If someone could suggest anything to try to solve the problem I'm seeing it would be appreciated:
My brother bought himself a bunch of new components and I spent the weekend trying to help him troubleshoot an intermittent problem that seems to be narrowed down to either the motherboard or the CPU.
He bought a 3.4 GHz Pentium D, an Asus P5VDC-X mobo, and 2 gigs of some cheap brand DDR2 memory and after rebuilding the system and reinstalling Windows XP SP2 we found that the system would after 10-20 minutes of running completely lock-up. It does it more consistently if we're running something heavy on the 3-D like Battlefield2, but it's also locked up on us while burning CDs and sometimes immediately after getting into Windows or even sometimes before it's got past the "starting windows" screen.
We tried putting different hard drives in, disconnecting the CD drives he already had in the tower, running on each of the two sticks of ram alone in case it was a bad memory stick, tried putting a different AGP video card in (both his video cards are AGP). The time to lock up is fairly random, it might lock up after 5 minutes on the first boot up of the day, get hard-reset, then run fine for half an hour before the next lock up so I think it's unlikely to be a heat problem. About the only predictable aspect is that the lock up is much more likely to happen sooner if a 3d game is running.
This is a Pentium D system so we already had to get past the "Ucode error" problem, now the BIOS running on the board is a released one dated September 1st (the newest available, and not a beta). It's a perfectly clean install of Windows on a freshly formatted hard drive but it also behaved this way before he reinstalled Windows, although then it was running 2000, not XP. All I could offer was that maybe his motherboard was flaky and he's now looking at putting an Asrok board in, unfortunately there isn't much choice available to him since he needs a board that supports Pentium D and AGP 4x-8x and he has a SATA drive presently unused so he also needs a board that supports SATA. Note all this time we were running only with 1-2 IDE drives.
Like I said, any help or suggestions for other things to try would be appreciated.
My brother bought himself a bunch of new components and I spent the weekend trying to help him troubleshoot an intermittent problem that seems to be narrowed down to either the motherboard or the CPU.
He bought a 3.4 GHz Pentium D, an Asus P5VDC-X mobo, and 2 gigs of some cheap brand DDR2 memory and after rebuilding the system and reinstalling Windows XP SP2 we found that the system would after 10-20 minutes of running completely lock-up. It does it more consistently if we're running something heavy on the 3-D like Battlefield2, but it's also locked up on us while burning CDs and sometimes immediately after getting into Windows or even sometimes before it's got past the "starting windows" screen.
We tried putting different hard drives in, disconnecting the CD drives he already had in the tower, running on each of the two sticks of ram alone in case it was a bad memory stick, tried putting a different AGP video card in (both his video cards are AGP). The time to lock up is fairly random, it might lock up after 5 minutes on the first boot up of the day, get hard-reset, then run fine for half an hour before the next lock up so I think it's unlikely to be a heat problem. About the only predictable aspect is that the lock up is much more likely to happen sooner if a 3d game is running.
This is a Pentium D system so we already had to get past the "Ucode error" problem, now the BIOS running on the board is a released one dated September 1st (the newest available, and not a beta). It's a perfectly clean install of Windows on a freshly formatted hard drive but it also behaved this way before he reinstalled Windows, although then it was running 2000, not XP. All I could offer was that maybe his motherboard was flaky and he's now looking at putting an Asrok board in, unfortunately there isn't much choice available to him since he needs a board that supports Pentium D and AGP 4x-8x and he has a SATA drive presently unused so he also needs a board that supports SATA. Note all this time we were running only with 1-2 IDE drives.
Like I said, any help or suggestions for other things to try would be appreciated.