Lockups - Am I missing anything?

[brett42]

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

 

[Cutthroat]

Could still be an overheating issue, the CPU cools down really quickly when not under load anymore. You could try to remove your HSF and clean it up really good, in between the fins especially, they really collect a lot of gunk after a couple of years.

Try running memtest86 1 stick at a time.

It is possible your motherboard is just dying without any visual cues, however I would hope it's unlikely because it's only two years old.

 

[LiLithTecH]

Any clues in the EVENT Log?

 

[brett42]

Strange update:
After I verified that the lockups kept happening with no sound card, I put the card back in a different slot anyway so it wouldn't be sharing an IRQ, and it locked up 5 times in a row as soon as I tried to play a sound. I then put it back in the original slot, and it's only locked up once at the login screen, though I keep winamp on a lot. Any idea why that would happen?

I left memtest86 on for 11 hours with both sticks still installed and it was still running with no errors when I came home, so I'm fairly confident about the memory at least.

Responses to helpful people:
The CPU sensor rarely reports going over 50 degrees after hours of WOW, and it can lock up on the first boot of the morning inside of 5 minutes, so I don't think it's overheating, though I should clean out my heatsink this weekend, it is getting dusty.

The windows event logs just have the usual startup/shutdown entries, and my BIOS doesn't seem to have any logging.

 

[rise]

well, it needs to be asked so, have you tried clearing cmos?

i'd still update your drivers, btw. and i'd check for bios updates or even re-flash the bios to the same version. iow, i think its your mobo.

also, i know you said a dmm reading looks ok but unplugging a hdd, burner, fans etc.

and check your voltage settings in bios. "auto" settings on older hardware can sometimes need to be set manually to compensate for undervotling or droops.

 

[brett42]

After the weirdness with the sound card, I'm also thinking the motherboard is probably the problem. I'll try to flash the BIOS and bump up the voltages a little this weekend and post the results.