Finding a fault is hard

Clyde

Clyde

Clyde

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Joined
15 Aug 2010
Posts
20
Hi All. I've put together a new system with the following components.
ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3
AMD Phenom x4 965 Black
4 GB PNY DD3 1333mhz PC10660 (me thinks this may be the problem :(. )
Corsair A50 CPU cooler
Corsair 550W PSU
Sapphire 5750 1GB DD3 Video card

Nothing overclocked yet.

Everything runs great..for a while:rolleyes: Temps are fine. Never going over 41C when running a few good apps including Photoshop CS5, Lightroom and stuff like that. Normal temp is 31C.
Games play great.
And then, all of a sudden, it will re-boot or the the PC just freezes up. I can't see anything in events that give me a clue as to what is happening.

I haven't set the memory voltage in BIOS yet..or the timings as I'm a little unsure about what to change.
I have updated the BIOS to the latest version from ASUS (1456) and that went fine.

Any advice for a relative noob would be appreciated.

Cheers :)
 
You will need to find the correct voltage for your ram.
Look through the BIOS and find the DDR3 voltage control. Adjust to suit.
Do not forget, you can change whatever you want, until you press SAVE AND EXIT then it can be undone.
 
No idea, but its a good place as any to start :).

It could be a driver error, are all the plugs plugged into the motherboard properly? I had this on one of mine, and it sent me round the twist until I decided to strip it out, which is when I found the 'fault' :D.
 
Just set the RAM voltage and timings to the manufacturers advertised values. If the RAM was causing those problems you will probably find that one of the sticks works fine on its own and the other stick will either not POST at all or not get much further.
 
Well the voltage looks correct in the BIOS.. 1.5v. As for the timings, I can't find out what they are supposed to be !
I've got another idea..could the Cool'n'Quiet function on the ASUS mobo be a problem under Win 7 64 bit ? I've read of a few people having grief with it and I remember some time ago having issues with it on a much older ASUS mobo.
 
OK.. I've run Memtest for nearly 15 hours and there were Zero faults. 15 minutes after re-booting, the PC locked up again :(
Could it be the PSU (Corsair 550w model) ?
Any other idea's would be most welcome.
 
Have you tried the Asus forums? someone with the same board may of had the same problem you never know.

Have you tried resetting CMOS, shot in the dark I know.

What about reseating your graphics card and trying it without.

PSU could be an issue but you could check the voltages / rails etc..

Just a couple of things you have more than likely tried already!!!
 
A quick update on my "progress".
I've enabled the auto overclock feature in the BIOS because I was at a loss as to what to try next :) I have cleared CMOS and checked all connections, Jase. Thanks. So, since the lock up this morning, it's been running fine all day..(touch wood). I can't see why over clocking would actually make it more stable though.
We'll see how it goes. :)
 
Clyde said:
A quick update on my "progress".
I've enabled the auto overclock feature in the BIOS because I was at a loss as to what to try next :) I have cleared CMOS and checked all connections, Jase. Thanks. So, since the lock up this morning, it's been running fine all day..(touch wood). I can't see why over clocking would actually make it more stable though.
We'll see how it goes. :)
Click to expand...

It's possible. Firstly, auto-oc won't really push an oc limit but it will increase voltages because they are still set to auto. In my experience, 'auto' voltages are very generous is bumping up the northbridge voltages and others. so it could have wacked your FSB up by 20-30 (which is neither here or there) but also increased a voltage to make the system stable.
 
An update, (fwiw) :(
I ran mini XP off the Hiren Boot CD over night and it didn't crash at all. This morning I removed the PCIe card and ran the same test again using on board graphics. No problems.
20 mins after I booted back into Win 7 it had locked up again.
I think I'll need to return something to the store but I don't know what !
I feel the graphics card and memory are fine. If the mem was faulty or incompatible it could never have run a live boot CD. Also, the vid card has been swapped over to my old 4750 and it still crashed under Win 7.
So that leaves the CPU and the motherboard.

Anything you can think to try ?

Cheers.

Slowly losing my mind (aka Clyde) :)
 
Any recommendations on a PSU for this system ? I will be getting one soon and, hopefully, from OC'ers :)
A small update on my situation. After yesterday mornings crash, I went into the BIOS(again!) and disabled C1E support. This, apparently, reduces voltage to the CPU when the PC is doing nothing.
I also un-installed the Realtek drivers for the NIC. Those came on the ASUS driver disk. So I downloaded the latest version from Realtek and installed them.

Going to temp fate now and say the system hasn't put a foot wrong in nearly 24 hours. That includes a 2.5 hour session of Mafia 2 last night :)
By the time you read this it will probably be locked up again !
But thanks a lot for all the help. I don't suppose for 1 minute the problem is entirely solved, but the PC does seem a lot more stable at the present time. I may never know why !
 
sounds like you're getting a bsod, but by default windows now just reboots instead of freezing and showing the bsod, to change this so you can see the bsod:

right-click Computer
properties
click 'Advanced System Settings' at the top left of the window
Advanced tab
under 'startup and recovery' click settings
remove the tick next to 'automatically restart'

you should at least see the bsod now next time it happens, feels like a ram issue to me, maybe run the machine with one stick and see if you have a faulty module.
 
Thanks for that, davethe11.
I had already tried that but the PC usually locked or crashed without the BSOD. I did get one once and managed to decypher the memory.dmp file using the WhoCrashed software..http://www.resplendence.com/downloads
The report was as follows.
=========================
On Tue 31/08/2010 19:19:33 your computer crashed
This was likely caused by the following module: ndis.sys
Bugcheck code: 0xD1 (0x129, 0x2, 0x0, 0xFFFFF880015214F0)
Error: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\083110-22869-01.dmp
file path: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\ndis.sys
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NDIS 6.20 driver
The crash took place in a standard Microsoft module. Your system configuration may be incorrect, possibly the culprit is in another driver on your system which cannot be identified at this time.
==================================================
This is basically why I tried the NIC drivers although it's not a 100% certainty that they were the cause :)
 
hate these problems where you find a fix but aren't sure why it fixed it, but am glad you are stable so far with c1e disabled, the only thing you could try is turning on c1e, disable your network card in device manager and see if the problem returns, but if your stable for now then that's cool :)
 
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