I'm losing the plot...can anyone please help me out?

[Woody Aki]

Hello there,

After 5 months of haemorrhaging money through upgrades and PC repair shops, I have reached the end of my tether – I know I have because my only outlet to life’s ills has become a frustrating painful experience in itself to the point that I’m a hair’s breath to jacking it in. So as a last resort, I've decided to mail you with a detailed description of my problem, which I've been having since January. I've taken it to two other repair shops, and they see no problem somehow, only for the problem to pop up again as soon as I bring the tower back home.

Firstly, here are the full specs of my setup prior to the problem:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
MOBO: Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra-939 NForce3 Ultra chipset
RAM: 4GB OCZ DDR 400MHz/PC3200 Platinum XTC Memory Kit CL2 2.8V (2x1GB x 2)
HARD DRIVES: 1 Western Digital 80 GB WD800BB (partitioned, running 2 boots of Win XP Pro); 2 Western Digital 250 GB WD2500BB (one handles data, the other handles samples)
EXT. DRIVES: 1 Western Digital 120 GB WD1200BB; 1 LaCie 1TB Neil Poulton design ST310005 20AS
GPU: MSI NX7600GS (NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS, 512 MB, AGP 8X)
PSU: 420W Thermaltake Purepower HPC-420-102-DF
CASE: Antec P160
MONITOR: Samsung SyncMaster 245B

The problems seem to have started right after I swapped my previous RAM (2Gb G.Skill ZX Series DDR PC3200 (DDR400) 2-3-2-5 Dual Channel kit) for the OCZ 4Gb kit. Whilst using the everyday boot (Internet, MS Word, etc.), the screen freezes and everything crashes, prompting a soft boot. I was thinking about reinstalling WinXP on that boot until the same problem started happening on my Music Production boot as well over the last two months! I start up Ableton Live, and everything runs well until I decide to open up a VSTi GUI – Ableton simply closes down. I have gone so far as to change the Mains Extension Lead to a surge protected one, and I also changed the PSU to a 520W Seasonic M12II-520 Bronze. After being told that I had a hairline fracture on my old mobo, I have also changed my mobo to a reconditioned Gigabyte GA-K8NSC Ultra-939 NForce3 Ultra chipset, as I’m too broke to get a decent upgrade.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve seen somewhere that there are issues between certain Socket 939 mobos and the OCZ RAM I fitted in, and a voltage adjustment might be the solution. Bear in mind that my rig is not overclocked, and I don’t feel too comfortable with BIOS as I’m a musician, not a PC expert, so I was wondering whether you guys out there can help me out before I do a Led Zeppelin on my PC tower from three storeys up…

Thanks in advance.

 

[PapaLazaru]

Get some new RAM & Win7.

 

[iNPUt]

First step would be to run memtest on the RAM (test each stick individually) since that seems like your issue, post your results here when done.

If it fails you know its a problem, and maybe the volts are wrong for the type of RAM. Then you could get an RMA on the ram if its dead.

Looks like you've swapped everything apart from the RAM, did a PC repair shop say you've got a hairline fracture on the motherboard, sounds pretty far fetched

 

[Deleted member 77746]

Do you have any competent friends near by or someone from these forums that live near you might just be able to give you a hand.

Since your no PC expert I won't suggest too much but what I can suggest is a bios update to the motherboard that you currently have installed this might sort out the memory issue because if it is the memory then the bios would be the cause (or it even could be faulty memory).

It's quite hard to assist someone over a forum thread when they can't sit down beside the pc to do diagnostics. The logs for the pc might tell you something about a freeze too but once again unless someone sits down at the pc for a while it could be hard to diagnose.

If it is a hardware issue, you should be able to do a RMA with the place where you purchased the content.

 

[thingemajib]

well the bog standard ddr ram does 2.5v, whereas the OCZ is 2.8v, so your RAM may not be getting enough juice.

Try loosening the timings a little, something like 3-4-4-9 should be nice and slack for it to work at 2.5v (dig around in the BIOS for memory timings, first number is CAS latency or CL, 2nd is RAS to CAS delay or tRCD, 3rd is RAS precharge or tRP and the 4th is Cycle time or tRAS)

hope that helps

 

[beefybarn]

Im pretty certain its the ram, the board you have is very picky with memory in all four slots. As said above run memtest first, if that comes back ok try running with just 2 sticks and see if its stable.