Is my CPU near death?

[Guest]

I'm getting ALOT of crashes in my games, like Vampire:The Masquerade, which shows the intro movie and then crashes to the desktop, or Baldurs Gate 2 (way too many errors to mention), or Heavy Gear 2... more crashes to the desktop.... basically, I think that a while back when I overclocked my CPU it was somehow damaged. It's now running back at it's normal speed (Celeron 333A). Is there a way of testing to see if it is screwed? I have already ruled out the Hard Drive (a 4 month old Seagate 7200rpm 30GB Barracuda) which has no errors, so I'm thinking CPU here. Please help!

 

[Guest]

Run specific hardware benchmarks. These will indicate(they will not tell you- you will have to infer) which component is malfunctioning. It could be your MOBO, Memory, CPU, a pci conflict, AND yes it could be your harddrive. Obviously start with your CPU, if you think thats the trouble.

Get some benchmarks, find out what they test, whether it's your hdd, memory sub system, cpu, etc. and see what they indicate. IF all that works out then time to trouble shoot your particular OS.

Good place to start is to search for benchmarks @ ZDNET.