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Core i7-2600K bad? Diagnostic available?

idata
Employee
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I have an i7-2600K installed on a MSI Z68A-GD80 (B3) board that quit booting Windows 7 the other day. The boot would proceed to the point where the four color swatches start swirling around to make the MS flag and then the screen freezes and nothing more happens. The system will boot Memtest86+ v4.2 and that reports no memory problems after running for many hours/passes. I have stripped the system of everything but one 4Gb stick of memory, the SATA DVD drive and a new/blank/different HDD than was present when the problem started. The video card has been removed and I'm now using on-board video. The lasted available version of the BIOS was flashed and both the default BIOS settings and also a BIOS configuration with most hardware disabled have been tried. Different SATA ports have been tried as well as SATA and IDE modes. Still the behavior does not change.

I've created both 32 & 64 bit Ubuntu boot CDs and both will start to boot but hang. A "FalconFour's Ultimate Boot CD" will boot and display a menu but both the miniXP and mini Linux environments hang when I try to start them. Windows 7 & Windows XP installation disks hang after a minute or two of starting up.

I do not have a compatible second CPU or motherboard to swap into the system to check if that helps.

So far I have only found versions of the Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool that run under Windows.

Is there a stand-alone version of it (or something similar) or one that will run under DOS available?

Are there other troubleshooting steps I should be trying?

Thanks!

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idata
Employee
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I'm not familiar with your system, but I'd like to ask you with regard to the memory stick. For systems such as yours or other systems in general there should be a pair of memory sticks. Why use one stick?

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idata
Employee
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Why just one stick? Very simple. When troubleshooting you want to reduce the system to the absolute bare minimum number of components that are required to for it to run. Back when this particular system was functional (it worked for a couple of months and then one day it would not reboot and no hardware had been changed) it used four of these DIMMs.

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idata
Employee
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It turned out that the problem was a Dell U473D USB keyboard. The keyboard somewhere along the way decided to die just enough so that windows would not boot while it continued to work well enough to navigate the BIOS and the various DOS utilities I messed with while trying to diagnose the problem.

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