lockups resolved
Hi All,
Well after much frustration, I finally worked out the lockup issue with my athlon 4800+, I have definitely narrowed it down to 2 things:-
1. not enough heatsink compound between cpu and heatsink.
The heat sink actually sits on the plastic holder, which sorrounds the cpu, so if the cpu is slightly smaller in thickness, the heatsink will not sit hard pressed against it, so its critical to have enough heatsink compound inbetween them.
2. The ddr2 ram heats up and casuses the lockups.
Ok so how did I findout, I got frustrated, after many hours trying to figure the problem out, which included:-
-playing around with the bios
-upgrading the bios
-upgrading the windows drivers, and so forth
-changing hardware like ram in different slots, dvd roms from the system....I could go on
Note to:-
I have been using memtest86, this is a bootable DOS memory test utility, so this rules out any windows issues.
so I took my upgraded pc back to the shop where i purchased the m/b, cpu and Ram, guess what no lockup, it ran flawlessely for hours. I felt like a moron, but to tell you the truth it did lockup just the once, when we switched the pc on for the first time, but after that it didnt lockup at all. The guy that was helping me, wanted to know as well, because he knew the first time it did lockup.
This is the clue, in the shop it was cool, because there was a cool breeze coming from outside into the shop area, I thought they had an aircon on, but it was just the slight cool breeze from outside.
So then I placed another fan loosely, near the cpu heatsink and fan, and near the ram and it ran for along time without a hitch, still testing continues, but everytime i have the fan near the ram and heatsink, it runs much much longer.
to give you an idea, the lockups were mostly happening within 10minutes, sometimes even seconds, by placing the fan, I get hours run time.
Mrd