I had a similar prob, not soo bad, XP went belly up, and no OS would install. Finally throttled AMD T-Bird to 500MHz, and installed from there everything was OK. Then I thought about checking the CPU Temp, would you believe that 500MHz was 50 degrees C, and 1000MHz was borderlining on optimium egg cooking temp around 75 to 80 degrees. Now I have Arctic Silver on the heatsink and it cant get past 40 degrees.
Had the processor running for a year before this, the original thermal compund had some paper over it which I removed, when I realised what it was covering it had always run hot, about 60 degrees, as it was in the way of the heatsink and the compound.
Oh yeah thanks for the tips Bytes, I think I may have a failing MB in an ME machine, it has random lockups, it is an Abit BX6 r2, is there any software that I can use to check it?
Hope your PC gets back and working cam.
Also could the MB have fried the RAM, what kind of system(inside the box) temp do you usually get.
Another thing one time I had a prob with my PC, and I removed everything nothing was connected to the MB except the PSU and the power switch, I turned on and then off, then everything was working again. No probs since.