pc dies.....tried everything :(

lethelgirth87 · Post by **lethelgirth87** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 1:36 am

Ok, well like a month ago I bought this new pc, all oem parts of course cause it was cheaper that way, and ever since the 2nd day I've had it up and running its frozen, crashed, died, and just randomly restarts when I have a music playlist on for a long period of time, editing, capturing video, running skype for a long period of time, or running madden 04'. The only game that doesn't crash, is Halo. For what odd reason I don't know. But Frankly I'm just getting tired of it because I go to edit and I'll add 2 clips or so, and then WHAM!!! It either freezes, dies, crashes, or restarts. I bought new RAM, and I made sure that nothing was overheating by taking off the cover and blowing my big fan inside. I got a 1.8 ghz athlon chip overclocked to about 2.1 ghz. I don't know if thats the problem but I don't think it is, I really honestly just thinks its windows not being able to manage something. Also my brother the "windows expert" didn't even know what was wrong. His suggestion was just just get an intel board with an intel chip, but at this point I can't really afford that for about another 3 months and I can't put up with crashing for another 3 months!!!! Any help would be much appreciated

Truggy · Post by **Truggy** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:05 am

Man that sucks, ide take it into an expert....or a comp repair shop...

2nd_Recon · Post by **2nd_Recon** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:09 am

sounds like something is going on that shouldn't be messed with by any of us untrained goobers. Deffinatley take it to a pro.

ALove · Post by **ALove** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 3:40 am

go to device manager and reinstall the video driver... seems like what happened to me, and the tech people told me to do that.

go to device manager
click on video card
uninstall
reboot.
If its a fairly new comp and windows xp it should automatically reinstall upon reboot, but call tech support of the card and make sure you card is supported, if not, find out how to install the driver.

Raptor · Post by **Raptor** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 4:23 am

Try backing the clock speed down and see if it stabilizes. OCing the chip can cause instability due to bus speed issues witht he motherboard and processor rates. The OC'd chip while clocking out at 2.1 may not be able to pull data fromt eh bus. When you OC the chip, you are actually telling the MB to push the chip, try it at 1.8, and if it runs stable then the MB/Chip combo just doesn't OC well. We played some games OC'ing Athlon 2400s at work. On an ASUS board they failed, on an MSI board the same chips OCd quite well.

lethelgirth87 · Post by **lethelgirth87** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:00 pm

Well see, I tried that as well, In fact I even downclocked to 800 mhz and I got an Nvidia motherboard, so I don't know if that makes a difference, but I will try that video drivers thing, bcause when I started windows in safe mode it went super slow but it didn't crash, so maybe its just that.

Truggy · Post by **Truggy** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:25 pm

800 mhz? Thats celeron speeds...wow am i glad i just bought a 2.8 ghz ,,, i heard that overclocking makes processors overheat?

Skitz-O-Phrenia · Post by **Skitz-O-Phrenia** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 7:26 pm

what motherboard(make and model), ram(speed and size) and video card do you have? if you oc you really need to match the speeds with the ram, if your ram is too slow oc'ing will kill the comp. Do you have the stock cooling on the cpu? do you have any programs that tell you the temps of the mb and cpu? if so what are the temps?

and lastly, has it been too long to take the comp back?

lethelgirth87 · Post by **lethelgirth87** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 9:51 pm

11-145-027 CASE POWMAX| MID ATX C501-4 RETAIL

13-138-227 MB NFORCE 2 SPP M7NCD PRO BIOSTAR R

14-145-092 VGA CHAINTECH| VOLARI V3 SLV3-128

19-103-400 CPU MOBILE AMD|2400+/266 ATHLON XP%

20-150-619 BUFFALO B-LINE 512M DDR PC3200 RT

22-144-122 HD 80GB|WD 7200RPM 8MB WD800JB%

35-110-009 CPU FAN|AEROFLOW2 VA4-C7245 VTEC RT

No stock cooling.....yes my motherboard moniters my cpu and its 111 F 45 C.....yeah its been a bit too long, all I can do now is exchange for new parts because I bought from newegg.com

Raptor · Post by **Raptor** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 10:32 pm

OK I'm running a very similar configuration.. AMD 2400+ Athlon in the Biostar M7NCG Mother board. In fact I have three editing machines setup with that same hardware as well as 24 classroom machines. All run fine at 1.8, OCing took some finagling, as some would run to 2.1 some wouldn't. Probably based on minute deferences in Manufacturing - all met tolerance for the rated speed, may not stay stable at OC'd speeds. We had none however that were unstable if not OC'd

ALove · Post by **ALove** » Fri Oct 08, 2004 12:13 am

dude try the video driver thing i had like the exact thing happening to me and thats what i did. does it go BLOOOP and then die?

lethelgirth87 · Post by **lethelgirth87** » Fri Oct 08, 2004 12:51 am

No, I tried that. Didn't work, so played around with some BIOS settings, and then it didn't crash for longest time, and then it froze up again. This time tho when it froze up my sound also made a reapeating noise that went like "errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" and was super annoying till i shut it off, then I changed somemore BIOS settings and it wouldn't reboot so I had to set the jumper to all the defaults, and I tried rebooting after that and it died when it was in the process of loading the windows welcome screen so I rebooted again and it died again after it loaded the windows welcome screen, so right now the clock speed is 1.4 ghz which is stable till I run a game or try to edit, so I guess this is just a really big loss.

This is like a new disease that no one can find a cure for....

Nightingale_zero · Post by **Nightingale_zero** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 2:44 am

Well I went over to his house today(I built the pc) and I just upped the vcore to 1.7(the mobo actually overvotls to 1.73ish), locked in the agp and pci bus to about 50mhz and so far it seems to be working. I was able to run madden 2k4, halo, Vegas 4, and encode using TMPGEnc. I have a feeling its possible the cpu wasn't getting enough voltage and that could have caused the instabity especially with the Athlons which are known to go as high as 1.9v with adequate cooling when running in the 2ghz region.

lethelgirth87 · Post by **lethelgirth87** » Sun Oct 10, 2004 4:26 am

Yeah, Dennis seemed to get it working, so far it only crashed once when I wasn't on it. lol