troubleshooting problem

hi, folks, just trying to figure out why i'm getting some random (to me) problems with my computer. i think it may be my motherboard going bad. can anyone here tell me what the northbridge and southbridge each control? i seem to be getting sporadic problems with the hard drives and the agp. these are some of the symptoms:

crashes to desktop while playing 3d games
also crashes to desktop when running 3dmark
these crashes happen anywhere from right away to a half hour or so into a game
prime95 runs anywhere from 15 minutes to and hour and then errors out
sometimes i get exception errors while trying to run games
sometimes when i boot into the os it can't find 1 or 2 of my hard drives

i've run memtest x86, it's stable, no errors after repeated looping of the tests
i've also made sure to check all my hard drive connections and they're all tight

my puter is this: winxp pro, amd xp2000+, shuttle ak35gt-r rev.2(via kt333 chipset, i think), radeon 9800 pro, 2 sticks of 512 mb kingston pc2700 ddr, 1 stick of 256mb kingston pc4000 ddr, various hard drives, plextor dvd burner, 2 nic's, using onboard sound

anyway, if anyone has any ideas, or can tell me specifically what the nb and sb control, it would be greatly appreciated . . .

What are your temps on the cpu, case etc?
Maybe a heat problem.

my temps are good on what i can see. load temp for the cpu is around 40 degrees celcius, case is about 35

Is your system overclocked? Whats your PSU ?

Could be a problem of your components not getting enough power

Goateh said:

Is your system overclocked? Whats your PSU ?

Could be a problem of your components not getting enough power

Click to expand...

This is my guess too. With summer here and temps rising, PSU put out less power. (Fact: The hotter the PSU the less power it outputs.) This is especially true for old and generic PSU's. And if you have an old generic....

enermax 431w, model # is eg465p-ve, but it's a few years old now . . . and nah, not overclocked atm, just trying to get it to run stably at default speeds, hehe. i'm still trying to troubleshoot it, running prime95 and memtest to try to figure out if it's my ram, or not. it seems that in some configurations (i have 3 sticks) it passes memtest86 just fine, but then, once i get to windows, i use prime95 to check for stability and it craps out on me then. i might be inclined to disregard prime as a little too picky if it weren't for the games crashing constantly. anyway, thanks for all the ideas, i'll try to see how many volts my ps is actually putting out. mbm says only 4.81v on the 5v line under load, but the 3.3 and 12v lines seem to be fine, so i don't know if that's ridiculously bad or borderline, or what, hehe. need to get my ohm-meter and check it, i guess . . .

I wouldn't worry about your 5v rail too much, it doesn't seem to be undervolting enough to warrent any concern.

Have you tried flashing to the latest bios for that board ?

haven't tried that yet, i will do that. the bios i'm using atm is prolly about a year old, so i'll give it a shot.

gl

Since the problem only seems (or primarily) to happen when 3D applications are run, I would think that Direct X and/or the video drivers are at fault. You seem to have ruled out other possibilities.

Hrmm good point.