Computer Crashes.. Having trouble troubleshooting..

[Phil194]

First of all, here is my problem. Running normal programs and stuff is fine. However, when I tried to play larger games such as Battlefield 2142, I experience crashes pretty quickly. I just recently upgraded.. I'll be playing, then something major will happen such as a disconnect-from-server message, an end of a round, a death, a large explosion, the entrance to a large vehicle, etc.. When such a thing happens, the system locks up and makes a high-pitched monotone beep sound, though kinda quiet. After a few seconds, the computer will reset on its own and begin booting up, which tells me it's still sane.

Before I upgraded, I had..
AMD Athlon 2400+
ECS Motherboard, 266 MHz BUS
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
768 MB DDR RAM

With that set up, I had absolutely no problems minus slow gameplay. It ran fine.

Now I have..
AMD Sempron 3100+
Asus Motherboard, 800 MHz BUS
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
768 MB RAM

And now I can't play the game more than five minutes. I am positive it isn't a compatibility issue or anything like that.. The motherboard and the CPU's temperatures after the crash are about 105 F, fan running normally. The only thing I'm not sure of is whether or not the video board fan is running properly, but I don't know why a faster motherboard/CPU would damage that.. Also, I do have all the updated drivers.

Does anyone have any ideas? I appreciate any insight.

 

[jammydodger]

Hmmm this is an odd problem, it is possible that the new motherboard is slightly undervolting you RAM causing the crash. The ammount of RAM you have suggests you have at least two sticks (one 512 and a 256 or 3x256), its possible the when u switched motherboards you put a memory stick with more agressive timmings in the first memory slot, so the motherboard is defaulting to those timmings that the second stick cant run.

I had a memory problem with one of my sticks of memory, everything would work fine but in certain games it would crash randomly and certain apps would crash at the same place everytime. I think the reason was that a certain area of my memory was currupted and everytime that area was adressed the computer would crash.

The way I identified the error was to run memtest86 from here, its a bootable .iso that can be burt onto CD. Load it up and run the test for a few hours, if you get errors try relaxing the memory timmings, boosting the voltage or removing one stick.