Phenom X4 9850BE freezing.

[Bad Maniac]

I have an Asus M2N32SLI-Deluxe AM2 motherboard, 2x1GB of OCZ Spec ops DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12 a Geforce 8800GT 512MB, Sound Blaster Xtreme Gamer and 2x 1TB Seagate Barracudas. All powered by a Tagan EasyCon 580w.

Recently bought a Phenom 9850 to upgrade my aging 4600+ X2. But when I install it my PC freezes under heavy load. No BSOD, just hard hang, with the audio looping either a high pitched tone, or static like noise.

All my other components pass stress tests when using my 4600+. The system easily runs 24 hour 100% CPU load on both cores, or 24 hours of 3Dmark 06. With the Phenom 3Dmark06 usually doesn't even complete a single run.

I have a Arctic Freezer 7 Pro rev.2, which I know isn't the best aftermarket cooler, but it should be better than the stock cooler. And I have a well vented case with 3 120's.
The temps seem "normal" for a Phenom 9850, idle in the low 40's, full load in the mid 50's.

According to the online PSU calculator my entire system will draw under 350w at 100% load, and the Tagan rails are all fine when it hangs, tested with a multimeter. It's got 2x20 amp 12v rails, which is well above specs.

So my question is this, faulty CPU or do I need more power?

 

[solstice]

Try download OCCT and run power supply stress test. It basically runs both CPU and power supply together. That will help to isolate the problem in more detail.

I can not tell from your post if you overclocked at all. If so, then the power consumption goes up dramatically and depends on your setup.

Another possibility for the hang is due to over heating on the motherboard or chipset. Do you have chasis airflow across the PWM? Those are very heavily loaded and get very hot. The other possibility is that some how ASUS motherboard sets the wrong chipset voltage and overheat it. I have a lot of problem when that happened. The system would simply freeze due to overhaeting on the chipset. The best way is to force the voltage on the chipset to something more reasonable.

Those are my advice so far until more data can be collected.

 

[Bad Maniac]

No overclock, my 4600+ is clocked to 2400 so my ram will divide evenly to 800, but the Phenom was kept at stock 2.5.

My case has good airflow and the cables are tidy, and the Asus motherboard has the heatpipe cooler on the chip and PWM's. I put the special Asus chipset cooling fan on, it didn't make any difference.
Also worth noting is I tried with Cool & Quiet both enabled and disabled.

Any idea what voltage I should force on the chipset? The board has the nForce 590 SLI chip.

 

[Bad Maniac]

Core 3 is giving errors, every time I run OCCT. Only core 3, and always core 3. I'm going with faulty CPU since when I replace it with my X2 CPU, it runs for hours with no problems.

Now here's hoping newegg has some nice people since it's way over 30 days since I ordered the thing, just haven't had a chance to test it until now. Typical...

 

[solstice]

It is very likely to be a CPU problem. It also could be a problem with the voltage regulator. I read in another forum that a ASUS motherboard incorrectly sets the Vcore voltage for a set of AMD processors. As the result, there were lots of stability issue associated with the processor. The bios fix was simply adding another 50mV to the Vcore supply for that set of processor. This may not apply to you since your motherboard is fairly old and decent. Still, I would not complete eliminate that as a possibility. I would try to raise the voltage of the cpu by a couple 20mV to 40mV to make sure it was strictly the CPU.

 

[QuietIce]

I take it you have the updated BIOS? (just asking)

Have you set the vCore manually to 1.35v?

Mid-50's is pushing it for a Phenom under load, is SpeedFan (not CnQ) enabled or something?

That's all I can think of at the moment - I'll keep at it ...

 

[DarkWhite]

The egg will probably take it back, they RMA'd my RAM fine when I couldn't test it because I ordered the wrong mobo twice. *facebus*

 

[deexteer]

"The temps seem "normal" for a Phenom 9850, idle in the low 40's, full load in the mid 50's."

Is that the temps your processor has without any oc? My amd 9650 @2.84GHz has lower temps :S

Srry for going offtopic^^

 

[TaCoSwInDeZ]

Hmm...interesting. I'm using the same processor and my computer has always and I mean ALWAYS from day 1 had stability issues. I wonder if its possible we might have gotten a bad batch of 9850's. Even at stock settings and less my machine will random BSOD, startup cycling, and almost always (at least 1/hr) comes up with the display driver has stopped responding and im not even o/c'ing my video card. I have ran memtest and it comes up fine with either stick or both in the machine. This definitely has me wondering.

 

[Bad Maniac]

Newegg.ca agreed to take it back. And the replacement WILL work, guaranteed, because when I went to the post office to send it back the receipt said $13.37

 

[Bad Maniac]

Well, the replacement is here courtesy of Newegg.ca. Popped it in and it runs beautifully. OCCT no longer crashes, PC hasn't frozen so far. Going to give her the full run through of benchies next weekend and report. But it's definitely running better already, could never complete even a 10 minute CPU or PSU test in OCCT with the previous CPU, this one passes all of them with flying colors.

 

[Parad0x420]

Grats, good to see the RMA went fine and it's up and running.

 

[TaCoSwInDeZ]

Im also glad to see that new CPU fixed the issue. I was having stability issues with my 9850 as I mentioned before so I may just bu another cheap CPU for my AM2 board and build a second rig dedicated to folding and whatnot.

 

[Bad Maniac]

I spoke too soon. 3DMark crashed, STALKER and Saboteur freezes the PC. Even froze once just idling on the desktop.

Running OCCT PSU test shows the 12v and Vcore dropping very low, the 12v is down under 11.6. Might have to replace my PSU. It is a EU Tagan PSU made for 230v, and I'm using it in Canada with 115 of the dirtiest most crappy volts ever.

OCCT passes tho, both CPU, GPU and PSU tests. And as soon as I plop my old X2 4600+ in there the games are stable as a rock. DAMNIT!

 

[Dooms101]

Well I am not completely sure about this, but if you have crappy AC input ('dirty' as you called it) maybe using a UPS would help by leveling it out? I dunno... just an idea.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

But when I install it my PC freezes under heavy load. No BSOD, just hard hang, with the audio looping either a high pitched tone, or static like noise.

Sounds like a CPU core wall or you need more Vcore, typical of AMD.

Does NOT look like a RAM issue, because a RAM issue usually causes a "STOP: 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA" BSOD or the OS complains about a file being missing or corrupted.

 

[Fugatron78]

Hi i have the same problem with freezing, same MB, but CPU is X2 4200, and this is not every time, only ocvcasionaly. i use WaterColling temp are normal on all components, no bug report can be found, is freeze to cca 7-10secods..... PSU is 600W with draw under 450W top...... this is very strange behavior, from HW point.......

 

[QuietIce]

???