I've had the same system for almost two years without any hardware changes, and it's been rock solid, but for the last few weeks it's been locking up with the screen freezing and controls not responding, and it seems to be happening more often in the last few days. Most lock ups happen within 5 minutes of booting, but some have happened after hours of active usage. I'm using windows 2000, and haven't updated drivers for a while, but I've had the same issue running memtest off a bootable CD, so I'm fairly certain it's a hardware issue. There are no related errors in the system event log.
System:
Epox 9npa+ nforce4
Athlon 64 3000+
2 512mb sticks of Kingston ddr400
Gigabyte x700 pro
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
2 hard drives, 2 optical drives
Fortron FSP400 power supply
2 80mm case fans on motherboard headers.
BIOS is optimized defaults with the onboard sound turned off, no overclocking.
Things I tried:
Memtest86 never reported any errors, but it has locked up during testing.
Lock ups happen even with sound card removed.
All fans continue spinning during lockup, and the BIOS reports temps under 45 after reboot.
12v and 5v on a spare molex connector seem stable on startup and under load using my cheap dmm.
Blew some canned air around the motherboard, a little dusty, but no visible damage, and the capacitors look normal.
A couple of times, it locked up before displaying a POST message on the monitor, the LEDs on the motherboard showed FF, which should mean it posted normally.
Sound card and video card share IRQ 18, but there is no other IRQ sharing with the sound card removed.
Reseated video card, sound card, and memory.
So now I'm thinking it has to be the video card or the motherboard. I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade the video card, and that would be my next step, but is there anything else I should check out before spending money? Any help would be appreciated
System:
Epox 9npa+ nforce4
Athlon 64 3000+
2 512mb sticks of Kingston ddr400
Gigabyte x700 pro
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
2 hard drives, 2 optical drives
Fortron FSP400 power supply
2 80mm case fans on motherboard headers.
BIOS is optimized defaults with the onboard sound turned off, no overclocking.
Things I tried:
Memtest86 never reported any errors, but it has locked up during testing.
Lock ups happen even with sound card removed.
All fans continue spinning during lockup, and the BIOS reports temps under 45 after reboot.
12v and 5v on a spare molex connector seem stable on startup and under load using my cheap dmm.
Blew some canned air around the motherboard, a little dusty, but no visible damage, and the capacitors look normal.
A couple of times, it locked up before displaying a POST message on the monitor, the LEDs on the motherboard showed FF, which should mean it posted normally.
Sound card and video card share IRQ 18, but there is no other IRQ sharing with the sound card removed.
Reseated video card, sound card, and memory.
So now I'm thinking it has to be the video card or the motherboard. I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade the video card, and that would be my next step, but is there anything else I should check out before spending money? Any help would be appreciated