terrible CPU or CPU fan noise on some startups - BIOS alteration?

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poachedeggs

I have got a custom built machine: Asus M2N68-AM SE2 motherboard with
an AMD Athlon I X2 250 3 ghz CPU, plus 320 hd drive, 4 gb RAM
(Buffalo), PNY Nvidia G210 card, running Windows 7 64 bit.

I had some instability problems when I'd had some apparently faulty
Elixir RAM - blue screens, and warped thing shappening on the
display. For a little while, waiting for the Elixir to be replaced by
a second stick of Buffalo RAM - asked for by me because the other one
seems fine - I only had 3gb, adding a 1gb generic stick that came with
the machine. Today is the first time the CPU has made this terrible
grinding din. It stopped doing this after I shut down and started
again.

Could this be simply because my home is unheated? February in England
and no central heating, which I can't rectify without trebling my
electricity bill. My laptop and netbook and other appliances cope and
have for fifteen years here. I would prefer to ignore this factor if
anything else is also possible, simply because this factor is
unresolvable.

Or, can you advise me about any Bios or Windows settings that might
need changing? I've got Windows' power setting set to High
Performance, and to not go into sleep or hibernation mode. Is this
tied in with ACPI and all that, i.e should anything be altered in the
BIOS pertaining to that?

My BIOS has sections for both Q-fan and Cool 'n' Quiet, but both these
things seem to do the same job, which I'm a bit muddled about, and the
little manual hasn't been enlightening. I had Q-fan enabled for a
while, and then I disabled it as it didnt seem to do anything. Now I
have Cool 'n' Quiet enabled.

Have I forgotten anything? This is the first time I've gone 64 bit -
does this require any BIOS or other changes?

Modest as the cost may seem to some I really can't afford to have this
machine die on me.

I will admit that I have one 'cracked' bit of video-editing software
running, and I'm happy to admit this because I fully intend to buy it
in a month's time as it is not as expensive as I'd thought, £35, and
needed to run it fully to know it suits me. But though scans with
Avast and Defender show no viruses, it did occur to me that might not
be foolproof. But I would think Keygen is famous enough that anything
bad smuggled into a version of it would soon be found.

I'm dreading having ot talk to the company I bought the machine from
because it would be so long-winded and they'd probably try to get out
of responsibility some way or another if there is a fault with the CPU
or motherboard. Memtest has okayed the RAM, anyway. The CPU
temperature checks out as normal in the BIOS too. The PNY card has a
little fan. The case has a fan which I was told wasn't necessary to
connect - it was very noisy so I've not bothered. With a case side
off I put my hand near and all seems cool and very, er, 'fanned up'.
I've had the machine a month-ish. It turned out that one connector
was on wrong as set up by the company, a connector that makes the HD
activity light work - I'm not too inspired by the thought that I as a
nervous novice have put this right after bottling out of fully
assembling it myself from the components.

Or maybe Windows 7 64 bit isn't stable?

All advice, as jargon-free as possible, would be appreciated. Many
thanks in advance.
 
I have got a custom built machine: Asus M2N68-AM SE2 motherboard with
an AMD Athlon I X2 250 3 ghz CPU, plus 320 hd drive, 4 gb RAM
(Buffalo), PNY Nvidia G210 card, running Windows 7 64 bit.

I had some instability problems when I'd had some apparently faulty
Elixir RAM - blue screens, and warped thing shappening on the
display.  For a little while, waiting for the Elixir to be replaced by
a second stick of Buffalo RAM - asked for by me because the other one
seems fine - I only had 3gb, adding a 1gb generic stick that came with
the machine.  Today is the first time the CPU has made this terrible
grinding din.  It stopped doing this after I shut down and started
again.

Could this be simply because my home is unheated?  February in England
and no central heating, which I can't rectify without trebling my
electricity bill.  My laptop and netbook and other appliances cope and
have for fifteen years here.  I would prefer to ignore this factor if
anything else is also possible, simply because this factor is
unresolvable.

Or, can you advise me about any Bios or Windows settings that might
need changing?  I've got Windows' power setting set to High
Performance, and to not go into sleep or hibernation mode.  Is this
tied in with ACPI and all that, i.e should anything be altered in the
BIOS pertaining to that?

My BIOS has sections for both Q-fan and Cool 'n' Quiet, but both these
things seem to do the same job, which I'm a bit muddled about, and the
little manual hasn't been enlightening.  I had Q-fan enabled for a
while, and then I disabled it as it didnt seem to do anything.  Now I
have Cool 'n' Quiet enabled.

Have I forgotten anything?  This is the first time I've gone 64 bit -
does this require any BIOS or other changes?

Modest as the cost may seem to some I really can't afford to have this
machine die on me.

I will admit that I have one 'cracked' bit of video-editing software
running, and I'm happy to admit this because I fully intend to buy it
in a month's time as it is not as expensive as I'd thought, £35, and
needed to run it fully to know it suits me.  But though scans with
Avast and Defender show no viruses, it did occur to me that might not
be foolproof.  But I would think Keygen is famous enough that anything
bad smuggled into a version of it would soon be found.

I'm dreading having ot talk to the company I bought the machine from
because it would be so long-winded and they'd probably try to get out
of responsibility some way or another if there is a fault with the CPU
or motherboard.  Memtest has okayed the RAM, anyway.  The CPU
temperature checks out as normal in the BIOS too.  The PNY card has a
little fan.  The case has a fan which I was told wasn't necessary to
connect - it was very noisy so I've not bothered.  With a case side
off I put my hand near and all seems cool and very, er,  'fanned up'.
I've had the machine a month-ish.  It turned out that one connector
was on wrong as set up by the company, a connector that makes the HD
activity light work - I'm not too inspired by the thought that I as a
nervous novice have put this right after bottling out of fully
assembling it myself from the components.

Or maybe Windows 7 64 bit isn't stable?

All advice, as jargon-free as possible, would be appreciated.  Many
thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

What's your opinion on this? I started reading up about whether a
cold home could be bad for a pc, and saw some advice to stop at the
BIOS stage in cold conditions to let the machine warm up. The
terrible din hasn't recurred - the only reason I'm not at present
reacting to your splendid advice - and I've also moved the pc to the
least cold part of the room.

I have also reinstalled 32 bit Windows 7, hopefully only temprarily,
as a test, and without adding my cracked video software yet. I have
had one Windows Explorer crash when trying to run Avast's setup file
from my external hard drive, and will keep an eye on things.

I've saved your advice in a file for later, but with the noise now
entirely gone I'm hoping there are other things involved, hopefully
either Avast 5 is buggy or that I shouldn't use the cracked video
software. Hopefully I don't have a faulty motherboard. One other
thing I'll reluctantly try is installing XP, or Ubuntu 9.10.

This motherboard is supposed to be able to take PC6400 RAM too but
came with a 1GB stick of 667 mhz RAM. This couldn't be involved could
it? I've already had the shop where I got the RAM replace one stick
and am not keen on asking them to replace both for 667 mhz RAM.

Further views welcome.
 
   The latest version of Avast, which is 5, is causing all sorts of
problems with people's computers. Most of which are BSOD's. If you can
get a copy of Avast version 4 it is stable. For further information go
read the Avast support forums.

  Bob
Click to expand...

I may have made some progress today. The BIOS was three editions
behind, so it has the newest version now - should have been done by
the builders, I think, seeing as it's one of their combinations of
motherboard and processor and not my choice from scratch.

I've put 64 bit W7 back on and both my 2gb Buffalo Select sticks of
RAM are in. I've got Avast 4.8 again now, not 5, which certainly has
problems, whether or not it has caused crashes.

I haven't had a Windows Explorer crash yet, but Windows Desktop
Manager did crash, while I was looking at the system health check, or
rather at the second I closed it down. I'm hoping the machine now
copes with the processor, though if there are any more crashes I will
try to fathom CPU-Z, which I downloaded earlier. I half-understand
that I may need to change one setting from auto to manual in BIOS and
choose one of the settings from 200mhz to 533mhz there - 400 mhz is
mentioned when I run CPU-Z, whether that is chosen by the current
'auto' setting or pertains to the my Buffalo RAM. No mention in the
BIOS of 800mhz so does that mean there is another speed pertaining to
RAM that I don't yet understand? Ay yi yi...

I will get the hang of it I imagine, but if anyone can speed up the
learning curve, great. I did notice that the same figures did not
show for both sticks of RAM, hope that's normal.

Thanks.
 
I half-understand
that I may need to change one setting from auto to manual in BIOS and
choose one of the settings from 200mhz to 533mhz there - 400 mhz is
mentioned when I run CPU-Z, whether that is chosen by the current 'auto'
setting or pertains to the my Buffalo RAM. No mention in the BIOS of
800mhz so does that mean there is another speed pertaining to RAM that I
don't yet understand? Ay yi yi...
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, the speed of ram will likely confuse someone not familiar
with the way it's rated these days. Many people are confused about this.
The ram speed for DDR2 ram for instance is not rated at the bus speed.
PC6400 memory is usually called 800MHz, when in fact the bus speed is
only 200MHz. So don't confuse the 800MHz with what you need to set the
actual bus speed at. Some board manufacturers want the actual bus speed,
while others may want the bogus rated speed for the ram setting and then
set the real bus clock speed accordingly. 800MHz ram=200MHz bus clock,
etc. I haven't used any DDR3, but I'd guess the bus clock would be the
ram rating divided by 4. I'm not sure how cpu-z reports the speed, but if
it's reporting it 400MHz, it's certainly not the real clock speed of
you're using DDR2 ram unless you have DDR2-1600 ram, which isn't likely
since I believe the fastest made is DDR2-1066 which is rated for a 266Mhz
bus clock.
 
Unfortunately, the speed of ram will likely confuse someone not familiar
with the way it's rated these days. Many people are confused about this.
The ram speed for DDR2 ram for instance is not rated at the bus speed.
PC6400 memory is usually called 800MHz, when in fact the bus speed is
only 200MHz. So don't confuse the 800MHz with what you need to set the
actual bus speed at. Some board manufacturers want the actual bus speed,
while others may want the bogus rated speed for the ram setting and then
set the real bus clock speed accordingly. 800MHz ram=200MHz bus clock,
etc. I haven't used any DDR3, but I'd guess the bus clock would be the
ram rating divided by 4. I'm not sure how cpu-z reports the speed, but if
it's reporting it 400MHz, it's certainly not the real clock speed of
you're using DDR2 ram unless you have DDR2-1600 ram, which isn't likely
since I believe the fastest made is DDR2-1066 which is rated for a 266Mhz
bus clock.

--
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Click to expand...

In case anyone else looks here in the future with similar aggro, I
needed a newer BIOS (there had been three new ones since), and the CPU
fan needed some 3-in-1. All is well now. I hope nothing was worn or
overtaxed on the way to this relaisation to the extent that the life
of themachine is shortened.

Amazing really - the people that built this forgot to plug the HD
light in, fitted the CPU fan cursorily and didn't update the bios to
suit the processor, I'm almost tempted to name them...
 
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