Stable after lowering FSB

[kheldar]

Hi

I have an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ in an Epox 8rda3+ Board
Geforce 6000 Graphics, 768Mb of DDR (Samsung).

The system will not boot to Win XP Pro SP2 or Ubuntu

Memtest fails with an enexpected Interrupt Error.

After lowering the FSB several times it became stable at 158, booting to either OS's. Memtest has run through 7 cycles with no errors and I have left the system running Prime95 Torture test for nearly 24 hours with no errors.

Anytime i increase the FSB it all fail again.

I am considering replacing my PSU - Tsunami 350W - but i am not really sure if this will cure the problem.

If any one is able to shed light on why this should happen then I am ready to listen.

Thanks

 

[CMH]

I believe that we here at techspot place an unusually high importance on a good power supply. Mainly because its problems cause other hardware to malfunction, making it so much harder to troubleshoot.

So if you can afford it, get a GOOD power supply. Good doesn't mean HUGE, but from a reputable power supply brand. I have a liking to Antec, so I'll recommend that, but there are other brands out there which would be equally good or better, but check back here first. Last thing you'd want to do is pickup a 650W Sunflower brand (non-existant brand obviously) PSU, and find that we all condemn the brand.

I don't know about Tsunami, which makes me quite skeptical about its performance.

However, the first thing that jumps out is your RAM. You've got a "weird" amount of RAM. Basically you've done something we don't really recommend doing: adding in different types of RAM. The best case scenario is adding exactly the same type of RAM, which means same brand, same speed (this includes clock rate), same quantity. This may be the cause of your troubles, try removing 256mb of RAM, and see if that solves your problem.

 

[kheldar]

The RAM is 3 x Samsung PC3200 256Mb.
I have tried these in all possible combinations, but the problem persists.

You say it makes it hard to troubleshoot. I am no expert -this is why i am asking for advice - but the blue screen error messages i have when i increase the FSB seem to be random.

I have also removed the second hard drive the floppy all optical devices and all external USB devices to try to isolate the problem, but still it is there, cant even boot in safe mode.

But when i lower the FSB again it is stabe with all the devices connected.
I am running at a clock speed of 2054. This is ok and to be honest I probably would not notice any increase in performance if it were to be running at the stated 2158. However it should be able to run at the stated clock speed and I do like things to do what they are built to do.

This is more of an annoyance than a problem but i would like to be resolved.

I guess the only way to really tell is to get a new PSU.

Thanks for your input.

 

[CMH]

I doubt it has anything to do with the power supply though, but like I said, if you can afford it, replace it.

You said all different combinations, I'm assuming you tried each individual stick (only one), and you've tried all the slots for each stick. If you haven't tried that, its a good time to try it. It could be a problem with a particular chip, or a particular slot.

 

[kheldar]

Yes each one in all slots

 

[CMH]

Just checking, you used only one piece of RAM?

Like I said, if you did, and the same problem occured, there's quite a few possibilities, including problems with RAM, motherboard or CPU (and as always, PSU). Could be an incompatibility problem, we won't be able to tell unless you get some other RAM in.