Need a little advice with a system I built recently

[inaba]

Against my better judgement I build this for a friend recently, all from ocuk

Asus A8N5X nForce4 (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard
OcUK Value 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 184pin DDR Memory Dual Channel Kit
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - Retail
2x SpinPoint P HD080HJ 80GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (raid 0)
Antec SLK1650B Black Quiet Mini Tower Case - 350W SmartPower PSU
OcUK Value Floppy Drive - Black
Sapphire ATI Radeon X1300 512MB DDR2 AVIVO TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express)

Much to my frustration he called me after about a week of getting it and said it keeps hanging up on games. I popped it open and everything seems to be working, no overheating and everythings plugged into the right places. I've built a fair few systems before as I used to do it for a living but I quit it about 2 years ago and some of this technology is a bit new, this is the first system I've built with PCI express.

I ran memtest 86 and that reported no errors, I totaly formatted the system and reinstalled windows xp with latest drivers to eliminate any software problems but that didn't work.

I'm leaning towards a fault with the graphics card possibly, the bios splash screen has a screwed up pallete since day 1 so i just turned it off and forgot about it but im wondering now if thats somehow connected. No problems with the windows desktop however, just hanging up on games, no artifacts, just freezes.

Everythings running at stock speeds, no overclocking.

Directx 9c installed

Trouble is I dont have any other pci express graphics cards to try in it to see if thats the problem.

So, any suggestions as to what I might try before I start sending stuff back to ocuk?

 

[Blue Cypher]

I think you may have a dogey graphics card there mate, try taking it out and use the onboard one, if the bios screen is still messey or garbled then there is a prob with the mobo itself.

 

[semi-pro waster]

Welcome to the forums, if you have a PCI(the original) graphics card then you could try that to see if it is a graphics card problem. Have you tried running 3dmark or anything like that to see if the graphics card copes with that?

 

[Sputnik II]

I would take a very close look at that PSU. It seems too small for the job.

 

[inaba]

Thanks for the advice, I dont have a normal pci gfx card but i think i can get one in a few days.

As for the psu, i have a similar setup running on a 350w myself that i never had problems with it Its an athlon 2600, asus a7n8x, sapphire radeon 9500, same amount of ram and same drives also in raid, would the newer tech use that much more power?

I could read the voltages off one of the spare molex connectors with my multimeter if that would tell me anything, what sort of tolerence is there?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Tolerance wise you are looking at + or - about 5% as being within acceptable limits.

The newer technology won't use that much more power, maybe a little but there is a definite habit of over-estimating the power requirements. I'm running an A64 3400, 6800gt(way more power hungry than the X1300), 3 hard drives, 1gb Ram and DVDRW + separate soundcard on a 400w PSU with no issues and I have had an extra hard drive as well as various USB devices running at the same time.

 

[inaba]

Just got back from his, had another play with the damned thing

The bios reports the voltages as

Vcore= 1.4
3.3v= 3.24
5v= 4.89
12= 12.22

little low on 3.3 and 5 maybe?

and i used a dvm on a molex connetctor while it was running and read 5.01v and 12.30v if that has any bearing

I disconnected the dvdrw, floppy and case fans to see if it still crashed with less of a load on the psu. It crashed.

I flashed the motherboard to the latest bios, which fixed the full screen logo but nothing else.

3dmark 03 locked it up on the first test

32mark 2001 se ran fine oddly enough, i had it on the same disk, yet older games do still crash it, warcraft 3 being one of them.