Author Topic: Crash! (Read 396 times)

niknak · « **on:** May 27, 2002, 04:36:22 PM »

Crash!

I originally posted this in technical support but on reflection this is proberly more appropriate.

I have recentley upgraded my computer by putting a new cpu/mobo in. After this when i ever i do something resource intensive (eg play AH, watch some bg video, have lots of browsers and programs open) my PC will crash. Not just blue screen it will freeze the image it has on screen and will not respond to anything, the only thing to do is power down. This means i can not fly in AH for more than 5-10 mins before a crash - very frustrating.

Any suggestions or possible solutions :

My System

New components:

athlon 900Mhz
abit kt7a-raid mobo
starnet 350W psu

Old components :
256 Mb Pc 133
Creative Savage 4 3D blaster (PCI)
diamond Sonic impact s90
10/100 network card
32x CD-drive
8gb ide HDD
floppy

I split it in to new/old as this was not a problem before upgrade.

SKurj · « **Reply #1 on:** May 27, 2002, 04:56:49 PM »

Take the case off...

put a fan beside case blowing in.. and see if anything changes

see what happens...

Something maybe getting hot..

SKurj

AKDejaVu · « **Reply #2 on:** May 27, 2002, 05:17:04 PM »

Overheating gets my vote too.

AKDejaVu

bigUC · « **Reply #3 on:** May 27, 2002, 05:28:31 PM »

Get a motherboard monitoring program and check your cpu-temp. I think one is included on the CD which came with your motherboard. CPU temp should not exceed 60+ degrees Celcius after a few mins with AH.

MrRiplEy[H] · « **Reply #4 on:** May 27, 2002, 06:14:47 PM »

It might be a memory problem also if your new CPU has a higher FSB.

Try reseating all your memory sticks and if that doesnt help, try picking them away one at a time to find the bad one.

"One thing we did run into on the KT7 was the fact that if you populated all three DIMM slots, it led to some board instability using Win2K. However, this problem continued even when only two slots were populated. It was suggested to us by an engineer that we use slots 1 and 3 when using two DIMMs. This is not a solution that has been tested by us, but we wanted to pass the info along. The Southbridge used here is the 686B, which means that ATA100 support is native on board. Also, you can see that the ATX power header is tucked off to the side and out of the way. Also worth mentioning is a new safety feature that ABIT is putting in some of their BIOSes. Just as many have learned, the AMD CPUs are very fragile when it comes to heat and handling. Now on some of their BIOSes, if you do NOT have a working fan plugged into the CPU1 3-pin header, the board will not boot. The CPU1 fan header is the one closest to the DIMM slots. "

Ouch.. 686B chipset.. This might well be the heart of your problem. I had exactly similar problems with the KT7A-Raid which forced me to change it to a KT266A board.

Animal · « **Reply #5 on:** May 27, 2002, 08:48:17 PM »

Overheating most probable.

Are you using a good heatsink-fan combo?
did you apply a very thin coating of thermal paste between the cpu and the heatsink?

Does your motherboard have temperature sensors? if so, please tell us what temperature you are getting.

MrRiplEy[H] · « **Reply #6 on:** May 28, 2002, 04:34:07 AM »

My bet is that the crashes are caused by the inherit instability of 686B. It crashes whenever the pci bus gets a little traffic (like copying 100Mb file)

niknak · « **Reply #7 on:** May 28, 2002, 02:01:29 PM »

Thanks for all the help and suggestions.

I tested for overheating by runing the computer for over 3 hours downloading mp3s etc. then ran AH which crashed shortly after taking to the air (offline). I powered down then checked the CPU temp and system temp - they were 40 and 24 degrees C respectivley (i bought a new AMD recommended heatsink with my CPU so hopefully overheating shouldn't be a problem)

It sounds a lot like the mobo is the problem. The ram is on one stick in Dimm 1 and i am using Windows Me. Therefore it sounds most likley it is the 686B's instability. The fact i have a PCI graphics card probably doesn't help.

Is there anything i can do apart from get a new mobo? Could it be anything other than the mobo (i don't want to replace it if there is nothing wrong with it)? If i have no other option can anyone suggest a good, stable low cost mobo to replace it with (bearing in mind i will only put a athlon 900 in it)?

Thanks again for all the help and suggestions.

MrRiplEy[H] · « **Reply #8 on:** May 28, 2002, 02:48:54 PM »

Read up on http://www.viahardware.com where you can find a q&a about the chipset problems.. There are also some patches you can try. However like me, you may have to change the mobo to a better one, I just couldn't make it reliable with the w2k.

niknak · « **Reply #9 on:** May 30, 2002, 09:49:50 AM »

Thanks for all the advice everyone.

I maaged to track it down to my soundcard based on the aureal vortex chipset. I have just swapped mine and my flatmates soundcards over this has solved the problem.

For any intrested here is an explanation of the problem:

"The following problem was noted for VIA KX133 chipset motherboards before the KT133 chipset was released. The KT7 motherboard uses the VIA KT133 chipset which is very similar to the KX133 chipset. The following comments therefore apply to the KT7 and KT7-RAID motherboards.

For audio cards that use A3D audio chip there appears to be an incompatibility that causes the KX133 system to deadlock when system traffic is heavy. The reason for this is that the A3D chip issues one memory read request cycle to the North Bridge and expects a grant within 4 mico-sec of latency time. If PCI TRDY# is not asserted after 4 mico-sec, the A3D hardware will de-assert the FRAME# and REQ# to terminate the operation. However, the A3D audio software driver cannot acknowledge the termination and continues waiting for hardware response. Hence the system hangs. This issue will only occur during heavy system traffic when the North Bridge cannot grant access to A3D audio chip within the 4 mico-sec latency time. There is no known work-around for this issue, and the principal advice is not to use A3D-based sound cards with KX133 based motherboards. Source: VIA Application note Serial #AN137 Date 07/05/00. This information found at BrokenPixel "

from http://www.viahardware.com

MrRiplEy[H] · « **Reply #10 on:** May 30, 2002, 10:04:44 AM »

My principle is to avoid all 686 based motheboards at all costs.. It's simply buggy.

Tumor · « **Reply #11 on:** May 30, 2002, 03:35:45 PM »

My vote is Heat (and Via )

Tumor

krat · « **Reply #12 on:** June 04, 2002, 01:53:15 AM »

KT7A-RAID

It could be ACPI related. ACPI loads by default with Win98SE or higher OS's on this mobo. It seems that ACPI takes total control over your resources....in particular IRQ's. It initially had my NIC (PCI slot 2) and my sound (PCI slot 4) sharing an IRQ....not good for Internet gaming. Abit's Official FAQ has squat...IMHO......Look at Paul's KT7 page....great info.

http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm