I had the strangest issue with my (fairly) new rig last night. I built it about 2 months ago:
OCZ StealthXStream 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply
Abit IP35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 "LGA775 Allendale" 2.20GHz (800FSB) - Retail
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775)
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel Vista Gold Series DDR2 (OCZ2G8004GK)
BFG GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail
It's been stable since the initial build at 3Ghz with temps around 32 degrees idle and no more than 50-55 load. However my daughter was on MSN when the whole thing locked up completely. No blue screen or reboot - just froze.
On restarting it, the BIOS settings had been lost and everything was back to stock settings, but it just appeared to hang on the initial BIOS screen. I figured it must be the memory, so I swapped out some from my other PC but it was exactly the same.
Eventually I realised that it was booting, but increeeediiibbbllllyyy sloooooooowwwwwlllllyy (i.e. taking around 3 minutes to reach the point when it entered the BIOS settings page when you press DEL). Once in the BIOS settings screen you could move around and change settings, however it took about 2-3 seconds to recognise a keypress and move around.
Next thing I figured that something must be wrong with the cooler so the CPU was throttling, however the BIOS was showing the temps as normal (albeit only updating the values every 20 seconds or so...)
After much head scratching I decided to disable the 'Thermal Control' and 'EIST' (i.e. speedstep) settings in the BIOS and rebooted.
At which point the whole system was back to normal.
So, it's back to normal now and appears to be 100% stable again, but has anyone had any similar experience and/or have any suggestion what the problem might have been?
OCZ StealthXStream 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply
Abit IP35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 "LGA775 Allendale" 2.20GHz (800FSB) - Retail
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775)
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel Vista Gold Series DDR2 (OCZ2G8004GK)
BFG GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail
It's been stable since the initial build at 3Ghz with temps around 32 degrees idle and no more than 50-55 load. However my daughter was on MSN when the whole thing locked up completely. No blue screen or reboot - just froze.
On restarting it, the BIOS settings had been lost and everything was back to stock settings, but it just appeared to hang on the initial BIOS screen. I figured it must be the memory, so I swapped out some from my other PC but it was exactly the same.
Eventually I realised that it was booting, but increeeediiibbbllllyyy sloooooooowwwwwlllllyy (i.e. taking around 3 minutes to reach the point when it entered the BIOS settings page when you press DEL). Once in the BIOS settings screen you could move around and change settings, however it took about 2-3 seconds to recognise a keypress and move around.
Next thing I figured that something must be wrong with the cooler so the CPU was throttling, however the BIOS was showing the temps as normal (albeit only updating the values every 20 seconds or so...)
After much head scratching I decided to disable the 'Thermal Control' and 'EIST' (i.e. speedstep) settings in the BIOS and rebooted.
At which point the whole system was back to normal.
So, it's back to normal now and appears to be 100% stable again, but has anyone had any similar experience and/or have any suggestion what the problem might have been?