Chipset cause of lock ups?

[madmanbmw]

I have been working on a PC this afternoon for a friend whom complains of constant freezes. While just "exploring" this machine it locked up on me twice. It did not make any sound or give an error messages, it just simply haulted. The system is an AMD K6 450mhz with 128mb ram and a 10gig hd running win98. It is about 13 months old. I downloaded Sandra, the benchmarking system information program to grab so info. I ran the CPU, DISK, and 3D NOw benchmarks without fail. However the 5 times I tried to run the memory benchmark (which includes CPU, CHIPSET, CACHE, MEMORY)the system locked up on me everytime. The PC was running at 50.5C or 122.9F which seems a little warm but I did not know if this would effect it. The main board is a Pronix (Expox) 06/08/1999 Apollo MVP3 AGP/PCI set. If anyone has any ideas as what could be causing these lockups please help.

Thanks
madison
mmcmajor@apex.net

p.s. The computer that I am working on belongs to a 40 year old woman and I know that she is not too woried about perfomance tweak and I doubt she has ever heard of the term BIOS. Once again the system is a little over a year old and only 700megs are taken up on the hardrive. Email and word processing are its main functions. I doubt anything has been changed on it sense I took it out of the box.

Ok, try turning off cache, pull memory one dimm at a time. Anything else? Could this simply be a windows problem. What are the odds this is hardware?

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by madmanbmw on 12/14/00 05:43 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

If the computer freezes (ie even mouse pointer doesn't move) then I would suspect the cpu. It definitely is running hot so I would try a good cooling fan before I'd throw away the cpu. It'd also be a good idea to put a cooling fan into the case as well. My amd k6's are running at anywhere from 38 C to 44 C. I don't like to go much hotter than that.

 

[madmanbmw]

That's it, everything freezes, no beeps or error messages, it is just like everything pauses at once, including the mouse. What would your first step be? Checking the current fan/heat sink to see if it is working?

madison
mmcmajor@apex.net

 

[RavenPrime]

Open up the case, and run the system and see if you get lockups while it is open. Make sure the open case is well ventillated or put a portable fan in front of it. If it is simply an overheating problem, this should help.
On one of my partners systems, he would get lots of lockups because of "overclocking" the SDRAM. It was set to CAS2 instead of CAS3. Once I changed it to CAS3, no other lockups. Check the BIOS and set it to the default settings.

James

 

[Guest]

I suspect the cpu is having problems. Like ravenprime said give it lots of ventilation but also have a good look at the cpu fan. If the fan is not turning or it's turning slowly, get a replacement. Does the board have some sort of hardware monitor so you can see the temperature?

If it's not the cooling, then indeed it could be the cpu. But I've also on some occasions, seen these kind of lockups as well when there are irq conflicts or address conflicts.