E8400 to qx9650

[mdadney]

I recently bought my boyfriend a qx9650 to replace his e8400. He has an XPS 630i. Everything in it is stock, not including the gpu and new cpu. He's having no problems just doing general browsing or streaming videos. When he games it's a different story. We can notice a difference in that the games are running much smoother than before, and an increase in fps. He's having a problem with the games freezing the system at random. He can't tab out or open the task manager and ends up having to do a forced shut down. They don't always freeze, but they freeze at least once a day. He's done stress testing and the hottest the cpu got under full load was around 65c. I know that's a little hot, but it shouldn't be enough to cause the freezing should it? It seems to lock up the most when he switches from one game to another. Ex: Today he was running FSX and got through a full flight fine with great performance. He switched to ME3 and shortly after it froze up. He restarted and has been playing ME3 for about an hour now with no problem. Can anyone suggest any fixes or bios tweaks we can make to get this worked out? I had him raise the cpu voltage to 1.3 and that made it a bit more stable. Any help is appreciated!

 

[rockadrock1]

What is your power supply?

 

[mdadney]

What is your power supply?

I'm not sure what manufacture, but it's 750w. The only name I see on the psu is dell.

 

[rockadrock1]

Is the cpu the only thing you changed at the time?

 

[mdadney]

Is the cpu the only thing you changed at the time?

Yeah. He's gone all day today switching between flying in FSX and painting liveries in CS5 and hasn't had a single freeze.

 

[Ubrales]

Sounds like a PSU problem.

When you changed the CPU did you take the motherboard out of the case and later re-connect the 24-pins connector and the 8-pins (or 4-pins) connector?

Re-check these two connectors and make sure that they are well mated and the latches engaged. Ditto for the PCI connector for the graphics card.

 

[mdadney]

I checked all the connectors and everything is plugged in fine. After looking around in it some more, I realized his ram is mismatched. Ordered him some new ram Sunday and it's out for delivery now, (thank you newegg and ups.) I'm not sure this is the problem at all but I figured it wouldn't hurt to upgrade anyway heh. I have read a few things saying this power supply doesn't always put out what it's supposed to. If we can't get it worked out that may be the next thing to upgrade. Something that is very possibly part of, or the entire problem itself is we haven't done a fresh install of windows, which I've heard can cause problems when you've switched cpus. He has no idea where his installation disks are for anything, so we're trying to avoid that.

 

[Ubrales]

I read somewhere on this Forum that said that Dell PSUs are rated according to total power output and not just peak power; this is good!

Yes mismatched RAM can be a problem; good that you ordered some new RAM.

It is a good idea to make a complete backup of the computer on to an external hard drive before you change things.

 

[iceclock]

maybe its time to change windows. doa fresh install. i always recommand to reinstall windows when installing a new cpu.

 

[mdadney]

I've got him to agree to a clean install. We only have one problem... Dell never shipped any of the disks for the computer. We have the product key but no disk to install it from. Can we just download and burn it to a cd and use the key we have? (He has Windows 7 Home Premium.)

 

[iceclock]

yes. u can.

as long as the key is valid shouldnt be a problem.