• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Pentium D 3ghz

naudiz

naudiz

naudiz

Associate
Joined
24 Apr 2007
Posts
545
Location
Rochford
My brother has been having some major problems with his computer for the last few months, and when I got back from Uni today I decided to Orthos it to see if it was at all stable. Orthos failed after about 16 seconds with a rounding error. Does this mean that the CPU is on its way out? I know it's quite old. The only thing I haven't tried is going into the bios of the motherboard and checking the settings. Any ideas?

Naud
 
Not necessarily, my uncles pc last year had some problems and turned out to be the power supply that failed prime and orthos.
Try another PSU if you can and run mem test to check any memory problems.

What are the problems his getting, BSOD or general slow-ness.

Rob
 
Could be faulty memory, or a PSU issue. To be honest, CPU is probably the least likely cause of the problem, although its not impossible. As its a Pentium D, why not force the test to run on core 0, and then again on core 1. If it fails on one core, but passes on the other, then its the CPU.. if both cores fail, I'd personally look at the memory/motherboard/psu instead.

Memtest86 is your friend.

Oh yeah, some cheap DDR (1 and 2) memory have trouble running even at stock speeds at the "official" voltages. a lot of PC problems are fixed by increasing the memory voltage a little.
 
Ah right ok thanks guys, the PSU is also relatively new, its a Corsair 520w. I'll get him to run memtest and see if that gives up any errors.
Edit: Apparently the memory is quite new as well, but will get him to run memtest anyway

Naud
 
Last edited:
If he's upgraded the memory (how many memory sticks installed?), then it may well simply be a case of either upping the memory voltage a little, or slackening the timings. The more memory sticks install, the more chance of instability with tight timings and stock voltages.
 
He's running 2x1gb sticks, or so he tells me, lol. I'll go into his bios a bit later and have a poke around, thanks guys

Naud
 
Well it now passes Orthos, although I've only run it for 10 minutes. Went into his BIOS and set the right memory timings, and it turns out the motherboard doesn't support 400mhz memory, so thats one problem.

I've also run memtest, and it fails on all of test 2 and 3, gave up after that. However at least its stable now, hopefully I won't hear any more complaints from him about it lol

Naud
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom