'Stable' system bluescreened

JonJ678 · 1 Oct 2009 at 22:58

Fairly sure I've diagnosed this, but it surprised me so I thought I'd check.

200x20 920 on a UD5, 1600mhz corsair. Water cooled processor and graphics card, good psu.

Passed prime 95/ibt/furmark without stumbling on XP. Intended to get around to installing vista and running ibt on all memory but not done so. Hadn't crashed in a few weeks, so stable enough.

Just now it blue screened. Audio jarred (?), pc did not reboot. Under mild load (warcraft 3).

Memory is not hot to the touch. Northbridge heatsink is. Back to defaults now.

I'm deducing that the issue is higher than normal ambients pushing it over the edge. Specifically I think the northbridge (IO hub? whatever the main mb chip is these days) ran too hot and thus blue. However it may have been the ram, airflow is shocking in this case.

How confident can I be that better motherboard cooling is the answer?

Do let me know if I've missed anything. Cheers

JonJ678 · 1 Oct 2009 at 23:06

Didn't bother to write it down, it might be logged somewhere. It's been coping fine with the game and everything else for ages, so I'm pretty sure it's not a software issue. You're quite right that drivers can do this though.

JonJ678 · 1 Oct 2009 at 23:13

Nah, softwares been the same for ages. Only thing to change is an increase in ambients. Don't really know how to tell whether ram or motherboard is overheating, neither are considered likely to but neither have any airflow near them at all.

JonJ678 · 1 Oct 2009 at 23:20

Don't think more voltage will save it for me, but good luck Paul. Do you use llc or not?

Since the processor is under water it's pretty immune to ambient temperature changing, but the no-airflow board and ram is vulnerable. I'm going to water cool one or the other to solve this, and just don't want to get the wrong one

Motherboard heatsink felt hot is the best I can do, nothing silly though. Didn't burn me at least. It did take a couple of minutes for me to think to check however.

Reason to suspect other causes is that so much is on the processor now that it's hard to imagine the chipset mattering that much, it's only running an 8800gt

JonJ678 · 2 Oct 2009 at 02:03

Aye, good to be back. I don't think I'm very lucky with overclocking either, but I can be very persistent.

So, essentially you've added mosfets to the list of things which might be too hot, and confirmed that ram can be the issue. The corsair block is being difficult to source, the one place with stock I don't want to deal with + has a two week lead time. Waterblocks for the board it is I think.

8800gt has an ek block on it, it's doing just fine. Loads at a ridiculously low temperature. Want another one, waiting on mm

So. £80 of the taxpayers student loan is being spent on copper and acetal, could have been worse. Cheers