Are these toast?

So I cracked open my case to take care of the dust bunnies and I noticed these things on my mobo (see image) aren't lookin' so good.

I have no idea what they are but I'm sure they're not supposed to look like that. Blue-circled areas are the spots I'm concerned about.

My sig is accurate aside from the 3.8Ghz clock; I've backed it down to 3.6 due to the warm weather.

These are the only iffy-looking things on the board and I've recently noticed heavy artifacting while playing Battlefield 2 and memtest errors if I push the FSB back up to ~238MHz -- which never happened until recently.

Mobo is an ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe

Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated. =)

Anyone?

Just an update: after testing I've noticed a couple things -- the first being that if I clock everything (mem timings, FSB clock, etc) back down to the stock/default/auto settings, the artifacts dissapear from within BF2. I'd suspect my card is dying but the card's core temp never rises above 62c on full load. Speaking of temps, my CPU doesn't rise above 49c while running two instances of SP2004 (HT enabled) using the blend tests and the temp never goes above 55c when the CPU is O/C'ed to 3.6GHz.

After spending a little time reading the feedback on this board on Newegg, many people have mentioned problems with the South Bridge "burning out" due to poor grounding on the front-panel USB headers. I've used those headers a couple times but they're connected to a free PCI slot in the back, not in the front, and they still work perfectly. Could the image above be the result of shorting out the USB headers?

So what I've noticed so far is that I only get artifacts in BF2 when I up the FSB to 225 while locking the PCI/AGP bus to their default timings. I have a feeling my problems are the result of these little... thingies in the above image.

Any ideas?

MonroeM, I am not an expert by a long shot but when you mentioned artifacting my immediate thought was your video card is dying. Let me ask you this: When not playing a game do you notice any artifacting? When my card was dying it would artifact and then some but when not gaming it would rarely artifact. I think it has to do with the Load and BF2 will push a card to the limits.

I'm not sure if this helps but maybe it can lend some info.

The card showed slight artifacting during simply browsing through folders within Windows -- yes -- but loosening up the NVSilencer on the card immediately fixed that issue. So far I've never had a hard-lock while gaming and the artifacts completely dissapear when the system isn't O/C'ed.

It's a shame those pictures aren't any better. However, I would prolly suspect the mobo simply because of, what looks like, the solder letting go. This could be due to overvoltage or, more likely, poor soldering. ALOT of artifacting that people see isn't even related to the vid card. Memory, faulty busses, etc. can attribute to artifacting.

Artifacting in Windows, browsing folders? Not the card. You would had to have done some seriously wicked stuff to that card to damage the 2D side o' it.

Time for a new board bro'

if you are concerned about the solder joints, you could always reheat them up with a soldering iron and resolder them.

You should pull the mobo though to do this.

Thanks for the input fellas. I kinda figured this was a bad sign; I guess my next step is to try my luck w/ ASUS' crap-tacular customer support and RMA service.

Anyone have any suggestions for a replacement board? I've got a "64bit" LGA775 3Ghz P4 that I can use but I'm probably not upgrading anything else until I start gaming alot more.

Thanks again for the input. =)

I dont suppose you could post some better pics?

The brown stuff is excess soldering flux getting squeezed out at raised tempratures

As long as the solder joints are making contact, your good. i can't tell from the pics if the joints are actually coming loose or not.


~ Gos