rllipham said:
I have a A7N8X Deluxe with a 3000+ and 1 meh 2x512. Put it together
about Christmas with no problem.
Last week my C drive crashed and had to reinstall XP Pro. Installation
went OK with activation. A week later I am getting freeze-ups and have
to reset or power down to get the system to start.
Teh freeze-ups have occurred while in IE and while trying to return
from a stock screen saver. When the freeze ocurs in IE the IDE
activity LED is on.
Sometimes after power up I get OC errors and the CMOS set to 83 KHz
and requests me to enter CMOS to set the speeds.
I am running 2x512 in dual channel at 167KHz.
The CPU is running 200/11. I have kept careful eye on temp with
AsusProbe. Threshold set at the lowest temp 54C. The highest I have
found it is 50C.
I have a
Maxtor 160 ATA drive, DVD Lite-on burner and a ATI 9800Pro.
I am using a Microsoft elite wireless KB and Mouse.
I have plenty of cooling and everything is stable other than the
freezes.
Any ideas?
Freeze ups could be many things. It could be an overheated processor,
memory errors, a video card on its last legs, a bad AGP interface on
the Northbridge, a bad power supply. The list is pretty long.
Your choices are to buy a whole bunch of duplicate hardware, and
play the swapping game, or to do some testing. The idea of the testing
is to try to eliminate some of the possible causes of a freeze.
For memory, try memtest86 from memtest86.com or the more recent version
of the same thing, which is memtest86+from memtest.org. You can leave the
test running overnight, and really there shouldn't be any errors detected.
If there are, look into adjusting settings on the ram, or if the
memory has a hard fault (i.e. an error at the same location every time,
detected almost instantly), replace the memory.
For the power supply, get a copy of MBM5 or Asus Probe, and enable
logging of the readings to a text file. Examine the text file after
doing some other tests, to see if any voltages are dipping below
nominal by more than about 5% or so. If the +12V is dipping to less than
+11.4 for example, you may need a supply with a higher amperage rating
on the +12V.
For the processor, run a copy of Prime95 in torture test mode. Monitor
the temperature of the processor. Since you've already tested the memory,
if the board crashes with the Prime95 load on it, then it could be a
bad processor (it could also be a bad motherboard, hard to tell).
After this, the next thing is test the video card in 3D texture acceleration
mode. The idea here is, that when gaming or using a 3D benchmark, the AGP
interface gets more of a workout than it does in the Windows desktop.
I had a board with a bad AGP interface, and it would crash or freeze after
about three hours in the desktop - with a 3D test running, it would happen
in seconds. You might also want to watch the voltages on the power supply
while a test like this is running, as the video card will draw a lot more
current during a graphics test. Examine the log file from MBM5 or Asus
Probe, after the test is finished. Set the log interval to 10 seconds,
to get as much data as possible.
For any of these tests, not only are you looking for the test to exhibit
failing symptoms, but you are also looking for the frequency of the
freezing to change. In my case, the virtually instantaneous failures
while running 3D tests were a dead givaway. Since I had a spare video
card, and the problem persisted, the motherboard was the culprit.
As far as your disk goes, really good testing of the disk would be
destructive (i.e. write/read of the entire surface, wiping the OS).
You would need to have a second disk handy, to swap in as your boot disk,
while testing the original one, so I would leave this kind of testing
until last.
There are possible obscure problems as well, like an extra brass standoff
underneath the motherboard shorting something, or maybe your PCI and AGP
cards are misaligned and not making good contact with their sockets. Some
people have their problems mysteriously disappear, after they remove
the motherboard and reassemble the system.
With a power problem, you are more likely to get random shutdowns or
reboots, whereas freezing to me indicates processor, memory, AGP/video,
or some other motherboard problem.
HTH,
Paul
