# Built first PC today - problems



## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

Hi all

I built my first ever PC from scratch this morning after much deliberating. The stuff I got was as follows:

2 - Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 DHX PC2-6400C4DHX TwinX (2x1GB) 
1 - Antec Sonata III Piano Black Quiet Case - EarthWatts 500W PSU 
2 - Western Digital Caviar RE 500GB 5000ABYS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM
1 - Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail
1 - MSI K9A Platinum Crossfire (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
1 - AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ 3.00GHz (Socket AM2) - Retail 
Plus optical drives / usb card from old pc

Not a monster but nice to start with. I stuck it all together this morning with the help of me dad and got it all to boot and everything. Its working fine except that whenever I start doing more than say 3 things at once it hangs. It also has a tendancy to hang during installations. I also had a problem when i first installed the graphics card with it hanging whenever it tried to install the .net files (in the end i installed them manually and then reinstalled the graphics card driver). 

I've come to the conclusion that it is a graphics card problem but i cant think what. My first thought was temperature but the system is running at about 40oC so i dont reckon that can be a problem.

Anyone else got any ideas what the problem is?

Regards



Ben


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## Old Rich (May 31, 2007)

Have you downloaded and installed the newest drivers for the Video Card?


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

yup sure have, along with the catalyst drivers for the motherboard


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## Old Rich (May 31, 2007)

Next thing I would check is the Memory . . Memtest86 is a good test . . test one stick at a time and let it run over nite


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

What operating system?


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

XP

no luck with that RAM test - it starts then just hangs like it does when you do anything that is resource intensive. I reckon that does narrow it down to the RAM though. Im gonna try fitting the old 1gb sticks out of my old PC later and see if its still hanging - if it is i think its safe to assume a graphics card problem - i cant even test the system without a graphics card as it has nothing onboard and i dont have another (working) card lol


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

Go into bios let the computer idle in there for 15 minutes then post the cpu temp and the voltages of the +3.3V, +5V and +12V


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

ok here are the readings the bios gave me after around 10/15 mins

cpu temp = 44oC
+3.3v = 3.264v
+5v = 5.094v
+12 = 12.249v
vcore = 1.416
3vsb - 3.248


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

Your voltages look good.
The cpu temp is a bit high for idle so lets take a better look at that. On your motherboard cd there should be software to monitor temps while in windows, see if you can install that, if you can report the temps right around or just before you get a freeze. Also same with the voltages.

You did run the motherboard cd and install all the drivers correct?

I find it odd that memtest freezes it will normally report lots of errors if you have bad ram. When you run memtest make sure you only run it on one stick at a time.

Clear the cmos and load the bios defaults to see if that makes any differance


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

I installed MSI Core Center and it is reporting the CPU temp as 30oC which is a bit odd like.

I managed to get memtest86 working last night - ran it on two of the ram sticks seperately with no errors at all - I've left these two in and the other ones out for now, till I have a chance to test the other two. The random crashing is still occuring however.


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

Right I've found another thing that is quite interesting. Whenever I start playing music in WMP11 (using the onboard realtek HD audio) the CPU temp climbs to about 36oC and the Mhz reading spikes between about 300 and 6000 consistently. This cant be the root cause however because its hung when the audio driver hasnt been used.


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## Old Rich (May 31, 2007)

One cause of random crashing is bad capacitors . . check yours just to rule that out


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

yeah i cant see any swollen ones in there after a quick look.

I have just had another thought though - on my motherboard there is a 4 pin power input (you know like the cd drive type ones) in addition to the 24 pin and the heatsink etc inputs. According to the manual this is for graphics card stability or something. This branch coming out of the PSU also has the system fan plugged in - will that effect the stability in some way? Why would the motherboard need this input anyway when the graphics card has its own pci-e power input on the card?


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

further to the idea i had about the sound card, i borrowed my mates PCI sound card (audigy 2) and disabled the onboard - the system still hangs after about 30 seconds of playing tunes, which has me completely flumoxed


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## Old Rich (May 31, 2007)

frostydt said:


> on my motherboard there is a 4 pin power input (you know like the cd drive type ones) in addition to the 24 pin and the heatsink etc inputs. According to the manual this is for graphics card stability or something. This branch coming out of the PSU also has the system fan plugged in - will that effect the stability in some way? Why would the motherboard need this input anyway when the graphics card has its own pci-e power input on the card?


Have you tried pluging power into that socket?


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

yeah i have had the power plugged in all along its just on the same line from the PSU as my system fan - I rigged all the hard drives and the sys fan on one line and moved that onto its own but it made no difference.


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

I think however i may be onto something - When i run with two sticks of memory the system works fine - its only when i go upto 4 sticks (whatever the sticks may be) that im getting problems - that suggests to me that there is either a problem with the second set of DIMM holders on the mobo or a software problem when the system tries to read past 2gb - doesnt xp only utilise 2gb anyway?


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## Old Rich (May 31, 2007)

You could be on to something . . a lot of the early boards do not handle four sticks of memory well . .


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

its quite a new board though thats what I dont understand. Its not one of the cheapest either. Looking around on the internet, I couldnt find anyone with exactly the same board and problem reporting anything, but i found something that could be the problem.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/243817-12-p5k3-deluxe-memory-problems

Upping the voltage could be the solution but im not sure I should because I dont really want to void the warranty plus im not really sure how to do it anyway.


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## Old Rich (May 31, 2007)

. . and you don't need 4 Gig of memory . .


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## frostydt (Aug 25, 2007)

well yeah until i get around to installing vista 64 but i suppose then i will find out if its a hardware fault or a software problem.

In the mean time keeping slots 3 and 4 clear has definetly fixed the problem, so at least the problem is isolated if not fixed. Cheers guys


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

Your fine your temps voltages everthing, I missed the part about running 4 sticks of ram, in your first post you listed 2x1024.

You don't need 4 gig anyway with XP even with vista 64 I doubt it, alot of motherboard cannot cope with all ram dimms occupied using XMS, you may get it to work by uping the ram voltage and playing with the timings but it won't be worth the effort


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