either my msi a88xm-e45 or amd 7850k apu is damaged, what are my options?

[kn00tcn]

i posted this on hardwarecanucks due to having a newegg.CA question, but i'll post here as well

the mobo is from newegg on july30, i picked it up from mississauga (what a waste of time & gas money crossing the GTA)

the apu is from ncix on july22, i already used the thief code

-what is the newegg.ca RMA process? probably cant return it since it's over 2 weeks ago, i dont mind getting a replacement, but do i pay for shipping using their ups label? the best might be to go over there in person to swap

-i doubt the apu is damaged but you never know... anyone in the GTA have a spare apu i can borrow? or an a88x mobo

-i'm near a canadacomputers, i could just buy a second mobo for $5 more than i paid at newegg, but that probably means i'll have 2 of them since the newegg one would most likely be replacement only

why do i think one of these is damaged? 6 hour long story short, i cant boot with a gfx driver or load anything that uses the gpu, either it will reset the whole system when windows loads (even though bsods are set to not do that) or it will hard lock then artifact during any gpu load within seconds/minutes

lowering the cpu & gpu frequencies guarantees a boot, but still eventually hard locks with artifacts during gpu load

a couple extra things that point toward the mobo in particular are some very rare bsods with BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER, i think mainly when a restart is triggered, & some kind of electrical noise coming out of... either the socket or vrms or usb ports... it doesnt seem like mere coil whine, seems more unhealthy

 

[brandonwh64]

Are you using drivers from the disc or from the individual manufacturers website? Also do a full CMOS clear by either pulling the battery or going into the CMOS and loading defaults.

 

[kn00tcn]

Are you using drivers from the disc or from the individual manufacturers website? Also do a full CMOS clear by either pulling the battery or going into the CMOS and loading defaults.

14.7rc3, 14.4 whql, 13.30 kaveri launch beta

the whole usb/ahci/southbridge drivers are extremely confusing, starting with 14.4 amd said they removed them due to some unspecified issue & that they'll post them on amd.com... WHERE??

with the 14.7 stuff installed, i still had an unknown device called SMBus, while in 13.30 i see SMBus is one of the items that the catalyst package installs

i guess the one thing i havent tried is windows from scratch... is it possible that overdrive's autotune is trying to load the wrong clocks & voltages? (i managed to run it once early on, how ridiculous is that to require you to run autotune! i just wanted to see if CCC's temperatures are correct) i ran DDU, system restore, manually cleared amd/ati/ace/fuel folders & reg entries entries

how much would a newegg RMA end up costing? can i choose to return to my home address instead of original (their warehouse across the city) shipping address since i didnt pay for shipping in the original order?

::EDIT::

funny... it's all working today, i had some webgl demos running for a few min, hit 80 on both the cpu & gpu according to hwmonitor (is this even accurate? temps jump around a lot, gpuz's 0 degrees is hwmonitor's 40)

no more unknown device manager devices after installing the extra packages that came with 13.30 kaveri launch beta (except that video bloatware of course) + msi's renesance usb3 driver

could it have been some warm boot bug on the mobo due me doing a ton of restarts+bios changes? the cpu fan's wires were also touching the ram sticks yesterday so i moved the wire today

i guess the next step is to keep watching what it does, have it in use for hours, attempt to install 14.7rc3

NEW EDIT:

ENABLE C6 STATE IS THE PROBLEM, also possibly the heat on the southbridge

i can boot & put various loads on when c6 is disabled, otherwise it instantly restarts as soon as windows loads with c6 enabled

buggy bios? still chance of physical damage? i'm also thinking the electric noises i'm hearing are the PWM fan

i had only 1 freeze earlier today, during an hd tune error scan i had hwmonitor+taskmanager+this browser cpu burnin test open at 25% & 50%, then it froze when i clicked 100% load (obviously it cant actually use the whole multithreaded cpu, i was on firefox at the time)