john
01-25-2004, 09:52 AM
My system @ home has started to act up. It's an xp2800, with 512 meg of pc2700, an geforce4 ti4200, 1 30 gig (O/S) drive, on 80 gig (data) drive, memorex CD burner, generic DVD drive, and an MSI kt4v board.
The FSB is 333 mhz, and is set in bios (to 166 mhz as there's a doubler onboard). For the past few days the box has been randomly hanging & rebooting itself. I reseated all the parts, did a low level format on my O/S drive, and after the format loaded windows XP (haven't reloaded linux yet). Once in awhile the failures give me blue screens, and once in awhile after a reboot, windows will send in a failure report to microsoft. None of the failure reports have been worth anything - "Unknown failure", etc.
I thought that perhaps the CPU was getting too hot (athlons are notorious for generating gobs of heat), so I replaced the cpu cooler just to be on the safe side. After being off all night, the box would run for about 20 minutes from being cold until it locked up or rebooted. Once it's warmed up, anywhere from 5-10 minutes. So it sounds somewhat heat related.
In my debugging, I backed the FSB speed off from 333 mhz to 266, and the box has been running for well over an hour. I believe I've got a thermal issue somewhere, and am still thinking it may be the CPU.
I'm going to swap in some RAM from the other athlon box I have here today, and turn the FSB speed back up to 333 mhz. At 266 mhz, the xp2800 reports itself as an xp2200, which is what I have in the other box (and I have a spare used 2200 sitting on a shelf somewhere).
I need to load linux back onto the box & beat the heck out of it CPU-wise to see if I can get it to fail with the FSB back at 333 mhz.
I know this is really vague, but does anyone have suggestions?
Fans in the box - I've got 2 on the rear of the tower (3 counting the power supply fan), one in the front of the box, and the onboard fan which came on the geforce video card.
Thanks. :)
The FSB is 333 mhz, and is set in bios (to 166 mhz as there's a doubler onboard). For the past few days the box has been randomly hanging & rebooting itself. I reseated all the parts, did a low level format on my O/S drive, and after the format loaded windows XP (haven't reloaded linux yet). Once in awhile the failures give me blue screens, and once in awhile after a reboot, windows will send in a failure report to microsoft. None of the failure reports have been worth anything - "Unknown failure", etc.
I thought that perhaps the CPU was getting too hot (athlons are notorious for generating gobs of heat), so I replaced the cpu cooler just to be on the safe side. After being off all night, the box would run for about 20 minutes from being cold until it locked up or rebooted. Once it's warmed up, anywhere from 5-10 minutes. So it sounds somewhat heat related.
In my debugging, I backed the FSB speed off from 333 mhz to 266, and the box has been running for well over an hour. I believe I've got a thermal issue somewhere, and am still thinking it may be the CPU.
I'm going to swap in some RAM from the other athlon box I have here today, and turn the FSB speed back up to 333 mhz. At 266 mhz, the xp2800 reports itself as an xp2200, which is what I have in the other box (and I have a spare used 2200 sitting on a shelf somewhere).
I need to load linux back onto the box & beat the heck out of it CPU-wise to see if I can get it to fail with the FSB back at 333 mhz.
I know this is really vague, but does anyone have suggestions?
Fans in the box - I've got 2 on the rear of the tower (3 counting the power supply fan), one in the front of the box, and the onboard fan which came on the geforce video card.
Thanks. :)