Please Help PC Rebooting Itself

[DanielLevesque]

Please Help, My pc reboots itself for no obvous reason, I installed latest Ati Catylist Drivers figuring that could possibly have caused it.. so went back to .21 instead of .22 which is the latest. This did not help.. I am running Windows 2000 Pro SP3 with my specs below. Only programs running are Dark Age of Camelot and Roger Wilco.

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000007f (0x0000000d, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000). Microsoft Windows 2000 [v15.2195]. A dump was saved in: C:\WINNT\Minidump\Mini080402-01.dmp.

Antec 400W PSU
Asus A7n266-c
Athlon XP 2200+ Tbred
2x 512MB PC3000 Cas2.0 DDR OCZ
100Gig WD Special Edition 8 Meg cache
Ati Radeon 8500 128MB
3dmark2001se score is 9479

 

[vader1882]

you might want to check the voltage of your ps is delivering to the motherboard

Oh aye its guaranteed, but I'm not too sure about the stuff inside. - Scotty

 

[DanielLevesque]

There power supply is as shows

Vcore 1.7
3.3+ = 3.2
5+ = 4.7
12+ = 12

 

[ritesh_laud]

Please Help, My pc reboots itself for no obvous reason

Could be a heat issue. Even at stock the 2200+ is a very hot chip and you must ensure that there's good contact between the HSF and the chip. What's the ambient temperature in your room? Do you have adequate ventilation in your case? Did you apply the thermal paste evenly and only a small amount?

Ritesh

 

[DanielLevesque]

My proc does not go above 45 degrees nor does my board.. its definitly not a heat problem... ive got the best HSF that can be baught on newegg... and yes thermal paste was applied

 

[ritesh_laud]

My proc does not go above 45 degrees nor does my board.. its definitly not a heat problem

Remember that temperatures reported on an Athlon XP system cannot be trusted because the core thermal diode is not used. Your core may be much hotter than 45°C. A good way to check is to touch the heatsink. Is it very hot to the touch? If yes, then the fan is not dissipating the heat quickly enough and the core is probably sizzling hot and hence unstable. If this is the case, try reseating the HSF (using new thermal compound). If you have a big portable fan, open the case and point the fan directly at the HSF. If your problem goes away, it was heat.

You can also try raising the voltage just a tad in your BIOS; perhaps your T-Bred came from a poor batch and needs more than stock voltage. I doubt it's a PSU issue since you have a powerful one, but perhaps it's faulty. Also try removing all expansion cards except video. It could be a hardware conflict.

Ritesh

 

[Guest]

voltages seem a tad on the low side. you didn't mention the stability of the readout. often significant variation , especially on one already reading low, would be a strong indication of a struggling supply.

 

[DanielLevesque]

Heatsink is cool... the Volcano 7+ is a sweet hsf Also I didnt see how to raise voltages in my bios but I will check it out.. dont want to burn the proc..
thanks for info

-Dan

 

[DanielLevesque]

Sorry... I posted the lowest point the voltages were hitting instead of the flux..

 

[slvr_phoenix]

My first thought upon reading the title of the post was that it was the power supply. Yet after looking at your specs, it looks like a winner, so that shouldn't be it.

My next thought was heat. Your heatsink looks good. So it's not likely to be the processor. (Unless you mounted it funny, but the temp you gave doesn't indicate that.)

So my next thought was still heat. (Heat is after all a big PC killer.) You don't mention your case's air flow. Are all of your case fans pointing in the right directions? Does your RAM get good cooling?

My last fading thought was power circuit stability. Try running the PC in a different room and/or running it without a surge bar. It might just be that you're close to overloading the circuits that feed your power supply.

<A HREF="http://www.nuklearpower.com/comic/171.htm" target="_new">The corpse you find may be your own.</A> - Black Mage

 

[DanielLevesque]

First off id like to thank you for your reply. My Heatsink is seated properly.. airflow is definitly good ive got 4 case fans which are all properly installed.... ram has heat spreaders... and im on a UPS.

 

[slvr_phoenix]

That does narrow down things since your PC is set up so professionally. If it's actually rebooting spontaneously with all of that, then I'd imagine it has to be bad hardware. I've only ever seen BSODs/lockups with RAM and PCI cards. They generally don't cause complete reboots on their own even when faulty. For that matter <i>usually</i> the AGP card doesn't either.

(The major exception that I've seen is that Win2000 and DirectX combined can easily causes the entire PC to reboot whenever DirectX encounters a problem, so video card problems can often mean reboots in Win2K if they're running DirectX apps at the time. This actually can also apply to any video editing and movie playing software that also uses DirectX in Win2K.)

So I'm guessing that it's either the power supply, the motherboard, or the CPU. (Those being the major culprits for a spontaneous reboot.) It sounds like it'll be a pain to diagnose.

<<<EDIT>>>
Two other thoughts:
1) You do have some serious RAM there. Are you actually overclocking at the moment, or were you just planning on it in the future? If you are presently overclocking, try going back to spec and seeing if that clears up the problem.

2) Maybe nVidia learned a trick from M$ and made their mobo chipset incompatible with an ATI video card. Heh heh.

<A HREF="http://www.nuklearpower.com/comic/171.htm" target="_new">The corpse you find may be your own.</A> - Black Mage<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by slvr_phoenix on 08/06/02 12:37 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[LED]

WinXP also has an auto-restart feature....Mostly gets triggered by bad RAM, or NIC/Network problems.

This sig runs too hot.

 

[Bardic]

Funny that you should mention dark age of camelot. The only time I have had any of my computers spotaniously restart in the past few years was when I started playing DAoC.

If you had just changed your video drivers, I would say that that is the cause. DAoC has it's nice features, but sometimes it just sucks. I've stayed at windows XP defualt drivers for more than 6 months just so I can play that game.

 

[DanielLevesque]

Yea.. Im on windows 2000 pro, and ive tried the radeon drivers that came on the cd all the way to the newest cat 2.2 drivers... with no luck... I took out my second 512 stick and am now testing ram first... Processor is definitly not the problem because it did the same thing with a 1.4ghz athlon in it.

 

[MeTaLrOcKeR]

Ok i've seen this kinda problem before.........

Do u have the absolute latest Via 4-in-1's installed ???

And i know it doesnt make sens ebut i had this problem with a friends A7V board on Win 2K after instaling SP2 but only if i had installed the 4-in-1's AFTER the SP2 installation.....and it had an ATI Graphics card aswell....AIW Rage 128 pro to be exact............i dunno.....hopefulyl soem of that info helps...

Check also ur BIOS settings..see if AGP Fast writes are enabled...and make sure anythign related do SHADOWING is disabled......and make sure system bios is on cached =)

Oh...also, switch ur ram timings from SPD if its selected to MANUAL and change from 2.0 CL to 2.5 just to see if theres a diff.......

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=13597" target="_new">-MeTaL RoCkEr</A>

 

[slvr_phoenix]

Ok i've seen this kinda problem before.........

Do u have the absolute latest Via 4-in-1's installed ???

And i know it doesnt make sens ebut i had this problem with a friends A7V board on Win 2K after instaling SP2 but only if i had installed the 4-in-1's AFTER the SP2 installation.....and it had an ATI Graphics card aswell....AIW Rage 128 pro to be exact............i dunno.....hopefulyl soem of that info helps...

That would have been my first thought too, had he not stated that it was an A7<b>N</b>266-C. That makes it an <b>n</b>Vidia <b>n</b>Force chipset, not a <b>V</b>IA monstrosity.

<A HREF="http://www.nuklearpower.com/comic/171.htm" target="_new">The corpse you find may be your own.</A> - Black Mage

 

[DanielLevesque]

this board uses the nforce.. no diff with cas testing with second stick of ram only in diff bank

 

[shallowbaby]

i had the exact same problem with my Tbird system. I tried replacing the PSU, heatsink, video card, and memory.. Nothing worked. So I completely replaced the mobo and went with intel cpu, amazingly, the problem went away. Maybe i should have replaced the cpu before i beat the crap outta my last mobo, but i couldn't stand it anymore with the constant annoying reboots.

as for your situation, if the computer reboots at certain intervals (say after an hour of being turned on), that probably means its a combination of things (no single culprit)...if you don't end up replacing the mobo or the cpu, i'd be interested to know what you did to fix it!

<font color=green> there's more to life than increasing its speed -Ghandi</font color=green>

 

[DanielLevesque]

I will be sure to let you all know.. it rebooted with 1 stick.. im testing the other.. and it hasnt done it yet... im thinking ram so if this stick works out fine after a day or 2.. i know its either ram bank1 is bad or the stick itself

 

[Guest]

LOOOOOOOLOLOLOLOLO
THe rebooting is thus a FEATURE ??? ROOOOOOOOOFL !!!
Wooohahaha LMAO
A feature !!! Man, i need to get XP !!
ROFL

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =

 

[MeTaLrOcKeR]

My bad dude.....sorry i was tired i misread that for A7V266.......im really sorry......i feel like an idiot now...
umm.............go back to where u baught ur motherboard and exchange it for the exact same one........assuming its ur ramm bank or whatever..............

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=13597" target="_new">-MeTaL RoCkEr</A>