elbert said:
There are many scenarios that may cause this but they all lead to the main reason. Not enough power to the CPU.
1. High OC without enough CPU volts.
2. Not enough CPU Volts at any speed.
3. Bad power supply.
4. Motherboards with very high amount of VDroop which leads back to "Not Enough CPU Volts". This will reveal itself with a load on the CPU. Could just be that the motherboard has CPU power issues like (Good power from PSU but the motherboard wastes power before reaching the CPU).
For the majority this error mostly seem to be MSI motherboards with a few ASUS. All I can suggest you do is follow these steps. Live update may do a bios update so save your current version.
1. Reconnect or reset all devices on your motherboard.
2. Clear cmos, then in bios load optimized defaults.
3. Under windows use MSI Live Update to update the drivers.
4. Remove the current VGA drivers and reinstall it from ATI website.
5. If possible use another CPU and memory to check.
6. If the issue remains reinstall the system to have a try.
If the issue remains, please contact MSI tech support.
I would suggest these free options first and if all else fails buy a new PSU. You could try checking your PSU's power output with a test meter.
Thanks for the reply.
I am currently using the motherboard's "Easy OC" switch, but the problem existed prior to that, and I've been running the FSB at +15% without issue, so I don't think that's the problem. I've also run 7zip's benchmark for at least 30 minutes with no problems. Incidentally, switching it to +20% overclock did cause the system to crash after running the benchmark for a few minutes, so I'm certain that +15% is stable.
I don't think that solution #1 will solve the issue, since it happened with a completely fresh install (both hardware and software). I also tried #2 to no avail.
As for #3 and #4, Live Update didn't work, but I used the M-Flash option to update the BIOS, and installed all new motherboard, CPU and GFX drivers from the appropriate sites.
I'd love to try #5, but that's not possible, although I could always try removing one stick of RAM - I'm using 2x 2GB at the moment.
#6; At first I thought it was an issue with Windows 7, so I went back to XP Pro, 32-bit, which didn't help, and a clean install of Windows 7 (plus all updated drivers, etc) after that didn't help, either.
As I mentioned, 450W is the minimum recommended by a few PSU calculators, and the Radeon card recommends 400W, so my 3-4 year old 450W PSU (which is JeanTech, PCWorld's own brand, I think) probably needs upgrading anyway.
Thanks again for the suggestions.
I'm going to remove a stick of RAM, unplug any devices I don't need and use a different PCI slot, to see if it helps.