Important to remember: I use XP Professional SP2. I'll start off about a year ago. I was simply, a foolish kid (still am, to be honest) but I knew nearly nothing about the consequences of a bad overclock. Around July 2008, seeking an overclock for better Crysis performance, I took someone's advice and changed the NB voltage on my Asus P5N-E SLI to 1.56v and the PCIE Clock to 125 Mhz.
Apparently, I didn't change a single thing that would improve performance, but rather just took some stupid advice. This really did nothing but bad things. I had to reset my cmos after boot failure. Everything seemed fine, it seemed as just a minor scare or something of the sort. However, I was wrong. I began to encounter freezing in which everything would completely freeze up, including the keyboard. I mean by this, pressing caps lock or pressing num lock warranted no success to turning the little 'A' light on. This became extremely irritating. I RMA'd my motherboard.
Once it came back, the error persisted. Eventually, I changed where I had my RAM. It seemed successful. However, I decided my previous 2 gigabytes was not enough. My dad ordered 4 gigs of Corsair from newegg. Link:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145184
Any game playing caused freezing or an blue screen. At first, it was just GTA 4. I could play other games like Fear 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R CS, Dead Space with no problem. Then, after a little while, they decided to stop just freezing, and blue screen me. I'd get tons of blue screens, along with lots of freezing. Some error messages include: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL while some just displayed stop codes such as 0x000000050, or 0x00000007F and others, all of which had different causes it seemed, but RAM issues these same blue screens as well.
The problem got so bad, I decided to back up important files and DBAN the computer, in the event it actually was software related. Now I am getting Session_3 errors or getting a light blue XP screen with a cursor on it. I'll fix this probably tomorrow and finish installation, but I am not sure about everything. So I test the RAM with memtest. Whaddya know, it gets a few seconds in and restarts the entire computer.
However, I don't think it is the RAM, but rather the PSU, for a few reasons:
A) I got brand new RAM that is completely compatible with my setup.
B) I RMA'd my motherboard, and the RAM slots should have been replaced. (If they weren't, I suppose I should RMA it again)
C) The RAM seems to be the culprit in all this, but new RAM should render the issue non-existant. After all this formatting and reinstalling of XP, it can't be software related. It could be the motherboard, but only in the event that they didn't replace the RAM slots. The PSU is the last thing that can be linked to RAM issues without it actually being RAM.
D) I overclocked and sent more voltage to the motherboard, which may have caused the PSU to fry after having sending out too much voltage.
My system specs:
Mobo-Asus P5N-E SLI
RAM-Corsair 2x2Gig 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM (Model: TWIN2X4096-6400C5)
GPU- 8800 GT
Sound card- Soundblaster Xtreme Gamer
CPU-Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 Overclocked succesfully to 3.1 GHZ
Fans-CPU fan is a Typhoon something (big thing with tons of heat sinks, maintains a good CPU temp) Other fans are stock
OS-XP 32 bit Professional SP2
PSU-ULTRA 600W ATX power supply (Model No-ULT-LS600P, AC Input Voltage: 115-230V)
Please help my diagnose this! Thank you for reading!
