New rig, random crashing.

[ironique]

Hi guys, just built a new rigg:

A64 3200+
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum
2x512 Corsair XMS3200XL (2-2-2-5)
Sapphire X800XT
Zalman C7700Cu CPU Cooler

Everything is running at stock speed, nothing oc'd (yet!) the rigg keeps crashing randomly.
Crashed when i was installing musicmatch, crashed again when i was playing FarCry, crashed again when i opened ATI CCC to change display settings. All temperatures seem fine. 39C idle, 46C load. Any clues anyone. I would really like to get this stable so that i could start OCing. Also, I run 3dmk 2K1 and 2K3 without a hitch, scored 23840 and 11420 respectively.

Any clues anyone?

 

[meltdown75]

Hi, how's it going? Well, obviously could be better eh?

What's your power supply? How about your hard drives? Those are the first two things I would think of in terms of random crashing... well that and the possibility that your motherboard could be shorting out somewhere. Nice looking 3dmark scores... more than twice what I get. =)

 

[ironique]

Meltdown, running on a 350W PSU. I have looked over the mobo several times looking for a short somewhere, nothin. As for the hard drives, I was using them in my previous system. Used everest to check their smart status and all seems well. Now the random crashes have seemed to stop, it only crashes when I try to run HL2. I get some Runtime error message and it crashes back to the desktop. This is really wierd, any other suggestions.

 

[daveybrat]

350Watt?? For that Video card? That's like the minimun requirement.

Also please tell us what brand of power supply, as that means more than just wattage.

I'd say for your system, you'd need a high quality 430Watt or higher for stability.

Also, you may want to try relaxing the timings on your ram to 3-3-3-8 instead of what you're running to see if that helps.

 

[Blazer]

go and buy a PSU

set mem timings to 3448

 

[ironique]

Ok, it seems it was an OS problem. Discovered I couldn't view any image files. Kept getting a windows error. So I re-installed and voila! But yes, I do need a new PSU. The one I have is generic, which doesn't make things any better.

 

[imported_bajan]

Yeah i would also recommend that you buy a more powerfull, higher quality PSU. What you may also want to try is testing your RAM. Bad RAM can also cause problems like that. I use a free memory testing program called Memtest86+. It's based on the original Memtest86, but it's been updated soit tends to support newer motherboards/memory.

Give it a try and see if it finds anything. If it detects that something is worng with the RAM, just RMA it and let the seller know that you ran Memtest on it. Last time i had bad RAM and went to RMA it, i just told them that i ran Memtest on it and it detected a few problems and they didn't even ask any other questions.

Hope it helps