A sad day for my trusty P4 2.4

[Fizzer]

Updated: With Pics.. A sad day for my trusty P4 2.4

OK A sorry tale of 1 guys n4b'ness and killing his old faithfull P4 2.4...

Please bear with me and console / advise this old OC that has been out of the scene for some time...

I have recently brought the Bliss GS+ 512Mb card (in hind sight wish I hadn't) but my PSU appears to be causing issues. I was banking on buying another PSU ready for my Conroe Upgrade near the end of the year or later anway, so no real problem just need a new one sooner than expected.

BUT.... yes here is the sad story

My water cooling radiator fan is plugged into the MoBo and the reat of the fans run of my AKASA fan controller (Beeping Speaker disabled due to flaky alerting of slow fan speeds).

While I was connecting the card up I must have knocked out the Water cooling radiator fan.

I ran some bench marks and games and the PC frozze beeping madly.
Foolishly I thought GPU Card as this was a new component, maybe overstressing the PSU so reboot try again same thing.

It was only then I noticed that the AKASA fan contoller was alarming for TEMP. on CPU and YES!! MY CPU was BOILING the water cooling.

Being and OLD 2.4 having had an VERY reliable OC of 3.0 Ghz on it for sometime the poor thing acting like a kettle has Killed it..

BSoD random lock ups even in BIOS and resets. Even with my original 6600GT card in..

So I now have some unknowns..

Is my PSU capable of running the Card??? Akasa Ultra Quiet 400W Paxpower (no seperate GPU molex) I think I will be replacing this.

Is the Graphics card OK. Or is that faulty as I was having a bit of trouble getting it working initially. Might have been the fact I had originally only plugged 1 molex in. OCUK won't accept it back unless it's faulty So I think I am stuck with a £250 quid card.

Need an upgrade Boys and Girls. Reccomendations please please.

May keep card and Buy AGP, board keep my PC4000 Geil memory and get a CPU but What??

I have Sooo many options open. I feel a cheap processor (with an overclock on it) and AGP mobo is the way forward

Please post any recconmendations!

Please help Please!! I'm very depressed. I feel I have lost a friend

 

[Explicit]

Damn! I really sorry to hear that mate, chin up.

 

[Johnnyboy]

The P4's have in-built throttling that kicks in and stops permanent damage. I doubt very much if your CPU is damaged, even if it ran very hot. The P4 Prescott normal operating range took it above 80oC (well mine did anyway) with stock cooling.

My money on BSOD's would be on memory problems. Have you double checked it is not running outwith spec. e.g. too tight timings? Have you tried reseating it? Run Memtest - test each stick separately and I bet it will find errors.

Your current PSU is good quality and should be more than capable of running your rig. My opinion, from personal experience (360W Chieftec PSU running a 6800gs and P4 3.2, all overclocked to the limit) - others will disagree.

Hope this helps.

[J]

 

[Fizzer]

Yep i'm gonna do a meme test. I giot my old trusty media cube at work so will use that for testing all the components to see what has gone bad.....

I can't get it to Boot sometimes.. and Lock ups IN BIOS ??? It was sometime ago BUT last time I had that was a BAD CPU or MoBo.

If it is the MoBo i will be changing CPU anway so I can get a bit more out of my stupidly expensive AGP card...

OK thanks for confirming the PSU I will just make sure that the 2 Molex ONLY plug into the G.Card. BUT even GainWood say that the 7800GS+ 512Mb BLISS AGP needs a minimum of 400w and OCUK say that it is probably the PSU that is causing any issues with the card (before I bolied the CPU).

 

[Corasik]

Some motherboards though disable P4's self throttling, although at about 120 degrees the P4 has a secondary level of protection which switches the processor to halt state until its reset.

At 120 degrees, there is some risk of damage to the cpu (although it will normally survive), and there is also chance of that level of heat damaging the motherboard.

Only way to check is try the chip in another board.

How many Amps can that Akasa supply on the 12V rail. a lot of people way overestimate their power requirements, and personally I would suspect it was just because you only plugged in 1 molex that you had issues, but unless the PSU has very lower 12V power (15-20amps... or less) then I doubt the PSU would be a major problem.

Claims of 400W or more etc, are generally 'safe' because companies dont want to risk someone with a low quality PSU complaining when it blows up.

A 400W Qtec for instance might overheat, and die if you loaded it with 300W continuous load for a few hours. On the other hand a 330W Tagen/Enermax/Seasonic ETC would probably run a 320W load for years without breaking down.

 

[Fizzer]

Yep I will be testing CPU tomorrow as soon as I get the Aria media Cube setup I got at work home..

Thing is its doing the BUIOS freezes and BSoD with the OLD 6600GT card in..

Assuming the CPU is toast as it has had about 2 years of overclock on it...

Also.. This CPU is probably really holding back the card I brought..

More I think on it I will probably get a Budget CPU MoBo combo that supports AGP But what??

I have been out of the OverClocking scene since I setup water cooling on my P4 about 1 1/2 years ago ( Never did get around to doing the Volt mod for my IS7-E, still have the pics from a forum in my draw )..

Now all the forums are Conroe and AM2..

Any quick suggestions to what CPU MoBo you would put on water with some PC4000 Geil and £200 quid to spare.???

 

[Corasik]

Well, as your Geforce 7800+ is AGP, I would think you'll have to go for an AMD64 setup, as all the current intel's are PCI Express.

AMD are probably about to slash prices on AM2, but thats a DDR2/PCI Express platform, as the older AMD socket boards are being phased out, you might be able to pick up a bargain, but its possible amd wont bother to reduce the prices so much on that line.

I'd certainly wait until the end of the month, and see if you can pick up a bargain.

Gigabyte K8NSC-939 nForce3 250GB, its a little older design than the current NForce4 boards, but it supports AGP, and should be able to take a single core Athlon64 4000+, the pair would set you back around 170inc vat.

Im sure someone with AMD experience would be able to suggest alternatives, perhaps a slower processor overclocked more etc.

 

[Fizzer]

UPDATED: with Pic... A sad day for my trusty P4 2.4

Help..

Need advice now.....

After memtest the Geil in the system 10 passes and FINE..

Prime95 the CPU in my other system and It's fine!! Hoorah!

BUT......

NOW.. Correct me if I'm wrong but the bottom left pin is one of the +12v rail.

EDIT: Nope I am looking at it backwards I think.. It's the +3.3V rail..... Yep just tested it and 1 of the pins Bottom Right goes to the WinBond chip, lucky my memory is OK.

Has the GB 7800GS+ sucked the power and caused the burn out, I know that it is on it's own molex???

It may have been thier before, which I suspect it has. Didn't know I had that much of a power issue. i am well confused!!!

I don't want to try my other MoBo and burn that with the GS+. So need some advice please.

Don't worry about any liability I am old enough to know all decisions are my own

EDIT: A sad day for my trusty P4 2.4 - NOPE - An even sadder day for my trusty IS7-E (1 IDE channel had gone anyway so not too bad, tiswas a faulty board)

 

[Corasik]

I thought Nvidia cards actually gave a warning when the Molex connections were not attached. I find it doubtfull that the damage was caused by the graphics card.

AGP Spec is quite limited in how much power a card can draw, I'd imagine the AGP bus would fail before the ATX power connector would be damaged like that.

My guess is something failed on the motherboard, and overloaded the power lines, causing the meltdown. It certainly would explain any problems you had with stability, and crashing.

Just make sure the molex (1 or 2?) connectors on the graphics card are connected up.

The only other possibility I can think of is that under load the PSU wasnt stable, and the voltages on the 3.3V went crazy, and the system draw too many amps across that rail, melting the connectors.

 

[Fizzer]

Well...

Installed my cheap Gigabyte SiS661 mATX board from the media PC into my Watercooled case.

Running a SiSoft sandra burn-in on it now!

Looks stable once it's run a few times and done a Prime95 and a few runs on 3Dmark I will try the GB 7800GS+ again.

If that's stable I am probably gonna go with a new MoBo and CPU as I think for the money it's a better choice than just a new MoBo.
The P4 is probably limiting the performance of the card.

K8NSC-939 nForce3 + Athlon64 or something similar like you sugested Corasik (thanks for the advice).

I'll take a few benchmark on this CPU MoBo combo before upgrading though.

Thanks for the help peeps and if anyone has better suggestions for a MoBo and CPU combo to go with my Geil PC4000 and water cooling then feel free to post it..

Thanks in advance..