Ok, the story goes like this..
I have an Athlon 64 3400+ CPU
On an MSI K8N Neo3-FSR (MS-7135) Motherboard
Running Windows XP with SP2
(and 512 RAM but i'll have to deal for a while untill I upgrade)
About 4 months ago I started experiencing some sudden shut downs whenever I was running something heavy like certain fullscreen 3d games, certain 3d Studio Max operations that needed a lot of processor, heavily animated Adobe Flash 9 clips and also running youtube videos inside Google Earth while having the 3d enviroment on the background (videos worked fine in webpages)
I noted it happened specifically in those cases so I assumed the problem was in the processor.
I downloaded several different small applications to monitor the processor.
So, I saw it was running at the speed it was supposed to run, 2.2Ghz or so..
but it was really hot, oscillating around 40c - 60c both the processor and the smaller processor thing (forgot the name, a smaller chip that has a small fan in these motherboards) the smaller one was even hotter, I touched the heatsink and it was REALLY hot..
I confirmed it was a temperature problem by loading these heavy programs and watching the temperature rise in the CPU monitoring app.
The overall motherboard temperature reached peaks of 90c instants before the computer shut down. CPU reached about 60c.
I thought it could be a driver problem since I downloaded the MoBo's drivers from the internet since I didn't have the drivers CD
I checked at some webpage that checked all the hardware drivers for updates and among the supposedly outdated ones was my CPU (the rest were things like PCI bus stuff and irrelevant things)
So I came to AMD.com looking for updates and I could only find this AMD_Processor_Driver_1320053 update which is supposed to regulate the voltage and performance of the processor automatically.
I installed it, I saw the installer install quite a lot of things and at the end it said my amdk8.sys driver was newer than the one in the update and wasn't going to be installed. But... it did affect the configuration, because I rebooted and in the next windows session I opened the AMD Clock application,
and it said no longer 2.2GHz
But now it was 800 MHz...
I haven't tried to uninstall the AMD_Processor_Driver_1320053 update because at least right now I am able to run all these heavy applications and it is no longer giving any problems, but I can feel the processor performance went drastically down, scrolling down in certain webpages now feels choppy, as well as scrolling around google earth and I even heard a glitch in an mp3 when I had several windows open and maximized a window. So I see it definetly did changes in the configuration in some way, and it is likely running at the speed it says it is running, 800MHz...
This is a quite frustrating because I know this MoBo and CPU have a high performance but I think it might be missconfigured either at the Bios or here in Windows drivers..
Right now I also have "Cool and Quiet" running from the BIOS settings, it wasn't enabled all these 4 months while I experienced the shut downs.. I guess that helps but it's not supposed to decrease performance so much right?
Any help would be HIGHLY apreciated.
If you need more specifications just let me know.
Kind Regards,
Roberto.
