System extremely unstable and random shutdown

[Forestfire_88]

Hi everyone,
First of all, here's my system spec:
AMD 4000+ w/Zalman CNPS7700CU, Asus A8N32-SLI, 1GB Kingston Hyperx PC3200, Two EVGA 7800GT in SLi mode, 250GB Maxtor DiamondMax10, Sony DVD-ROM, NEC DVD Burner, Antec NeoHE 550W.

Just finished building this gaming beast, but it has been acting extremely weird lately. First of all, sometimes after I exit the game to return to the desktop, the screen just locks up and I will be forced to restart the system by pressing the restart button. After a while, the system starts to shut itself down or at times it take a long long time to boot into windows( 15 ~ 20 mins). I'm not sure now if it's problems with the RAM, CPU, HDD or MB, because I tried a few DOS diagnostic programs, and it will just shutdown after 5~10min of diagnostic.
So I'm wondering if anyone has ever experience or heard about the same problem as I'm having here... and hopefully give me some tip!

Thanks

 

[russell]

Could be a number of things. Since it's a new build first I would check to be sure the heat sink is properly seated to the CPU and all cooling fans are working .

I don't know what kind of diagnostic software you ran but be sure to check the memory if the machine will run that long.
here is a site for creating a boot disk with practically every diagnostic program on it.

Good luck and let us know how everything comes out.

 

[Forestfire_88]

Well, thanks for the tips. But I have ran two different ram diagnostic tools (Mem86, and Microsoft's ram diagnostic) and the ram seems to be in working condition; also I'm sure that my CPU heatsink was installed correctly because i have both hardware and software monitors that shows the cpu temp is around 30~40somthing depending on the load. The utilities that I have used are both in DOS, first one is the Eurosoft PC-Check and the other is the "PC Certify" diagnostic tool; for both they didn't come up with any error message about any hardware.
I have actually narrow it down to the PSU. I have contacted Antec about the NeoHE 550W that I have purchased, and they told me that there are some rare cases of incompatibility between the PSU and the MB that I have (A8N32-SLI Deluxe). I'm just wondering if anyone has ever heard about that or even experience it??

 

[russell]

Glad you got it pinned down.