Nerds: Malware, Overheating or P.S.

Man you guys are nerds! whatever the cause something that he did corrected the issue and all is well now ;)

while the CPU may be communicating directly with the RAM, as current AMD and Intel CPUs do, there is most definitely still a chip that serves the function of a northbridge. usually found adjacent to the CPU socket with a large passive heatsink on it. the i/o controller chip (which usually requires windows drivers) serves the function of PCI express controller, USB controller and handles I/O to all other parts of the motherboard.

for example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131767

see the thing under the blue square heatsink? that's the northbridge, or whatever you want to call it. the rectangular longer heatsink is covering CPU MOSFETS which are power supply circuitry for the cpu.

using that motherboard as an example, the chip in question is an AMD 970/SB950.

here's a functional diagram of a typical socket AM3+ board, in this case with an AMD 990FX northbridge and SB950 southbridge:

for the original poster, their motherboard has an nvidia nforce 520 MCP which serves the functions of northbridge and southbridge, including what appears to be integrated video. installing the latest nvidia driver will be required for the system to function correctly in windows.

RAM interface is traditionally known as Northbridge. Interface to ports and slow connects (such as USB) is done through what is traditionally known as Southbridge.

RAM interface is traditionally known as Northbridge. Interface to ports and slow connects (such as USB) is done through what is traditionally known as Southbridge.

the high thermal dissipation chip adjacent to the CPU socket which controls the CPU's interactions with all other peripherals and i/o devices on the motherboard is traditionally known as the northbridge. this hasn't changed. the main change is that in older intel and AMD CPU designs, the DRAM slots were communicated with through the northbridge.

when CPU designs changed to integrate the memory controller onto the CPU die itself, the DRAM slots became directly connected to the CPU socket, but the chip that is the northbridge continued to perform all of the other functions just as it always did…

many of the functions that were found in what was called a southbridge are now integrated into a single chip. for example here's a block diagram of the intel Z77 chipset which is for use with 22nm and 32nm second and third generation core i5/i7 processors (sandy bridge, ivy bridge) on LGA1155:

specifically what driver did you install? I bet it's for your motherboard's PCI-Express I/O controller chipset located adjacent to the CPU (the functional equivalent to a northbridge), not the CPU itself. And yes, you need to have properly updated drivers for all your hardware, motherboard included…

Proper drivers? Nonsense :P

Go to amd.com, mouse to the support tab.

Choose Desktop Processor from the first tab,
then Athlon 64 X2.
Choose XP for the OS

Or a combination of such and then from the list of the files available, look at the AMD Dual Core Optimizer. Thats what I installed.

Before I even found this, I flashed my BIOS, updated any driver I could find in my system whether it was my display, mouse or IDE/SATA controllers, checked for Video Card updates as I hate ATI graphics bloatware (but it was a cheap hdmi out card) and almost anything else I could physically see or from Device Manager as I didnt really think you could update a CPU. Last one I heard you could "upgrade" was changing from an SX to a DX (wooo math coprocessor - moving up in the world!).

I'm not exactly a computer newbie by any means but definitely not on the same geek level as you or Switch.

Man you guys are nerds! whatever the cause something that he did corrected the issue and all is well now ;)

Switch and TheWalrus, please rep this man as I cant. Or anyone really. Its my thoughts exactly.