[Fishie36]

Ugh... all the nightmares past are coming back to me. I just changed my motherboard and PSU and now my comptuer locks up left and right. New motherboard is a EPOX ep-8hmmi-a and the new power supply is an aspire 450W with duel rails.

Basically what happens is... everything on screen just freezes without a sound and the hard drive stops working but still spins. All the fans run and the system stays powered on but it will not respond to anything but the reset switch. The cause of this appears to be pure randomness: it will happen when going through my documents folder or when running prime 95. The first time it happened was while installing windows. During the GUI part it just froze, but I restarted the comptuer and it continued. Since then, it froze in windows about 6 times in the last 3 hours.

The problem is, I don't know what's causing it or even what's happening! Since there's no crash or error report I'm left dumbfounded. I took a ton of readings including temperatures and voltages so maybe you guys can point out something that looks off.

Temps: Idle: 36C, Load (never gotten a load for more than 4 minutes without a freze so it might not be full load yet): 52C. That's quite a step up from my other motherboard and power supply which had a load of 32C after gaming for hours.

Voltages (measured with digital multimeter):

Line hooked to 120mm led fan and temperature display (12V): Idle (/w cool'n'quiet): 12.28, Load (ATT artifact scanning): 11.88

Line hooked to video card (12V): Idle (/w cool'n'quiet): 12.3, Load (ATT artifact scanning): 11.79-11.8

Motherboard Power connector:

3.3: Idle: 3.28, Load: 3.25
5: Idle: 5.21, Load: 5.2
12: Idle: 12.28, load: 11.88

Other than that I really don't know what to check. I'm writing to you now on the PC, so it's not so bad that I can't do short tasks. I would try my old 500W ultra and see if that fixed it but unfortinately the 20 pin and 4 pin motherboard connectors are too bulky and hit eachother. All the rest of my parts are in my sig, minus the motherboard and PSU, of course.

Oh and the ratings on the PSU sticker are:

+3.3V: 31A
+5V: 28A
+12V1: 14A
+12V2: 16A

That's all I can think of. If you need more detail, let me know. If you can help me work this out I will rep you for every helpful post you make!

 

[Fishie36]

Maybe I've found the problem! I know this was way too complicated for you guys so no one even responded

I usually speak too soon, and I probably am now, but I think I've located and fixed the problem with two strokes of the keyboard and a small loss in memory performance. After noticing that 754 only supports two double sided sticks of ram at 166Mhz, I decided to try 166 Mhz even though my last board ran fine at 200Mhz. Well this seems to have done it! I've only given it about a half hour of prime 95 /w 3D torture tests running at the same time and it hasn't flinched yet.

The only problem I can see now is my cpu is getting extremely hot! I have both sides and the top off of my new cube PC (asire x-qpack) but my CPU is currently at 51C! With my last motherboard I was getting 32C so maybe I'll take it out and see if I can find the problem. Any ideas before I do as to why the temperature is so high?

EDIT: I just had a thought. Does AS5 go bad? I've had this tube for over a year now and recently it gave my friend bad temps too when he put it on. He was getting 60C with his A64 2800 and stock cooler. Now I am getting 51C with my A64 3200 and 7700ALCU. Anyone know about this?

 

[Fishie36]

I feel like I'm talking to myself today

Maybe I need a blog. Anyways... I reseated the CPU cooler and that seems to have helped temps a bit... now I'm getting 36C idle and 46C load... not too bad. It will have to work since I don't know of anything else to try.

 

[The Duke]

The age of the AS5 is interesting actually. I have some older AS5 but I'v not used it... perhaps your inquiry has some good merit!
Just remember very thin to win... to much is a bad thing!

 

[Fishie36]

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Duke The age of the AS5 is interesting actually. I have some older AS5 but I'v not used it... perhaps your inquiry has some good merit! Just remember very thin to win... to much is a bad thing!

Actually when I added a bit more the temps went down! So I dunno... maybe I had too little before but it was enough that the heatsink spread it to the edges of the cpu without my assistance. And the temps went back up a little since I put the cover on... now it's idling at 39C.

 

[The Duke]

I will take atleast 3 days before it starts to cure and the temps drop because of that!

 

[vip3r87]

well, what you could possibly try is updating your motherboard bios. There is no harm in it, even if it doesn't fix your problems. I would do it though, takes about 5 minutes, and can be done through windows(atleast for my asus board)

Please try it, I am curious, it might be a bios revision error for the lack of OC?

(forgive me if this doesnt make sence lol)