Blue screen of death...

[xinsomniacboix]

Hi people... lately my computer has been giving me the dreaded blue screen of death. I built it about a week ago using:

MSI K9n4 sli mobo
Athlon 64 x2 5000+ black edition
4 gigs of ADATA ddr2800 ram (1 sticks)
carry over 7600 gt
carry over old hard drive
carry over psu 450Watts

My system seems to be working fine most of the time and it worked really well the first week. But, it's been giving the blue screen after every so often now. And it happens when I'm not even playing games too. I was running matlab for school and it bluescreened. I've overclocked my 5000+ a few times by changing the multiplier from 13 to 14 for 2.8gHz. It seemed to be running stable and that's not even overclocking by very much. It's supposed to be able to hit higher speeds easily. So what is causing this blue screen? Is the power supply malfunctioning or something? Is it my hard drive? The first couple of times i tried to boot the computer it gave me a disk read error. But, after I swapped some power cables so that not as many things were in a row leading up to the hard drive plug, it worked fine. Does power consumption have something to do with it?

I really need help since I don't know what's wrong. Thanks guys

 

[g-paw]

I'd start by running the diagnostic/repair software from the hdd mfg site, preferably from a floppy. If it's not the hdd, could be the PSU

 

[akhilles]

It seemed to be running stable

Don't assume anything especially when you're overclocking. Make sure. Run memtest+ & Orthos overnight.

 

[iiiceaser]

Lemme just get clear.. You have a single 4GB stick of ram, and just one? Also, did you format your hard drive during the carry over process?

I think you probably have 2 sticks of ram, and you just had a typo above. If you indeed only have 1, that could certainly be A (not the) problem w/ overclocking. Then depending on how your individual motherboard deals with the ram be sure you check the manual and have the ram in the correct DIMMs. (sometimes the mobo will ask for a stupid configuration to work properly)

Also, if you didn't format your hard drive before you booted be sure you do that. Having all sorts of old drivers and such can really mess up your stability. You'll want to get an OS disc and do a clean wipe, then reinstall. Although, if it's giving you that unable to read disc bit, you may want to seriously consider just getting yourself a new drive on newegg for $40 or so. That's the first sign something is going wrong...

I hope some of that helps you

 

[xinsomniacboix]

Hi, sorry I wasn't clear about the ram, I meant that I had 4 gigs of ram composed of 4 1 gig sticks, 2 dual channel kits.

Yeah, I was planning on getting a new harddrive over the next week or two, but I need to make the money first. Hopefully, that's just the issue. I'm going to run the tests that you guys suggested and hopefully that'll identify the problem for me if I have one. Thanks for the help

 

[SirCrono]

My money is on faulty ram, run memtest overnight and tell us if you get any errors.

 

[johng24601]

Just a quick check, make sure you installed the AMD CPU driver. I had a similar problem on my first AMD 64 build before I installed the cpu driver. If that isn't it, then as others have said, it is probably a memory issue. You could try lowering the speed from 800 to 667,(In The BIOS) I've seen that help when all the memory slots are full. I would also try running just two sticks instead of all four. Good luck.

 

[xinsomniacboix]

Hey guys, I ran memtest all night and it returned no errors. I also ran orthos on stress cpu for a few hours and that was fine as well. When I did blend it blue screened after a while but i had it overclocked at that point so it should be fine when not. Is this an issue with windows most likely then? or my hard disk? I'll try the memory stuff johng suggested too, thanks

 

[SirCrono]

Since you say it bluscreened when running matlab (I hate matlab btw) and when running orthos in blend I appears it crashes when using CPU and RAM heavily, since memtest reported no errors I have just two guesses now, and they aren't nice, first guess is faulty or insufficient voltage regulators in your mobo, second guess is bad PSU.

Try to borrow a friends PSU (preferybly a more powerful one) and see if it blue screens when blending in orthos.
Also try running SuperPi 32M and see if it gives you any errors.

BTW, I really doubt it's your HD, but run the diagnose tool on it, you never know.

 

[xinsomniacboix]

i actually bought a new psu so i should be able to install it today and see if theres a difference... at the expense of my homework of course
-_-, my psu worked fine in my old rig, so idk if it's faulty, but hopefully that's the case. the computer has blue screened at start up before, it seems to happen at really random times. when i play games, it's fine for the most part. i'll try running superpi though. Which hd diagnostic tool is good?

 

[g-paw]

i actually bought a new psu so i should be able to install it today and see if theres a difference... at the expense of my homework of course
-_-, my psu worked fine in my old rig, so idk if it's faulty, but hopefully that's the case. the computer has blue screened at start up before, it seems to happen at really random times. when i play games, it's fine for the most part. i'll try running superpi though. Which hd diagnostic tool is good?

For the hdd, I'd run the diagnostic provided by the hdd mfg, they it generally includes software that can do some repairs

 

[xinsomniacboix]

man, after installing the new psu I still have these problems,
the computer blue screened after about 3 hours of prime95 on blend,
then again it also blue screened randomly a little while later as I was browsing the internet... which i'm sure doesn't take too much resources

so far, memtest ran perfectly fine on the computer so it's not the ram? orthos ran fine for a good while on just stress cpu, it blue screened on blend too, but now i'm thinking maybe it's related to something else? I mean, I'm getting blue screens at all sorts of strange times

 

[homerdog]

I was having this exact same problem until I fixed it a couple of days ago. It would do dual Prime95 for days and run memtest indefinitely, but then bluescreen at the most inopportune times.

I finally figured out that my mobo doesn't like running 4 sticks at their rated speed of DDR-400. I backed down to DDR-333 and it's rock solid stable now. I just tightened the timings a bit to make up for the speed drop.

Yes I am still on 939

 

[xinsomniacboix]

I reinstalled windows lately and I thought I was in the clear for a while, but then the blue screen happened again. This time however, it cited my hp printer driver as the source of the error. Is that bs? It worked fine before I upgraded and I just installed everything, so there can't be any conflicting drivers or anything. At any rate, I've uninstalled the printer and I'm trying to run the ram at 666mHz now. Seems like a waste though since this is a new build. Is it a good idea to return the motherboard and get a new one? I can still return it to newegg if I want to.

note: it blue screened the first time i tried to post this message -_-

 

[Hawkeye22]

Have you checked your CPU temps?

 

[xinsomniacboix]

My temps are ok, my cpu runs 30-40 normally and gets to maybe 50 or so when i'm testing it.
My gfx card stays at about 55. My system in general is around 45.