedfan gave me a warning when I hit 50*C. I didn't think it was a big deal. It shut down without any problems last night.

This morning, it hangs on the inital post. On initial powerup, I get the 'ok beep'. A bit of a header, then a line that reports that my processor is what it is, but doesn't proceed to perform any other checks. I can't hit F2 or F8 to enter boot menu or bios. Nothing happens.

Unseating everything and reseating does nothing. No ram gives me the expected beep error. Minimal system; processor, one stick of ram (checked all 4 individually) with only my master hdd (non-raided) and video card doesn't seem to change anything. Plugging in an old working ide drive. Nothing. Same when trying to boot to a usb jump drive (once I reconnected the front usb port). I don't have another pci-e video card to check, but I am getting a picture on the screen, so I suspect it isn't the problem.

So I think it is something on the motherboard, not entierly dead, but something problematic. I believe that my northbridge was the sensor that was reading hottest.

What else should I think? I want to be pretty sure of myself when I go to exchange the board.