Problems since upgrading to Abit AN8 Ultra

I've upgraded my computer about 3 months ago and it now consists of the following parts:

Abit AN8 Ultra
Athlon 64 3200+ Winchester
2 X 512mb Elixir Brand DDR 400 Memory
WD2500KS 250gb SATA II hdd
Seagate 200gb IDE hdd (secondary)
PowerColour Radeon X850XT
Antec TruePower 2.0 480w PSU

Now the new parts I got to upgrade my computer were the mobo, gfx card and the psu, and the problem I'm getting is random BSOD that could happen within 2 minutes of booting up or my system could be up and running for 3 days and it'd suddenly crash to a BSOD. I'm mostly getting the driver_irq_not_less_than_or_equal thing, and as far as my limited computer knowledge goes, it could be anything.

Now I've read on the abit usa forums and it seems that the mobo gives a lot of people this BSOD problem and I cannot find a garantee fix to it. I've tested the ram and it seems ok, boosting the voltage from 2.60 to 2.80 and chaging it to 2T seems to make it more stable (could go on for longer without a crash) but would still crash often.

This has caused me a lot of grief as it's been 3 months and I cannot find a fix to this, so I'm considering replacing the mobo and maybe the ram and see if it'd be a quick fix to the problem.

So a couple questions here:

1, Any suggestions of what I can try to fix this BSOD problem?

2, If it gets to the point where I have to purchase new parts, any recommendations on the new mobo? Haven't got a big budget as the last upgrade including various other stuff cost me a total of 400 quid, so hopefully something in the region of 70-100 pounds would be great.

Thanks for reading this long winded post and I hope someone could help me with this :undecided

Sounds like the RAM's faulty, see if you can get your hands on some other sticks and test it out. As for the motherboard, it shouldn't really cause that problem... <3 my AN8 Ultra. :)

Elixir isn't normally great RAM more your cheap & cheerful.
Have you tried running memtest on it?

Uninstall teh Nvidia firewall and ide drivers

Hey dude, i had the exact same problem as you. And its not the mobo or bios.

the guy above me is right, it was my nvidia firewall which was causing the bsod. I thought it was the bt client i was using. But i found out that some people are having issues. The firewall causes a memory leak and then bsod appears. For me it was quite random and v.annoying.

But uninstalling that fixed the prob no restarts since. I love the an8 ultra ;)

I recommend using the free version of zonealarm, its what i am using now.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the replys lads, and ja3h especially for the pm or I might have forgotten to check back on here!

So should I uninstall only the firewall or both that and the ide drivers? I have a couple of Nvidia things installed under the add/remove programs, one is Nvidia Drivers and the other is Nvidia ForceWare Network Access Manager, which I think is the firewall right?

I'm trying to avoid a clean install for the moment, at leats until I get another hdd so I can install on the new one and wipe this one clean. My ram's been fine in my old system and I tested them both in another system I built for my housemate and all 2 sticks ran ok, memtest shows np and I used the new rams I bought, altho elixir again, from the new system and stuck it in mine and it still BSODed me.

Get rid of both - the network access manager asn the IDE drivers.

It might still come to doing a fresh install as when you put the drivers it actually pauses something or other for the network manager to install and therefore knackers the driver installation adn your PC. I never used to get BSOD but just really slow at times and would not access some web stires - Ebay for one.

Did a clean install and va va voom :)

You could possibly try driver cleaner and or the system restore to see if it helps?

I uninstalled the Nvidia Firewall and so far so good, still early days tho. I was afraid that uninstalling the IDE drivers might screw something up so I'll leave that on for the moment.

Definately gonna clean install s29feb, but not until I buy a new hdd that I can install on, too much stuff on the hdds and nothing to back them up with :P

jsut totally uninstall the Nvidia drivers and clean with driver-cleaner or similar, and reinstall without the IDE drivers. It pops up with a question during driver installation 'Do you want to install the Nvidia IDE SW drivers?'

I had problems with a friend's machine using that board and Elixir RAM. The RAM ran and tested fine on my Asus A8V but wouldn't run in his AN8 Ultra. He fixed it by getting some Crucial RAM instead so I'd suggest running memtest86 on it as well.