Problems with new build

[D D Danneh]

Spec is as follows:

Phenom II X4 955
Gigabyte 880gm-UD2H
Corsair XMS3 (2x4GB)
Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB
BeQuiet Pure Power 530W
MSI HD6950 Twin FrozR III 2048MB

The problems with this have been extremely odd and inconsistent. I've been testing it for a few days, and the system usually crashes after about 20 minutes, but sometimes it lasts several hours. There was an initial problem that produced 3 long beeps and a short beep before POST, and switching the ram modules around seemed to fix it temporarily. This seems to have disappeared though recently.

Now, the problem is that it crashes every time something intensive is done. Running intel burn test with the above setup caused a crash almost immediately. The problem is not cooling, the temperatures are fine and cooling is adequate. The problem is not the power supply, testing with a BeQuiet 750W PSU made no difference. Swapping the graphics card out for a GTX 260 fixed the problem, strangely, however testing the HD6950 in another system (an i7 920), the crashes could not be replicated. I've also tested with another windows HDD that both gave the same crashes.

I'm fairly certain the problem is not the PSU, RAM, or HDD. I'm thinking the problem is likely to be the CPU or motherboard, however, why would swapping the GPU out fix the problem? Can anyone else tell me anything else to test? Unfortunately I don't have access to another AM3 motherboard or CPU to test each seperately. Is it just a case of RMA'ing the motherboard, cpu and gpu together?

edit: note that I've also tried slightly increasing the CPU voltage, and the RAM voltage to 1.65v, but neither of those had any effect.

 

[TB1968]

Do you mean 1 long and 3 short?
I would look at your memory first, remove one dimm and just leave 1 in, run that and see what happens, if it goes again after 20 mins then swap dimms, if thats stable then you have a faulty dimm.
If its still faulty then use another dimm slot on the mobo, it sounds memory related but you have to test to see if its the dimm or the slot.

Tony

 

[D D Danneh]

Already tried all that, I've ran 3 passes of memtest, with no errors, single module in every slot, alternating modules, using different ones, no difference. The BSOD codes have all been vague ones that could be hardware or software related, I just have no idea what to test now

 

[HNR1]

I was doing a new build with a brand new Tagan 500 psu and no way would it run an xfx 5850, the fan would spin up to 100% on the gpu and that was it, but it would run my gtx 295 no problem. It sits as a spare with all the other spares I instead put in a corsair 850 and no more problems.

http://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm