Hello,
My system is a bit older and I've been having some problems with it lately (and they've been getting worse).
Things started with CTD's when playing games - that got more frequent as time went by. I thought it was the
video card at first and up'd the voltage to it, reduce the speed to 4x AGP, etc. - all helped a little, but only
for a short time. Soon I was back to crashing to desk top as frequent if not more then ever.
I ran memtest86 for 24 hours with no error. I tried Orthos and it ran for about 16 hours before the system blue screened.
When I restarted it, I went into bios and poked around. I had the Vcore set to default voltage of 1.4V, but the Bios reading was showing under 1.3 (around 1.28). So i thought this was probably the culprit and I upped the Vcore
to 1.425 - but it still showed in Bios under 1.3. When I upped it to 1.45, it finally came up into the 1.3 range - fluctated between 1.328 and 1.344V according to the BIOS. I last tried 1.47V but still saw the same readings -
of course now I'm lucky if I get into BIOS at all. The system isn't even booting far enough most times to get into
BIOS and when it does, after a short time in it locks up on me.
Is it my cpu or are the VR's on my mobo shot? I hope I didn't fry the cpu by playing with VCORE but according to my last BIOS readings I was still well below default voltages.

Any thoughts on what it could be or what to do next? I was hoping to hold off on a full system upgrade until early next year - anyone know of a decent, cheap 939 boards with AGP (or I could go 939 with PCI-E and bite the bullet on the upgrade on the GPU now, even though I just bought this card about 8mo's ago).

Thx,
Sdrac

- by the way, the PSU is fine. In BIOS the readings are 12.16V, 5.08V and 3.34V. I also checked with a Multimeter and got 12.01V and 5.1V (not sure why BIOS was a bit off - I trust the MM more then BIOS).

Ascendtech has 2 versions of the ecs kv2 with agp support for $44-53. I use the lite version for my backup system, and it works fine if you load the sound driver off ecs' website. If you upgraded the agp card, you may need more juice from your power supply.

o1die,
thanks for the info on the mobo - I'll check it out.

PSU seems fine - its 750W and only about 3months old. Checked the a couple of the rails with a multimeter and
it seems fine.

Its either the cpu or the mobo - I'm leaning toward the mobo because of the vcore readings I got from BIOS right before it went totally belly up. Still hoping to hear from others on the forum to see what they think.

Anyone have any thoughts?