Hey folks,
Some strange goings on with this system at the moment:
K7S5A 1.x running latest ECS BIOS
AMD Duron 1200
512MB DDR
nVidia GeForce 2MX400 64MB AGP card
Realtek 8139 based NIC
Creative SB Live! Platinum
Maxtor 60GB HDD
Pioneer DVD R/W
250W Q-Technology (not cheapo Q-Tec!) Silent PSU, a very heavy, well built and quite expensive unit although nearly 4 years old now.
Windows XP Pro.
All of a sudden the machine would lock up whilst in Windows, or simply cause a STOP BSOD then reboot, and go into a reboot cycle, not even POSTing, just 'bleep' every 4-5 seconds as it was rebooting and rebooting ad infinitum. If I powered the machine down then switched it back on again, it would POST again, try to boot into Windows and the same problem would occur. This looks to me like a hardware issue of some kind...
It was at that point I dug out a boot CD with a lot of nifty utilities and ran some tests. Memtest86 ran without a hitch, indicating that RAM wasn't the problem. I also ran the Maxtor HDD diagnostic utility which checked out too. I then ran a Linux based CPU burn in test and after 15 minutes or so, received a kernel panic (it crashed) from it. So maybe the CPU is sucking too much voltage under load? Next I decided to have a look in the BIOS at the voltage readouts and I found something that I thought was a bit out of the ordinary:
So from the look of the Vcc3.3v readout, it seems quite low. I was wondering if anyone would be able to help me shed some light on this, perhaps confirming if indeed this reading is too low and that the PSU may be on its way out and therefore be causing this sudden and seemingly random instability. Many thanks for your time!
Warm regards,
Neil.
Some strange goings on with this system at the moment:
K7S5A 1.x running latest ECS BIOS
AMD Duron 1200
512MB DDR
nVidia GeForce 2MX400 64MB AGP card
Realtek 8139 based NIC
Creative SB Live! Platinum
Maxtor 60GB HDD
Pioneer DVD R/W
250W Q-Technology (not cheapo Q-Tec!) Silent PSU, a very heavy, well built and quite expensive unit although nearly 4 years old now.
Windows XP Pro.
All of a sudden the machine would lock up whilst in Windows, or simply cause a STOP BSOD then reboot, and go into a reboot cycle, not even POSTing, just 'bleep' every 4-5 seconds as it was rebooting and rebooting ad infinitum. If I powered the machine down then switched it back on again, it would POST again, try to boot into Windows and the same problem would occur. This looks to me like a hardware issue of some kind...
It was at that point I dug out a boot CD with a lot of nifty utilities and ran some tests. Memtest86 ran without a hitch, indicating that RAM wasn't the problem. I also ran the Maxtor HDD diagnostic utility which checked out too. I then ran a Linux based CPU burn in test and after 15 minutes or so, received a kernel panic (it crashed) from it. So maybe the CPU is sucking too much voltage under load? Next I decided to have a look in the BIOS at the voltage readouts and I found something that I thought was a bit out of the ordinary:
Vcore: 1.760Vcc2.5v: 2.464Vcc3.3v: 3.072Vcc5v: 4.865+12V: 12.288SB3V: 3.312-12V: -11.393SB5V: 4.892VBAT: 3.312So from the look of the Vcc3.3v readout, it seems quite low. I was wondering if anyone would be able to help me shed some light on this, perhaps confirming if indeed this reading is too low and that the PSU may be on its way out and therefore be causing this sudden and seemingly random instability. Many thanks for your time!
Warm regards,
Neil.
