USB & Sparkle Motherboard Problem

[Matthew]

Today I installed my Sparkle motherboard. I didn't reinstall Windows.

After swaping the motherboard I started windows and everything seemed fine. I then installed the nforce drivers (not the ones on the CD) and restarted.

When it booted back into windows it detected the USB hub thing and wanted to install drivers for it. When it installed a driver it came up with the BSOD with a message saying IRQ_Not_Less_or_equal_to (or something like that).

I restarted and then tried to install the USB driver from the CD that came with the board but got the same thing.

Anyway I then thought that I should just reinstall Windows XP so I put the CD in a booted of it, it started to load some files (first thing it does) and then said "Setup is starting Windows" when it said that it crashed. It also does this with the USB thing disabled.

[BUFF]

How are your voltages?
i would try upping Vcore & also to your RAM.

[Matthew]

Why would I need to do that?

Everything was fine with the old baord and the voltages are what they should be.

[Spud1]

it does sound like a ram instability problem - your old board may have been supplying enough power to the ram but the sparkle one might not be as good at supplying the power. They are 'budget' products anyway imho...

[Matthew]

If it was a RAM power issue then why would it only crash when installing a USB driver or trying to reinstall Windows? It's been on for about 24 hours now without any other problems.

[BUFF]

If it was a RAM power issue then why would it only crash when installing a USB driver or trying to reinstall Windows? It's been on for about 24 hours now without any other problems.

nForce2 boards are hard on power suppilies - they like a good supply.
Most nForce2 boards tend to undervolt slightly from what is set in BIOS.
they also tend to be a bit picky on RAM, maybe this 1 doesn't like your RAM.

When you say that it's been on now for 24 hours without problems what has it been doing for those 2 hours - sitting in BIOS, or idling or will it run games etc.?

[Matthew]

Its just been setting idle and me using the net. I can't try any games until I get my new graphics card (don't think many will work on a 8MB PCI one )

My PSU is a 480W Tagan so I think thats good enougth.

My RAM is only generic stuff though, so that might be the problem. Can you recommend any good RAM?