XP Restarts after 10 or so minutes... a8v 90nm gf4

[distinction]

Hi,

This is my first post here so please no 'n00b' insults...

Ok, I have recently bought the following from overclockers.co.uk

ASUS A8V Deluxe REV.2 Motherboard
AMD64 3000 Winchester 90nm (retail kit).
512 GEIL dual channel kit
Akasa 460Watt power supply with the blue l.e.d. (yey!)
Antec SUPER LANBOY case.

I already had a 120gb maxtor (i know, i know)
Geforce 4 MX 440 (with 8x agp)
Creative 5.1 soundcard
D-LINK Wireless 11g PCI card.
and a DVD writer.

I spent most of my student loan on the new bits for this computer, hoping to upgrade the rest when I had the money. But of course, i'm having problems.

I have updated the bios succesfully to the 1008 version off the official ASUS website. (RAM IN SLOT 4 etc). But windows is really unstable and restarts after a while when doing *anything*. It seems to be ok if it's sitting at the login screen though.

I have done driver clean and installed the latest drivers from the nvidia site, run memtest overnight with no errors. Installed the latest drivers for the soundcard and the wireless adapter. Still no luck.

I'm running SP2 on windows xp pro. I even tried different graphics cards, fished out an old geforce 2, same restart problem. I have had the motherboard replaced by the company and still the restart problem remains. It must be hardware, or and IRQ conflict or something but I JUST DON'T GET IT!

I have disabled all onboard features such as sound, lan, firewire etc. Still the same problem.

I read someewhere that fast writes causes problems, so I disabled this, put the graphics card down to 4x AGP.

Does anyone have any ideas, i'm really getting pissed off. I seem to have tried everything! Should I just sell all the parts and start again? Get a new motherboard? Help!.....

Thanks

[Purple]

over heating - its always always overheating with these new fangled experimental hypercharged chips, Get some heat paste and use precisly the amount instructed, using more is not better infact it is alot worse. Make sure that you have the right heat sink and that it is not RPM limited for noise reasons. If you are using dual channel RAM try not using it (take out 1 stick temporarily). Use fail safe defaults in the bios, if it works after this use optimised defaults then use trial and error to find the problematic setting. It is not likely to be Windows or driver issues since the hardware you are using is quite well established and you said you have tried various bits.

[Purple]

oh and buy a new graphics card for gods sakes man MX sheesh

[Wam7]

Go to Control Panel-System Properties-Advanced-Startup and Recovery and make sure 'Automatically restart' is not ticked

[pre]

You installed latest Nvidia drivers? You know this is a VIA chipset and not an NVidia one? Did you do an OS reinstall or are you using the same as from your previous setup?

Also look for hardware monitoring in the BIOS and see what temps/vcore readings you get after 10m.

[fthlagen]

I had similar problems recently (my thread is probably on page 1000 by now) but I agree with Purple.

Check you haven't slathered the heat paste on. Check that you have instead scraped it all back off and applied a tiny blob the size of "half a grain of rice" and smoothed it on with a credit card until no one area is thicker or thinner than the others - then apply the heatsink firmy but manfully without twisting.

In addition, I found that running my memory in dual channel caused problems. As an experiment, lump the RAM into pedestrian mode and see if your system stability problems go away.

If they do, then - like me - you're just left with the issue of getting the machine to run in dual channel mode after you've completed halflife2.

The most helpful advice I received was to get a copy of prime95 and run its torture test - there are three settings and each tests a subtly different aspect of the machine's setup. It identified my particular issue as related to memory.

[StormPC]

fthlagen,

You agree with Purple? He says it's overheating. You just said prime95 identified your problem as "memory related". Which is it?

Distinction,

You say you have a Geil DC kit, then later you say you installed it in slot 4. Please explain.

As with all S939 boards there are quirks. The A8V is the best of the bunch (least number of issues) but it isn't perfect.

A better test of overall system stability is looping 3DMark2001 with the splash screens disabled. If you can do that your system is stable. If you can't it's good to run memtest86 (make sure it's the updated version so it understands the cache schemes of the new CPUs and can properly test the newest memory modules). If you are totally stable without memtest86 errors then you have a VC or OS/driver related problem.

A hint:

The A8V will only run single channel if the DIMM is in slot 3 ONLY! Also, most memory will not run 100% stable in slots 2 and 4 if slots 1 and 3 are not filled.

[fthlagen]

Errr - it was the heatsink one first. when that was fixed, then prime95 was able to run for extended periods. It was then that it identified the memory problem.

So to answer your question, both.
I agree it wasn't particularly clear.
sorry

[Purple]

actually i suggested both

[aarontur]

omg. this one had me stumped for a few months. resolved with a fan and heatsink combo on the via chipset. it came with thermal double sided sticky tape already. comp usa 10 dollars. before that i tried drivers, swapping and buying new ram, a psu, video card. damnit, its all about the heat.
AVT
asus a8v mobo
amd 64 athlon 3200
2x1gb adata memory
ati 256mb agp video card

[iranu]

This thread is over 3 years old - I hope the OP is not still struggling with the problem!

[peterb]

This thread is over 3 years old - I hope the OP is not still struggling with the problem!

Indeed! And I woulkd also hope that the OP has now graduated - as he used his student loan to build the thing!

[s3ds]

this had me checking my clock lol when i saw the date