Best way to check out hardware / BIOS problems?

[David Hamilton <david@bearoak.com>]

I have two systems that crash regularly while running slink.  I
suspect that this is probably hardware-related, but I can't see any
evidence of it in the logs.  Does anyone have any suggestions for
checking out these problems, preferably at a low level?

The hardware is fast and reliability improves if I turn off both
internal and external cache, although performance dies when I do that.

The majority of the crashes seem to be related to video (Matrox
Millenium I), since the X server dies a few times per day.  Netscape
seems to crash most often, sometimes bringing down the X server.  The
X server dies once for every 5-10 Netscape crashes.

The video card is PCI, but is a couple of years old.  There is also an
ISA bus Ethernet card.\

The two systems have the same symptoms, but have different
motherboards, CPUs and configurations, yet both have similar
symptoms.\


Any suggestions?

--dh