My computer continually crashes

[jlutz11]

I have a vista 64 x2 dual core 6400+
4g memory
ATI 2600xt video card
ECS Z780gm-a motherboard

I have all the most recent drivers for everything.


I have continual crashes when i play games. I play world of warcraft and my daughter plays spore. We cant even play either game for 15 minutes without it crashing. Most of the crashes just freeze up the game we are playing and we can get back to desktop to close the game and restart. Occasionally the crash will produce the Blue screen of death and restart the system.

I have worked with Blizzard tech support for a while and they seemed to think it was some sort of resource conflict with the sound or video card, but even disabling the onboard sound and buying a new sound card didnt fix the problem.

I saw on this forum that someone suggested getting Orthos stress test and see what happens. When i run it on any of the test it will fail after about 6-15 seconds of testing. Here is the most common error i get


Type: Blend - stress CPU and RAM Min: 8 Max: 4096 InPlace: No Mem: 3838 Time: 15
CPU: 3200MHz FSB: 200MHz [200MHz x 16.0 est.]
8/9/2009 12:00 AM
Launching 2 threads...
Using CPU #0
Beginning a continuous self-test to check your computer.
Press Stop to end this test.
Test 1, 4000 Lucas-Lehmer iterations of M19922945 using 1024K FFT length.
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.455078125, expected less than 0.4
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.
Torture Test ran 0 minutes 18 seconds - 1 errors, 0 warnings.
Execution halted.



please help, I'm at wits end here

 

[pjmelect]

The blue screen of death is most often caused by faulty ram, run a memory testing program to test. However if the memory test fails it may not be the memory that is faulty but a faulty or under powered power supply. substitution is the only test.

 

[jlutz11]

i have run the memory test with no failures, and the power supply is new.

could my voltages for the cpu or memory be too low?

CPUZ shows my voltage on the cpu is at around 1.31v occasionally dipping down to 1.29v

and under the SPD tab is shows my memory at 1.8v under the timing table.

 

[CooLWoLF]

Ok. Two possible answers for you:

1. If you look at the cpu support list for the A780GM-A, the 6400+ is NOT supported. That could be the problem.

2. If you are feeling adventerous, bump your core voltage up to 1.4 volts. That cpu uses 1.35-1.4 volts, so if you are only using 1.3, my guess is that will fix your issue. Your problem sounds dead on like a voltage issue. It is hungry for more power.

As a side note, make sure you have the latest bios update.

 

[jlutz11]

you were right on about the voltages. when i increase the voltage a bit the crashing seemed to stop. I was able to play my games without crashing. The most stable voltage seems to be around 1.35-1.38. I had it up to 1.4v but i was running into heat issues. Seems the crashing starts when the voltage dips down below 1.3v


somthing new started to happen last night. windows started to crash. (this is a completly new problem, windows was always stable before) In some cases, i couldnt even get it to fully load before it crashed and restarted. after it did this several times it wouldnt load up at all and i got a message that the windows registry was corrupt. I tried to run a repair but it didnt work, so i had to reformat the whole drive and start again. I was looking at the voltages when the windows crashing was happening. The core voltage would drop down to about 1.0 - 1.1 volts, even though i had bumped it up in the bios. Not sure why that was happening.

After loading windows again...the problem happened again. Same registry error and couldnt get it to load. This time though, the repair worked and now everything seems stable. Its been running all night long and so far this morning the system seems stable.

I cant believe I bought a processor that isnt supported, i normally am very thorough about that kind of thing.

 

[CooLWoLF]

If you are worried about heat, get yourself a good after-market cooler. I suggest the Xigmatek Dark Knight. Its what I use and I have the exact motherboard you do. It cools my cpu extremely well. My temps never go above 45C at 1.4 volts. The nice thing to is that you do not need to remove the motherboard to install this cooler.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835233029&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-CPU+Cooling-_-XIGMATEK-_-35233029