Athlon 1.4 stablilty

[Guest]

Hi there, I just built an athlon system with:

1.4Ghz chip
soyo dragon m'board (integrated lan and audio)
256Mb crucial 2100 memory,
ibm deskstar 60gxp
pine geforce 2mx 200 (I know - it will be my first upgrade)

The system boots fine but one in windows it invariably locks up - total system freeze, no blue screen - must reboot.

I noticed it was running quite hot (50C-65C, cpu temp, 40-50 chassis temp). I reduced the speed to 1200 and now it lasts longer before hanging. The +12V rail on my HEC 300 power supply seems to regularly dip to around +10v before returning to +12.28v

Sometimes it hangs immediately on bootup into windows - even from cold after being off all night. It also seems more likely to hang during CPU intensive operations (e.g decompressing a large rar file etc).

What is the most likely culprit? Heat (i.e. get an extra case fan), power supply or faulty chip/memory?

If anyone has ideas on how to test the system to see what the real problem is fire away. I'm quite new to this so I'd appreciate any and all suggestions.

Thanks in advance,

drbob

 

[Guest]

>The +12V rail on my HEC 300 power supply seems to
>regularly >dip to around +10v before returning to +12.28v

there you have it. ALthough the Athlon CPU is not dependant on the 12v (I believe), it really seems your PSU isnt up to the task. Get a decent one, and use your MX a bit longer if you have to. Can you monitor the 5v line ? what are you getting there ?

>50C-65C, cpu temp,

This is very high.. too high I'd say, although I must add my 1.4 survived well beyond 65° and remained stable. I changed HSF anyway, and now get <45°c with a swiftech+pabst HSF. Consider a new HSF, or improve case flow.

>40-50 chassis temp
Hard to believe. 50° chassis temp ???? I think your motherboard monitor isnt reporting the correct value here. 35 would be high and 40 extreme. 50 is never heard off. Even your chipset shouldnt that hot.

---- Owner of the only Dell computer with an AMD chip