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Can CPus carry viruses?

rousha

rousha

rousha

Associate
Joined
25 Aug 2006
Posts
7
Location
Oxford
I have a problem with an Athlon 64 754 3400+ CPU.

I have an Asus K8V-X running a Sempron Athlon 64 3400+ with 256 L2 Cache. It was going great -no problems.

I have this other chip same again but a straight Athlon 64 which should be better because it has a 512Mb L2 cache so I swap them and now the PC refuses to boot. The fans fire up but I notice that no light is flashing on either the master ODD or FDD one only flashes on the slave ODD.

I have tried clearing the CMOS but still no joy.

Could this CPU have a virus which has infected the BIOS or IDE controller preventing the PC from booting and if so is there a cure?

:confused:
 
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Can CPUs carry viruses

Ok - I did not think they could but I have refitted the old chip back in and guess what - the PC now exhibits the same symtoms as the duff chip and won't fire up other than the fans , lights etc no bleeps nothing.

I should also mention that this chip did the same thing to three other motherboards one a Gigabyte GA-K8VT800, also a GA-K8U and the other an Asus K8VT800 :confused:
 
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Absolutely certain. Every one of these motherboards have shown the same symtoms after installing the duff chip and I have been unable to recover any of them! :confused:
 
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Good advice and of course I definitely wont be testing the faulty chip again (I'll be dumping it shortly after prising off the heatsink to use on an Athon 64 mobile 3000+ ) but the issue is how to recover the situation using the good chip? Any ideas gratefully received. ;)
 
I remember reading something a while back whish said that one of the risks of diagnosing hardware problems by using the parts in another PC, is that if a part is "bad" it can wreck the whole computer and will do the same to every computer you put it in.

solution: stop putting that CPU in other machines, it's "bad"
 
Well that certainly happened here. But why did it do it? What was on that chip that caused the PC to go haywire and stop booting? Could it be a virus?
 
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rousha said:
Well that certainly happened here. But why did it do it? What was on that chip that caused the PC to go haywire and stop booting? Could it be a virus?
Click to expand...

No it cannot be a virus.

Most likely there is a short in the chip that is frying the motherboards, and when you try it in a new motherboard, it shorts it again.

Throw the chip in the bin, throw out the broken motherboards and learn a very important lesson. If you repeat a sympton when testing for a fault, as you did by trying another motherboard, realise the fault is with the part transferred over and do not screw up any more motherboards!!!

It'll end up costing you a fortune!!
 
virus can fit inside cpu l1 or l2 cache. but that means the virus needs to be coded very well. but either way when power is removed from cpu the data in its cache's can not be saved by conventional means.
 
Thank you for this valuable input . OK I have learnt the lesson but hey it's tricky knowing whether its 's the motherboard or the chip that faulty. It has taken me four mobos to work out it is the chip! I just hope they keep replacing them! :rolleyes:
 
That doesn't mean it breaks the hardware, rather that it uses low level information about the processor itself to evade some operating system protection. Just like the hyper-threading exploit last year did on P4s.
 
Well that being the case is anyone interested in taking this AMD Athlon 64 754 socket 3400+ off my hands (minus heatsink as I need it for the 3000+ mobile chip to avoid modifying the heatsink support bracket) to look further into this phenomenon. I will post it free of charge to the first person who wants it! :D
 
this thread caught my attention. i have had a problem with a mobo and cpu. i was gonna borrow a mobo off some one to see if it was the cpu but now i dare not do it incase i fry their mobo. would you guys assume it wise to either take the parts to a repair shop or somewhere that specialises in checking them or get in touch with the company who created the hardware?
 
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