How do I know the difference between a dying CPU Socket and a dying CPU?

So basically I need to figure out how I can determine the difference between a dying CPU Socket and a dying CPU. I have limited money and I've narrowed down my diagnostics to either being a problem with the motherboard cpu socket or the cpu itself. Are there any symptoms that I should be looking for with either situation? My current symptoms are:

-Blue screen memory dump followed by event viewer stating a major hardware failure in processor core.

The problem is, I don't want to buy a whole new processor just to find out that the "processor core" problem was actually coming from the socket itself.

If I had to guess I would say it is a processor, because of the reference to the core. If you want to test, the only thing I could think of, would be to get another processor and stick it in and see if you get the same errors. Although, if you mishandle the processor, it could go very badly. It may be time to just get a new processor and motherboard.