Trouble with my dual core Amd athlon 64 X2 3800+

I would really doubt it is a heatsink problem.

If you kept having crashes during the OS install, it's entirely possible that the install you eventually got is corrupted. However, that's not the original problem, so after you figure out what component is being troublesome, you should probably do a fresh install from scratch.

First place to start is the memory. Run memtest (you can search for it online, and make a bootable floppy) and check to make sure that the memory is ok. You may need to relax timings in BIOS.

Speaking of BIOS, make sure you mb BIOS is up-to-date. You may need to flash it to get the mb to play nicely with an x2. As it's an AM2 system, this is unlikely, but you never know.

Next thing I can think of is your windows version. Is your install disk already SP2? Original install disks for XP sometimes have problems with the newer motherboards and processors, as it doesn't have the correct dirvers available.

I just know that the M2n Series from Asus that are currently sold most often use 0103 bios revision.

I recently build around this board and had same kind of problems.
After loading bios 0203 and setting DDR2 timings manually all my problems disappeared.....well the computer problems did anyway.....


Take care though....it seems ezflash method and within windows method of flashing BIOS is not allowed before bios version 0203.(as stated by asus on their site) Also, there was one guy here on forums who said he used ez flash to upgrade bios from 0103 to 0203 and it hung half way, leaving him with a black screen comp that does not beep,boot, or toast your bread for that matter.

So if your bios is still 0103, flash it the old fashion way....bootdisk with awdflash program and bios file.

Also the M2N series have a strange thing going with the memory settings.
In my case, a pair of corsair ddr2 800 was set at ddr2 667 with very strange timing when i used auto configuration from the bios.

I had to manually set it to ddr2 800 and fill out the timings manually to get it to work properly.