Newly built system crashing

[Pat]

I recently rebuilt my system using a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AMD A64
X2 6000, eVGA GeForce 8500GT with 512 MB RAM, and two 1GB sticks of
Kingston PC6400 DDR2 RAM. Finished the rebuild the night after
Christmas, and have had the system upp 99% of the time since then.
Yesterday (09-Jan) I went down to my office and logged on, and noticed
that the system had been rebooted. NP - Windows said that the system
had been automatically rebooted after an update. So, I start reading e-
mail, and all the sudden the system reboots. It gets past the memory
count and drive detection, then reboots again. It does this several
times befofe finally going into Windows. When I get logged in, I check
the Event logs and find no entries possibly related to this event. The
system proceeds to go through this cycle. I finally powered it off for
about 2 minutes and started it up again, and it ran fine for about 10
minutes before starting this cycle again. During that time, I checked
the CPU and system temps and found them to be in acceptable range (BTW
- the Cooler Master Hyper 212 is an AWESOME CPU heat sink/fan!). SO -
do I have a faulty board or a faulty CPU?

 

[pcbldrNinetyEight]

I recently rebuilt my system using a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AMD A64
X2 6000, eVGA GeForce 8500GT with 512 MB RAM, and two 1GB sticks of
Kingston PC6400 DDR2 RAM. Finished the rebuild the night after
Christmas, and have had the system upp 99% of the time since then.
Yesterday (09-Jan) I went down to my office and logged on, and noticed
that the system had been rebooted. NP - Windows said that the system
had been automatically rebooted after an update. So, I start reading
e- mail, and all the sudden the system reboots. It gets past the
memory count and drive detection, then reboots again. It does this
several times befofe finally going into Windows. When I get logged in,
I check the Event logs and find no entries possibly related to this
event. The system proceeds to go through this cycle. I finally powered
it off for about 2 minutes and started it up again, and it ran fine
for about 10 minutes before starting this cycle again. During that
time, I checked the CPU and system temps and found them to be in
acceptable range (BTW - the Cooler Master Hyper 212 is an AWESOME CPU
heat sink/fan!). SO - do I have a faulty board or a faulty CPU?

Do you have another power supply on hand that you could try?

 

[Pat]

Do you have another power supply on hand that you could try?

Unfortunatley not. I have been thinking about building another system
using an old case, so this could be just the excuse I need to get that
project started...

 

[Paul]

Unfortunatley not. I have been thinking about building another system
using an old case, so this could be just the excuse I need to get that
project started.

There is an article here on power supplies. The ones in the "Tier 5" list
are examples of brands to avoid. For some of the more expensive units,
you can find reviews on the web. Jonnyguru.com has a few reviews.
Anandtech.com has done a few reviews. Xbitlabs.com is also a technically
skilled site. Good sites use power supply testers as part of their
evaluation.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=108088

There are also reviews, where the reviewer only did the review to get
a free power supply. The comments you might see are "it was shiny" or
the like. Such sites lack the resources to do any measurements or
offer critical comments about the construction.

If you read the customer reviews on Newegg, you can also spot products to
stay away from.

I don't recommend getting a computer case with bundled supply. It is
better to buy them separately, so you have more control over what
you get.

Paul

 

[gsboris]

There is an article here on power supplies. The ones in the "Tier 5" list
are examples of brands to avoid. For some of the more expensive units,
you can find reviews on the web. Jonnyguru.com has a few reviews.
Anandtech.com has done a few reviews. Xbitlabs.com is also a technically
skilled site. Good sites use power supply testers as part of their
evaluation.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=108088

There are also reviews, where the reviewer only did the review to get
a free power supply. The comments you might see are "it was shiny" or
the like. Such sites lack the resources to do any measurements or
offer critical comments about the construction.

If you read the customer reviews on Newegg, you can also spot products to
stay away from.

I don't recommend getting a computer case with bundled supply. It is
better to buy them separately, so you have more control over what
you get.

    Paul- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I had the same problem a while ago. It turned out to be faulty
capacitors on MB. Check capacitops around the power connectors. Good
luck.

 

[pcbldrNinetyEight]

There is an article here on power supplies. The ones in the "Tier 5"
list are examples of brands to avoid. For some of the more expensive
units, you can find reviews on the web. Jonnyguru.com has a few
reviews. Anandtech.com has done a few reviews. Xbitlabs.com is also a
technically skilled site. Good sites use power supply testers as part
of their evaluation.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=108088

There are also reviews, where the reviewer only did the review to get
a free power supply. The comments you might see are "it was shiny" or
the like. Such sites lack the resources to do any measurements or
offer critical comments about the construction.

If you read the customer reviews on Newegg, you can also spot products
to stay away from.

I don't recommend getting a computer case with bundled supply. It is
better to buy them separately, so you have more control over what
you get.

Paul

Hi Paul,
I'm curious, do agree with the article at the link you gave about the
quality of those power supplies?

My PSU needs or my experiences with PSU's must be radically different
from other people. Of the two PC's I've built I have always purchased a
case with PSU. The first PC I built in '99 still works perfectly
(although I have seen a software glitch or two in recent months, I've
been tinkering a lot with all my machines recently so it may finally be
time for an OS reinstall) and the one I built in November of last year
looks to be equally reliable. Although I did get two bad Kingston ram
DIMM's in a row from newegg. I will never again buy Kingston ram!

My first case, an Enlight EN-7237 which came with a 300W PSU houses a
DFI K6XV3+, K6-2 500, 256MB of PNY RAM, ATI128 Rage, Segate ST38420A
8GB, Memorex 48MAXX, generic floppy and a Zoltrix FMVSP561 controller
modem circa 1998. My first CD-RW, an Acer died in 2002 and I've replaced
the CPU fan three times.

The new case, an IN-Win J619 which came with a 350W PSU houses a Biostar
NF325-A7, Sempron 64 3100+, 512MB of Kingston ram (at least one of the
three dimms sent worked!), Zogis GeForce-5500 256MB 128 bit, Seagate
Barracuda ST380215A 80GB, Sony AW-Q170A, Sony floppy and an Agere
WinModem sent me by mistake form TekGems. They screwed up the order and
it was cheaper to let me keep it rather than send it back, not
surprising since it sells for $6.

Both of these PC's are WIN98SE. I also have a Gateway P2-233 full tower
given to me that I tided up and installed WIN98SE on for my wife to use.
I also still have my first PC a 1994 vintage Acer Acros DX2-66. It's in
working order but now languishing in the basement.

Oh I also just bought three pieces of cat5e, a D-Link switch and two
D-Link NIC's so I can network all three PC's together (Biostar MOBO has
on board NIC).

I guess my PSU needs are either pathetically modest or I'm exceptionally
lucky. Especially considering the horror stories I read in this NG.
What do you think, am I lucky or do my systems have miniscule power
needs?

 

[Paul]

I guess my PSU needs are either pathetically modest or I'm exceptionally
lucky. Especially considering the horror stories I read in this NG.
What do you think, am I lucky or do my systems have miniscule power
needs?

Which is why I recommend reading reviews of supplies on Newegg. For
example, one guy had four failures of the same brand and model of
supply. The only question there, is why he persisted on using the
same model supply. Reading reviews is the best way to discover which
ones are good.

Paul

 

[Pat]

Unfortunatley not. I have been thinking about building another system
using an old case, so this could be just the excuse I need to get that
project started...- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

UPDATE: Everything seems to be just ducky now. I replaced the power
supply (was a Zalman 400W fanless, now PC Power & Cooling 750W) on
Saturday. Shortly thereafter I started experiencing numerous BSODs,
with varying messages. Most pointed to memory as an issue. I did two
things in succession, not sure which one actually fixed the BSODs:
upgraded the driver for the GeForce 8500, and upgraded the driver for
the NetGear GA-311 gigabit network card. After that, I pushed the
system pretty hard, moving a large number of files, running audio and
video, and graphics intensive apps while cruising the net. It hasn't
BSOD'd on me even once since then, or thrown any errors in the system
or application event logs. Thanks everyone for your help! - Pat