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Major computer problems, possibly ram?

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NGL_BrSH

Member
Joined
Dec 9, 2005
in the last year or so I haven't been gaming like I used to.
Used to run BF2, COD4, FEAR.. etc

but of late i've been using it mainly for a webbrowser with no problems.
UNTIL.. I purchased L4d2, and COD4 MW2 which are quite system intensive
I will get random looping freezes that require a Hard boot.. occasionally a BSOD that says "page error in a non-paged area" or things like that.

I had a trojan recently and decided that was probably causing my headaches.. so I reformatted Winxp sp3.

To no avail.. same problems.. blah.
I have not changed any settings in bios and the computer has been stable for years.

During either memtest86+ or the other memtest they both just hang about 8 mins into the test. Always @ test #5 block moves.

I've tried different sticks of ram, different Dimms as well.
tried it with EIST off, and C1E off.. nothing different.

I cleaned the entire set of components thoroughly and checked to see if they were getting hot.. nope. PSU, northbridge, IC's, vid card, ram and cpu barely warm.

HELP I don't really have the money or the desire to start throwing parts at it.. otherwise i'd just get a new mobo, ram and cpu.. but I don't want it to come to that.

specs:
Abit AW9d-Max bios 1.7
Intel E6600 overclocked to 3.4ghz (365 fsb)
Mushkin 996696 PC9200 5-5-5-15 (2x1gb)
EVGA Nvidia 8800GTS 640mb
Pc Power & cooling 650w silencer
dual 74gig raptor's in Raid-0
1 terabyte seagate
320 gig seagate
winxp sp3
Custom watercooling.
 
Using RealTemp--> "Settings" page (or CoreTemp), make a note of the Max. Core VID of your chip. Next use CPU-Z to record your Vcore (Core Voltage) while the CPU is under a load (like while running Prime). Compare the two readings, and if the recorded Vcore in CPU-Z is lower than the Max. VID as read by RealTemp, then you'll need to increase the Vcore until the two voltages match. A reading in CPU-Z that's slightly higher than the VID is fine, but you don't want to see a lower voltage.
 
Thank you for your response.

So.. here's what occurred..

After attempting several settings in hopes that magically something would fix it.. and i wouldn't have to replace things.. I had a profile for an even higher clock that used to be stable.. and I had a profile for the stock clock with just the configuration of fans and timings etc.

The higher one immediately failed.. however.. the stock clock worked flawlessly.

So it seems it's a voltage thing in my eyes. However when i tried considerable more cpu voltage nothing changed as did more ddr2 voltage.

Last thing that could have changed when i switched the profiles was the northbridge voltage.. I upped it .05v and boom.. works great. (now at 1.60v hopefully not too much)

but the funny thing is when i took it back down.. it seems to work not as bad as before. By refreshing Bios profiles i wonder if there was some corruption before. Or if it's really the northbridge voltage.

If it's the northbridge why is it requiring more voltage?

Is my mobo getting tired? Is this it's death rattle and I can assume it to fail completely now?

blah.. anyway.. it's stable for now. yeehaw?
 
So I hate it when I have a problem, search the forums and find someone with the exact same problem yet they never put the solution.

Problem: Stable in most normal events IE: browsing net, video and music playback but crashing ingame with sound looping, occasional BSOD random harddrive errors.



Solution: Needs more northbridge voltage. Apparently as things age on the is 975x board with an overclock it requires some additional northbridge voltage to keep it stable.
 
So I hate it when I have a problem, search the forums and find someone with the exact same problem yet they never put the solution.

Problem: Stable in most normal events IE: browsing net, video and music playback but crashing ingame with sound looping, occasional BSOD random harddrive errors.



Solution: Needs more northbridge voltage. Apparently as things age on the is 975x board with an overclock it requires some additional northbridge voltage to keep it stable.

This also holds true when the parts start to degrade and die. Thus is why we try to get the maximum clocks with the least amount of voltage.
 
So I hate it when I have a problem, search the forums and find someone with the exact same problem yet they never put the solution.

Problem: Stable in most normal events IE: browsing net, video and music playback but crashing ingame with sound looping, occasional BSOD random harddrive errors.



Solution: Needs more northbridge voltage. Apparently as things age on the is 975x board with an overclock it requires some additional northbridge voltage to keep it stable.

NGL,

Besides the check redduc suggested, I think running hard drive diagnostics from Seagate would be appropriate. Overclocks and hard drive errors are normally separate issues alltogether unless hard drive file corruption is caused by BSOD errors.
 
harddrive problems were caused by the memory issues.
Very common.

Thats why I was thinking memory failure or ddr2 voltage at first.. but it ended up be deeper seeded with the northbridge which controls the memory which then causes hdd issues and gets me to square one :D

I ran a scandisk /f and all is good now.. since i originally posted all this and figured out the northbridge voltage issue, everything now works perfectly. No hdd probs, no mem probs, no lock ups, no freezing in test #5 on memtest. (KNOCK ON WOOD)
 
This also holds true when the parts start to degrade and die. Thus is why we try to get the maximum clocks with the least amount of voltage.

Sounds like the symptoms that cap gurus over at badcaps.net report when the motherboard or PSU has caps that turned bad.
 
Have you tried each stick individually in the same slot? Then ran the mem test on each stick?

It may be a bad slot, rather than bad RAM...
 
i did test individually, same results.. again..

Solution needs more northbridge voltage and is 100% as of right now.
 
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