[evilskillit]

Problems, possibly p4c800 *update*

Heres my rig
ASUS P4C800
P4 2.4
2 sticks 512meg corsair 466mhz ddr(3700)
2 Western Digital HDs, one is an 8meg cache.
PNY Geforce4 TI4400
Soundblaster Live
400Watt PSU
Thats it, Nothing Special.

I put it together with a 350watt psu. It ran Fine, it would run 2 instances of prime95, one on each virtual processor for 24 hours.
It would do this even at 3ghz, the processor would get up to 59C but it never complained. And this was only when running 2 instances of prime95. and i updated it to the newest version of the bios.

I was playing counterstrike and it started rebooting. So i ran 2 instances of prime95 and it says Hardware Error Roundoff>0.5 or something like that. So i underclocked it and turned off hyperthreading when running prime95 it would eventually reboot. Even with the most conservative settings it would reboot or generate an error. Asus probe said that it was only getting 2.8 volts on the 3.3 volt lead so i went out and bought a 400watt psu. The 3.3volt lead now says 3.29 or 3.2x and the 12 volt lead fluxes from 11.9-12.1 and the vcore fluctuates a little bit but it seems ok but it still reboots and generates errors. I tested the outlet that it was plugged into and the outlet shows no ground so i ran an extension cord to an outlet that showed that it did have a proper ground still doesnt work.

Summary, it worked for 2.5 weeks now it will hardly do anything and a new PSU didnt fix it. Any sugguestions. I'm going to pull everything out of it tonight and start systematically testing things but i'm not sure exactly what to do, i hope i dont have to RMA all this stuff .

I also posted the problem here but nobody seems to have any ideas.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=1025110814#post1025110814

 

[Guest]

Welcome to the forums evilskillit

Did the problems start after you updated the bios?

 

[evilskillit]

Nah, i updated the bios right after i put the thing together. it ran perfectly for about 3 weeks, and i didnt do anything to it during those 3 weeks.

About 2 days ago i took up counterstrike again and it was acting funky that day. The next day it restarted during a game and then i strated diagnosing. I hadnt made any changes in a while before the crash, no hardware or software changes. I honstly dont do much on my pc other than surf the net listen to music play games and watch movies. I dont do anything workstation like on it or anything so it had been working perfectly for a couple of weeks then boom!

Generally the only things that faily spontaniously are hard drives and power supplies. Could a bad hard drive cause prime 95 to generate a hardware error, does prime95 run entirely in memory or could a bad hard drive cause problems with it? i'm going home from work tonight and getting to the bottom of this.

I'm going to have my uncle bring over his pentium 4 computer and swap parts out till i find the culprit. I'll let you guys know what i figure out.

 

[Guest]

Have you tried clearing the CMOS?

 

[evilskillit]

nah, i figured loading the defaults would fix it, i guess i'll clear the cmos and maby flash to a newer bios if there is one avilable.

 

[evilskillit]

got home, cleared the cmos, unplugged everything except the master hard drive. swapped dimms around, still cant get the dam thing to work, it wont read a floppy which means the floppy drive is bad or something is screwed up with the mobo, but then again the floppy drive could just have gone bad, havent used it in forever and i dont trust those things half as far as i can throw them.

 

[evilskillit]

major update.

I pulled out the ram, reseated the cput and heatsink because the computer stopped booting into windows entirely.

Didnt fix anything. I pulled the cmos battery for about 20 minutes and it booted into windows. So i downlaoded memtest86 and ran it for 30 minutes straight, which was long enough to complete 4 full passes on my gig of ram. So i booted into windows and fired up two instances of prime95 one on each virtual processor. And the heat sinc was cool to the touch, so i went in and looked at my processor usage and each instance of prime95 was using about 0 to 7% processor usage and it was bouncing around or not doing anything at all. After a few reboots of trying different things the hard drives scandisk ok and the ram tests ok, i'm afraid to run any major hard drive tests because i'm afraid they may just corrupt my data but this is a 2 week old install of windows xp. So basically in my opinion something is seriously messed up. i have an RMA# for the motherboard, i'm shipping it back on monday, i'm testing my processor and ram in another p4 board, if they work i'm keeping them, if not i'll get another rma# for them on monday.

Something has to be seriously wrong that it will post about 75% of the time and only boot into windows about 40% of the time, and wont even run any of the stability tests. They come up at almost 0 processor usage. Oh and i turned on the asus probe software to check the temp and it stops polling the temp after a min or two but the heatsinc isnt even hot to the touch. Its got to be the motherboard, it just has to be.