Help needed.

DayleW

DayleW

DayleW

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Joined
11 Apr 2011
Posts
10
Hello All,

I am having some problems with my PC and was wondering if anyone could shed some light onto what the problem might be. I have the Gigabyte GA-890 GPA UD3H motherboard, AMD Phenom II X6 1100T CPU, and 12Gb of Kingston Hyper X 1600mhz ram (KHX1600C9D3K3/12GX). The system is about 8 months old.

Shortly after I built the system I was having stability problems and was using some OCZ ram and when i confronted gigabyte about the problem, I was told that the OCZ ram was not compatible with the board and to choose some ram on the memory support list, which I did, hence the Kingston ram. After that I had trouble getting the ram to run at the stated 1600mhz and had to run it at 1333mhz instead. Gigabyte told be this was a BIOS issue and sent me a bios update which still did not fix the problem. I've since updated the BIOS again and am currently on the latest version.

Well for 8 months I have been running the system underclocked like this with no major problems until the other week when the operating systems (both windows7 and ubuntu which I dual boot) started crashing quite often, in the same manner as I had when the system was first built. Usually the crash would result in the network connection failing and not being able to start applications. Thinking this a possible software problem i formatted and and reinstalled my operating systems but the problems still persist. I downloaded some hardware monitoring tools; AMD overdrive (the system is not currently overclocked in any way), CPUz and Core Temp.

Anyway, the system still crashes seemingly at random. I suspect the motherboard, or maybe the CPU. Any ideas on how I can diagnose the fault?

Many Thanks,
Dayle
 
Hello and welcome to the forum :)

This is were the fun starts, you start by running mem test on your and see if any errors occur.

http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

Then run Prime 95 to see if you have any stability issues, but this can mean a multiple of issues, its just a case going through bit by bit.

Run HD Tune to check your hard rive for any errors.

What is your make / model of the PSU, as these can often course major issues as well.
 
I'm currently running the AMD overdrive stability tests and will run the memtest and Prime 95 once that completes. As for the PSU it's the Arctic Pro 850. I'll let you know how I get on with the tests once they are done. An interesting thing to note, it the system is going to crash it often does it very soon after booting it up. However, if it manages to boot up and I get past maybe about 5 minutes or so then the chances of a crash seem to greatly reduce and I may be able to run for hours before a crash.
 
The AMD overdrive stability tests showed my system to be stable. I then ran MEMTEST and that passed with no errors and then I ran a Prime 95 torture test for two and a half hours with no problems. I will now run HD tune but as I have a RAID 10 configuration I am not expecting the hard discs to be the problem either.

It's strange. I know last time I was having these problems Prime 95 was showing a lot of errors and the workers kept stopping on various cores. Then the problem disappeared for 7 months and now it seems back but only intermittently. I have the feeling that the system is more likely to be unstable when it's cold, i.e been off overnight. But sometimes, like yesterday my maching had been on for hours before it crashed.
 
I have checked the voltages and currently my memory is 1333MHz is 1.5V. I'd like to run it at 1600MHz but there was some kind of problem with this board reading the XMP from the chip, even though Gigabyte suggest that these chips will run at 1600MHz in this board according to their memory support list http://download.gigabyte.eu/FileList/Memory/mb_memory_ga-890gpa-ud3h_v.2.1.pdf. The system was crashing with the memory at 1333MHZ as well as when I was trying to run the memory at 1600MHz. I've not tried to get the memory to run at 1600MHz in some time though.
 
Yes I have. The computer is being very well behaved again at the moment - No crashes since this morning. It's odd how the problem comes and goes. It will be interesting to see if the problem returns again when I start the computer from cold in the morning.
 
Ok, I thought that was in order to run at 1600MHz. I have it at 1333MHz. I'll give those timings a go anyway and see how I get on.

Thanks
 
It's still crashing, particularly when the PC has been off for a while. The memory timing has not changed the situation. When it does boot up and gets warm it seems that I can throw whatever I like at it such as a prime 95 torture test for 4 hours without any problems.
 
I'm on my phone so sorry if this has been covered.... When you crash do you always get a BSOD? Or does it just reboot instantly?

If you always BSOD then could be HDD... If not then PSU is likely
 
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I'd be inclined to get in touch with Gigabyte - if they are saying the board is compatible with your memory, yet you still cannot get it to work at the stated speeds, dependant on how long you've had the board, I'd be inclined to ask for a replacement. Within 6 months, it is up to the supplier to prove the product is not defective (often difficult with an intermittent fault), after this time, you need to show the fault existed from the beginning (not too difficult if you have an email-trail for the BIOS updates)...

Good luck!
 
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