I am helping a friend diagnose his PC problem.
When under load the PC will power down after about 5-15 mins and will need to stay powered down for a few mins before it will even power back on.
I have an almost identical set up, for all intents and purposes the only differences are PSU, motherboard and the HDD
I have stress tested the cpu and gpu in both towers, only the DS3P mobo system powers down.
I updated from the F1 bios to the only other bios available (a beta bios) and the problem remains.
Windows has been reinstalled several times and on a second HDD, problem remains.
Installed all the latest drivers after clean installs of windows... problem remains.
WhoCrashed reported a few errors regarding corrupt RAM address and told me that nvidia driver caused the problem but I have reinstalled them multiple times and on fresh OS installs. I replaced the RAM and stress tested them with no issues.
From some reading I done today I discovered that the North bridge controls communication between cpu, gpu and memory. So could an overheating northbridge corrupt data being sent to/from GPU and Memory.
Right before a power down during a stress test all temps (taken from CPUID HW monitor) were normal but north bridge temps aren't reported. When the PC powered down it would not start back up again and when I touched the NB heat sink it burned my fingertip. Is this normal or have I found the culprit of crashes?
Mobo: GA-970A-DS3P
PSU: OCZ 750w 80+ Bronze
OS: win7
CPU: FX-8350
GPU: Gigabyte Windforce GTX 770