Machine constant freezing, even after formatting

Mr. CooL ICE

M PC has been giving me heartbreak recently. It has a Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI mobo running an AMD Athlon 3500+ with twin Crucial 512Mb DIMMs, and a Club3D X800 based graphics card (also see my sig). It also uses a cheap PSU+case combo (XP4D, 400W PSU) and runs XP Pro+SP2. I mainly use it for games.

Last weekend, I got one or two blue screens of death (didnt bother taking note of error code), and later i turned on World Of Warcraft as usual, and five minutes into the game, the PC froze, but before doing so, the screen went blank, followed by changing to be in multicoloured squares. After this, it became unresponsive when booting up at the windows logon screen, but bootable in safe mode.

I realised there was an error with Symantec NAV, so I assumed my AV software failed and I got a virus, so I formatted and rebuilt it with XP Home Ed and also updated my BIOS (as i got the idea thats all it needed, not a format). I took it easy for a while, not running anything too intensive. Last night, after patching up WoW to the latest version, i played it, and 5 minutes into the game, same thing happened (but without the multicoloured boxes). I restarted, and the PC hung at the windows logon screen, but eventually got through it.

I thought I originally didnt have a virus and that there was something to do with running process-heavy games, so got the only other game i could get my hands on (i really only play WoW) and installed Colin McRae 4 and played that for half an hour. Nothing happened, it played perfectly without any freezes. I got out of the game, and tried WoW, and it froze, and I haven't been able to boot up since.

Any ideas? Would I need a new PSU?

jor el

It being a cheapo PSU, you may not get near the 400W stated os it could well be power related when running intensive games. Freezes like this can also often be RAM related. Any chance you can borrow RAM from somewhere else just to see if the PC boots and WOW plays?

branners69

deffo sounds like not enough juice or dodgy ram..

can you even remove a stick and see how you get on with just 512mb.. if you get on ok try the other stick!!

I had similar problems and had to replace a stick of ram..

ShiverinEskimo

i'd check that all your heat sinks are fitted properly too - specifically CPU and Graphics. Might be heat related.

zilog_jones

Might want to try out some stress testing first before coming to any conclusions. Not sure what's best for stress testing the graphics card - 3DMark maybe? But for CPU and RAM you can try running the "torture test" on Prime95 for a few hours and see if that kills things. You can also try memtest86 to check the RAM. (we could really do with a sticky regarding that kind of stuff...)

And do you have any other games to try besides the ones you mentioned? Has it only crashed when running WoW?

Smoggy

Also make sure you have all the latest drivers.

Mr. CooL ICE

Tried the individual sticks of RAM on their own and sure enough, one is fcuked. When that certain stick of RAM is alone in the PC, I cant boot as far as the BIOS, with a long, slow, repeating beep. According to the mobo manual, this is a DRAM error.

Thanks everyone. Ill keep updated if anything else weird happens

Mr. CooL ICE

Back again with the same problem...

I had to reinstall windows again, and had the PC working with the (good stick of) 512Mb RAM. I never ran any intensive applications until I decided to install Colin McRae this evening. This time, I was in the menu of the game, when it froze, like before. When I tried to reboot, it wouldnt let me get past the windows loading screen, where the screen went blank and everything unresponsive.

Is it possible (and/or usual) for both sticks of RAM to simultaneously become fcuked, and how can that affect windows being able to boot? Just to clarify, like all previous times that I ran a game to crash the PC, I havent been able to boot back to windows unless I reformatted. Safe mode is ok tho.

I was planning on buying a new PSU soon anyway (now that I have a summer job), but would it be worth it to buy a new 1Gb set of RAM aswell? I would try the PC with other RAM, but tbh I dont know anyone nearby with a PC with a socket 939-based mobo to try out my RAM/their RAM in my PC.

KamiKazi

Next time your booting up, go into the BIOS and check how much RAM the system is detecting.
Basic enough test, but you never know;)

Cuddlesworth

Can you do me a favour, I have a hunch as to why Wow wont work, but its only a small chance. Since its a fresh install, un-install the nvidia firewall. The background downloader is a bit-torrent program and I have seen this before.

Ohh and since nobody ever "see's" this : The nvidia firewall will cause so many problems installed but disabled. It needs to be un-installed.

Once againn it might not be this, but it sure is worth a try.

jor el

LordChessington wrote:

Is it possible (and/or usual) for both sticks of RAM to simultaneously become fcuked, and how can that affect windows being able to boot? Just to clarify, like all previous times that I ran a game to crash the PC, I havent been able to boot back to windows unless I reformatted. Safe mode is ok tho.

Possible certainly but likely, I'm not as certain. Weh you tried the DIMMs on their own, did you use the same slot on the mobo or did you leave them in their original places? It could possibly be one of the DIMM slots has become damaged, though I think this to be unlikely.[/quote]

I was planning on buying a new PSU soon anyway (now that I have a summer job), but would it be worth it to buy a new 1Gb set of RAM aswell? I would try the PC with other RAM, but tbh I dont know anyone nearby with a PC with a socket 939-based mobo to try out my RAM/their RAM in my PC.

Don't know, it's a bit strange that it's corrupting the Windows installation too, that sounds like some sort of hard disk error. Safe mode removes a lot of drivers and so on making it more likely to boot.

It could also be a motherboard failure. I had an Abit BP6 with somewhat similar problems. Turned out the hard disk controller was corrupting data as it read/wrote. I thought it was a bad hard disk at first until I checked the disk Linux system for md5 checksums on big files that I copied on and off it.

There's no easy way to prove any of this I'm afraid, the only sure-fire way is to replace components one at a time till it stops failing. Without spares or borrowed parts that'll be an expensive endeavour. If you're anywhere near Limerick I have a couple of PC2700 DIMMS you could test with.