Random restarts

V9

Right, I've been at this the entire weekend and I've come no closer to finding the problem, so heres the story.

I built my new PC on Friday, components are: Asus crosshair mobo, AMD 64 x2 4200+, OCZ Spec Ops PC6400 2gigs, Nvidia 7900gtx, Xion 500w PSU, X-Fi soundcard and a Samsung HDD, DVD drive is an old DVD drive from my old PC.

I formatted the HDD and installed windows without any problem, when it came to actually doing anything in XP, downloading, programs, games, even right down to right clicking on an icon, it would just switch off without warning. I had spoken to anti in great lenght about the problem and at first we thought it was temps, but this morning I checked the temps and they were in the late teens early twenties. I tried moving the DIMMS into different slots and it doesnt make much of a difference. I cant run memtest86 coz I dont have a workin floppy drive or CD-R drive.

I've drawn the conclusion that the problem can either be the RAM or XP itself. Any help would be fantastic.


Cheers.

8T8

Got a USB flash drive ?

Download this utility it will create a bootable USB drive select use internal DOS files and copy across the USB drive memtest .exe and run it from that.

Have you tried increasing the timings of the RAM ?

Saruman

Is it shutting down or restarting?
What does the event log say for the time it happened?
did you dissable auto reboot on error? By default the system is set to reboot rather than give you a blue screen.
Event log is your best bet for tracking it down unless its an actual hardware fault.

Avns1s

Sounds like it could be a hardware fault TBH. I was installing a number of a particular type of PCs recently and found a large number had MSI MOBO's which demonstrated the fault that you describe. The acid test was to open MS Word and type a little. After about 1/2 page, the computer would just shut down and restart. The solution, a new MOBO! apparantly.

V9

Cheers for all the replies, I read somehere that installing windows under RAID 0, 1 etc can also be a fault, anyone heard of this problem?

8T8

V!alli wrote:

Cheers for all the replies, I read somehere that installing windows under RAID 0, 1 etc can also be a fault, anyone heard of this problem?

No it shouldn't if everything is working normally, Windows should install atop any RAID array with supporting drivers. That said some RAID controllers are more buggy than others particularly NVIDIA ones, install XP without using the RAID feature and see if the system is stable or not.

V9

forgot to say I made a ather large noob mistake and forgot to stick cooling paste on the processor when I built it, but if the chip was burnt out with the PC start at all? let alone run for a few hours playing games? (I ran games when I had the paste applied)

8T8

V!alli wrote:

forgot to say I made a ather large noob mistake and forgot to stick cooling paste on the processor when I built it, but if the chip was burnt out with the PC start at all? let alone run for a few hours playing games? (I ran games when I had the paste applied)

Modern CPU's have a fail safe switch whereby if the CPU gets to hot they will auto shut down instead of killing themselves

As long as temps on the CPU are okay I can't see that as being the cause.

L31mr0d

V!alli wrote:

forgot to say I made a ather large noob mistake and forgot to stick cooling paste on the processor when I built it, but if the chip was burnt out with the PC start at all? let alone run for a few hours playing games? (I ran games when I had the paste applied)

:eek: dear god man... are you serious, thats your problem right there. feck sake put some thermal paste on that chip. Your system will randomly reboot when the cpu gets too hot... what are you using to monitor your temps. Idle temps in the late teens does not sound right at all especially without any TIM. Unless you live in the artic circle or something?

V9

L31mr0d wrote:

:eek: dear god man... are you serious, thats your problem right there. feck sake put some thermal paste on that chip. Your system will randomly reboot when the cpu gets too hot... what are you using to monitor your temps. Idle temps in the late teens does not sound right at all especially without any TIM. Unless you live in the artic circle or something?

I have paste on it atm, the average temp is about 28 to 38 degrees when idle, thats from the BIOS. I the moment I have one DIMM in a RAM slot and things seem ok so far. I got 5 hours in total from the the rig on Saturday so its hard to know. I checked the event viewer, what exactly should I be looking out for in the system faults? anything particular?

8T8

So going okay with on one DIMM installed, there is another possibility that it is a case of RAM incompatibility.

The RAM itself is fine just that the minor differences in whatever OCZ do to their product are not properly supported in the bios by Asus.

OCZ had some severe DDR-2 compatibility issues with the launch of the Intel 956 chipset and their premium RAM. The only way to test this theory is to borrow some RAM from someone else though or return the current RAM and exchange for something else.

You could try flashing the latest bios official or beta from Asus site for the motherboard and see if anything changes.

V9

update: I have one DIMM in atm and the PC has ran for a good five hours without crashing, I was able to play games and all. Im gonna assume its either the DIMM I took out, or as 8T8 said, incompatibility, I'll see how long I can keep going for

V9

Ok I've broken it down to a simple diagnosis, the longer I have the PC turned off, the longer it will go for. The temps on the CPU and mobo are 25/30 and 30/34 respectively. Any ideas?

8T8

V!alli wrote:

Ok I've broken it down to a simple diagnosis, the longer I have the PC turned off, the longer it will go for. The temps on the CPU and mobo are 25/30 and 30/34 respectively. Any ideas?

Absolutely none

I cannot think why it would do that or be the cause.

The only other suggestion which is a complete & total long shot is you take the PC apart completely and rebuild from scratch again.

Other long shot is borrow a PSU from another PC and test against that.

Anti

I have spent about 5 hours tlaking ot vialli now. Ive tried everything. Drivers, one dimm. bios. changing timings and clock speeds. Nothing seems to work. If ya can, borrow some ram, to rule that out as a problem, Failing that. RMA the whole fecking lot.

Saruman

V!alli i do not see any mention of what you found in the event logs? Did you look? See anything?

V9

nothing at all, from what I've found online it seems to be a ram incompatibility, I just may RMA the RAM for something else.

Saruman

That sucks!

dathiultaigh

Did u ever recieve a BSOD STOP error if so what was the 0x00... code

MEMTest is available in ISO format to burn to CD though I cannot recall were I DLed this utility.

Also u have a samsung HDD? How hot does it run as I have noticed my own spinpoint run's pretty hot compared to a WD HDD I have. Does your HDD ever not get detected on boot? Try a new HDD preferbly not a samsung. I had similar issues but I blue screened mostly within 15 mins came up with 2 different HDD's a WD and samsung SPC4000. I replaced the SATA cables with tougher shielded cables from Maplin and my WD HDD is fine since then but my Spinpoint always reproduces the problem wheather it be set as master or slave(not sure whats up with it) ).

Also check in the BIOS what speeds are set for SATA i.e. gen 1 or gen 2. Set it to the lower end and if you can set the jumper on the HDD to lower the sata speed also.