Bizarre Athlon Crashes?

llatsni

I recently did some further modifications to my Comp. including upping the FSB to 140, which gives me a total of 1.35Ghz. I also put new (massive) heatsinks on my GF2.

so now sometimes (seems to be when I do something like VOB to AVI (divX) encoding - or - 3DMark) it just totally bombs, like I mean restarts itself, or it exits 3DMark back to windows, or sometimes (in Counter Strike) it gives me some weird blue screen memory error.

I've no idea whats going on (or if the differant crashes are related). have i just buggored my machine???

Hum.

Samson

I have been having similar problems;

Look here:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32778

I reckon this is a definite overheating problem due to pushing the Athlon a little bit too far.
I have lots of cooling in my case 3 fans plus my CPU heatsink and fan.
I was running at 1.4Ghz but it is stable today at 1.33Ghz and 55 degrees C.

I had a lot of reboots and weird crashes when I first got the Athlon 1.2Ghz because I was fu(king around a bit too much so I settled on 1.4Ghz.

I guess you will have to tune down the speed a fraction.

flamegrill

could this be a power problem?


with loads of fans and over clocking, maybe your powersupply just aint up to the job.

Samson

I did not consider this as I have a 300W PSU which should be plenty and just by bringing the clock speed down a fraction seemed to solve the problem.

Does overclocking your CPU use more power ?

phaxx

Slightly, yeah, but it's very little, as far as I know.

flamegrill

think of it this way, the recomended power supply is for a minimum of a 300 or 350 watt power supply. so if you have a 300 u are scraping the bare minimum.

so if you can get yer paws on a better power supply for testing it, do.

other than that. dont overclock it

JustHalf

Prfft!

I'm running an 1GHz TBird @ 1.4GHz, on a 250W PSU. So there! (it's all down to quality)

BTW Paul, check your temps first, on both the graphics card and cpu. Also make a note of the voltages on all lines in ViaHM, and the range which they and the CPU fan speed fluctuate, and let me know. Next, clock down your FSB to 133 and run it at 1333... see if it still crashes (you *might* be pushing that new RAM too much... you *DID* remove that old RAM first, yes?).

Post everything here. If and when I get my 431W PSU, I'll give you a lend of it to try it out.

llatsni

OH CRAP!!! OH CRAP!!! OH CRAP!!!

I just did some testing with prime95 torture test, while having VIA Hardware Monitor open. and too my horror I saw (after a few min in prime) that my voltages were all over the place!

My VCore even fluctuates (which just cant be good), but the biggest horror was my 5 Volt value (which for some reason is normally 4.95) dropping quite a bit (can't remember how much). My 12V has always tweatered a bit but it was going haywire.

This surely means I need a BIG PSU and not a stupid 250W right??

Oh and my temps are fine really:
CPU - Load: 48/23, Idle: 43/22 (today anyway)
GF2 - Load: 50/34, Idle: 47/32

JustHalf

I'll pop over with "my" 250W PSU, and give it a go. Why aren't you in college BTW?

Also, once I get my 431W PSU I'll let you try it out.

Giblet

While were on the subject of overclocking;
I've heard that a P4 wont overclock as well as a P3
i have a P4 1.4ghz and wnat to over clock it to 1.8 (or close to that)

Lemming

Originally posted by flamegrill
could this be a power problem?


with loads of fans and over clocking, maybe your powersupply just aint up to the job.

Not only do you want to check the wattage on your PSU, but you might want to start considering the Amps also. I'm currently building a 1.4GhZ TBird with a GeForce3, and I need not only minimum 300w PSU, but it also is going to need 14amps, and not 12. I'm not *entirely* sure on this, but you might want to check that little factor out??

Gerry

well watts = voltage x current, so it is all related. Giblet, you are referring to the current on the 3.3volt line. A decent 300w psu will have 14, 15 or up to 20 amps on this line. Most people don't know though, that many good quality 250 watt psu's have 14 on this line as well, and many crappy 300 watt psu's have only 12 amps on this line. I think that most motherboards depend mainly on the 5 volt line for cpu power though, and this is often the deciding factor with a top end athlon system. They need lots of clean power on this line.

llatsni

Em...

I was playing the max-payne demo last night and after a while it would crash back out to windows (like 3dMark) so I restarted and changed some bios settings, it lasted a few min longer but then it would system hang. I gave up after a while.

BUT!! Then this morning I booted my system and it went to the 100% on the blue progress thingy on the Win2k startup screen and just stopped dead. I rebooted a few times, modified (de-overclocked) some bios settings, to no affect. It will boot into Safe mode however, which is what really baffles me.

It could be a software prob after all????? Still I think I'll get the new power supply, and do a fresh re-install. again.

astrofool

win2k is more sensitive to system instabilites than a win9x OS is.

try reducing the RAM speed, cas latency, reduce agp to 2x, take out and reseat the graphics card, basically make sure everything is solidly in place and then unoptimise all bios settings to the default settings.

also, a 7mhz fsb overclock will yield little or no performance difference, the machine will already be limited by the speed of the graphics card, added to the fact that you're talking about 50mhz out of around 1300-1400mhz, you're talking about a 4% increase in speed, leading to about a 2% difference in real world use. Add to that fact that the ide drive will be running beyond spec, and it mightn't be worth it, esp. looking at the problems you're getting.

Overclocking is only really worth it, if you don't gain a noticable difference out of it, prices on chips are so low right now, there's no point in not buying a 1.4 athlon, which overclocks by about 100mhz, not that much really, unless you go for supercooling. + u're voiding any warranty you have on the parts, you'd want to make sure you're getting your money's worth out of it

having a hugely overclocked computer can be a boasting point, but if you spend most of the time trying to stabilise it, it's not really worth it.

if no hardware solution works, reinstalling win2k might be the only option, will fix mbr work here?