I think you are correct, that it is either a dead motherboard or dead cpu. You have just about eliminated every other possibility, other than ram stick...or did you try other ram in it?Anyway, sometimes these things are not worth messing with anymore.Sometimes, the upgrade is forced on you, in a roundabout way.Hope the snow looks good on the hills over there. Here in the southeast tip of Missouri there is no snow (we don't ever get much) but it is just very very cold.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

Good morning Rhett:Later own this morning I will check and see what type of memory is in the other two computers in use at my house. It has been too long and I don't know if it is compatible with mine or not. If so, I will switch mine to my wife's and my wife's to the computer in question and see what happens. Unless this brings a pleasent surprise (which I don't expect), I am about through fighting this problem.I originally had two sticks of matched 512mb 400 memory, and added two sticks of 1GB matched memory some time ago for a total of 3GB. It is all the same family of memory and as per my MB Specifications. It has also worked flawlessly for some time. I wouldn't think all four sticks would have failed at the same time. I tried just the 512's, then the 1GB's, then singles (don't know if that is even supposed to work), switched slots, and every other combination I could think of.Thanks to info in a couple of other posts I made, I have discovered that mismatched video cards may have problems in dual PCI Express x16 Video slots. I was about to order an 8800XTX and 7950XT (or lesser secondary card) combination which it appears might not work. This may or may not need additional confirmation from knowledgeable sources with experience relative to such an application. I have tried to research everything I could think of and am about ready to bite the bullet and order the components for my new system.Weather has been beautiful for the past few days, but with temperatures hanging around 10-20 degrees. Last week it dipped down to zero for two nights. Now retired, I have feelers out for returning to Toledo Bend, Sam Rayborn, or Lake Livingston in Texas, or possibly Lake Rosemound outside of Baton Rouge which are a lot closer to my old stomping grounds until about sixteen years ago due to a job change. I don't know if I can talk my wife out of the mountains now though, although I think she has had about all the cold weather she wants to experience as well.Thanks for your interest and kind suggestions.RTH

Hi RTH,So sorry to hear it, I have been going through the same exact thing since Tuesday. Turns out mine was a Motherboard that went bad in the middle of a session, rebooted and she was just gone. I was like you sitting with an FX-57 but still dreaming of the E6600 chips...Well long story short, don't waste the time and effort diagnosing. I used Acronis True Image with Universal restore to get everything back...I took the old AMD FX system apart and got a new ASUS P5N32E-SLI Plus Motherboard, a E6600 and two gigs Corsair XMS DDR2 6400 C4 memory. I then put everything together, rebuilt my Raid array on the new mobo and booted into my Universal Restore Disk from Acronis. What it does is actually re-image your drive but remove the HAL and all your old h/w settings, run a repair install of XP and replace the HAL with the new h/w info. I switched Motherboard, processor and memory and I am back up and flying this morning without losing ANYTHING. I am in total disbelief to be honest... Only thing I am having to do is re-set my controller assignments.Now the interesting piece, an AMD FX-57 running dual 8800 GTX in SLI scored ~ 12k in 3dM05 and ~ 105k in AM3. Without any tweaking and NO SLI the E6600 and the 8800 GTX just pulled 15k in 3DM05 and 135,000 in AM3. I am just blown away and this is at stock speeds this thing just abuses my old system. Just take the hint from above and go for the upgrade. My big concern was my data and with Acronis I did not lose a single thing!Good luck RTH, Cheers,-Paul