computer freezing once a second...

[Silicon Skum]

OK, this is driving me NUTS, EVERy 1 second this machine will jam and the continue as normal, then jam, work, jam etc.
Te macine is a 3000+ XP on an Asus A7N8X-E Delux with 2 matcing Nanya PC3200 dimms in dual chanel mode. Up until 4 days ago, all was sweet, machine was overclocked to 2.5Gz. FSB and RAM at 217Mhz with the RAM timings relaxed until all was stable. Machine has been running 24 / 7 for about 4 weeks. After the first week I had to up the CPU voltage to 1.850V to get it stable as the CPU was burned in. CPU temps never went above 59C under full load. It has been running D2OL full time since it was first setup. Then 4 days ago the machine had rebooted during the night and had the "system has recovered from a serious error" box on the screen. I figured it was just overclocked too much, so I droped the FSB down to 213Mhz, but it crashed after 15mins. so I droped it again to 210Mhz and run the ram with te 83% divider. system did'nt crash anymore, but after about 20 - 30mins the system began to lock about once a second, the mouse would freeze and them move, then freeze etc. even the sound will lock once a second.
The system is now running at the default speed and voltage and it is STILL doing it. After a restart it seems fine but the locking up returns after a while.

The odd thing about this is that I have an XP3200 on the same type f board in another macine that runs Win 2K, and it has had a similar problem though it seems ok now. That machine has never really been overclocked as it runs too hot for overclocking. Also that machine uses a single stick of 512Mb DDr400 TwinMOS branded RAM. so the only think in common is the motherboard.

Iknow the RAM I use is NO use for overclocking but it's ALL I can get locally (computer shop doesn't sell anything that allows overclocking), and ASUS motherboards are not my fave boards for overclocking, but it's ALL I have to work with. As long as the timing is low and the voltage is bumpe up, it works just fine.

Any ideas guys? tis is getting annoying as I keep missing characters when typing ( so ignore spelling) ;

§
_________________
my sig disappeared from the image host (?)
But at least I have a Josh Award!

[Google]

[2old2care]

this may be too obvious...are you using the same keyboard and a kvm switch?
I've seen keyboards and meece's do wierd shiz.
The next step, of course would be reload.
Hurry up and get it crunchin....or I might catch ya
_________________
.
Liquid-Cooled Q9450 and an EeePC
.

[Silicon Skum]

Nope, no KVMs, all the machines have seperate keyboards mice etc. as they are set up for lan games. the other machine is OK for now (only does it once in a while).

I'm now running this machine at 1.84Ghz (166 X 11) which the bios reports as a 2500XP, so far The lock ups have not returned, so I'm not so shure it is a windows problem.
Maybe the RAM has failed from the excessive (for cheap-ass RAM anyway)overclock, Even at 9. 5. 5. cas3 timings I was still geting bandwith scores higher than ddr400 running at cas2 2.2.2!

Could be that the CPU just wasn't up to running at 2.5Ghz @ 1.85V and now it is a little burned out. Oddly enough this CPU has some strange characteristics, it's suposed to be a 3000+xp (333DDR) yet my mobo cant seem to run it higer than 2500+ @ 166 (333) FSB. can run it close at 200FSB though. also it appears to be unlocked even though both 11.5 and 12.5 multipliers are seen as a 23x multi, yet it is a fairly late production ( green PGA not brown) barton CPU. begining to wonder if this is actually a mobile chip, though CPU-Z does'nt report anything odd. maybe it was an engineering sample?

I have new waterblock I'm building, might try that when it's finished and see if it's just the CPU. But I still suspect it's something else, as the CPU will still boot into windows at 2.6Ghz (unstable), more stable (except when temps get close to 59C ) at 2.5 but lower speeds dont seem to help much

I did find the Alexa spyware on the system though, but I doubt that had anything to do with it.

§
_________________
my sig disappeared from the image host (?)
But at least I have a Josh Award!

[Silicon Skum]

It was my RAM that was the problem, seems I burned it out. I can run the system fine with a 60% ram divider, but the locking probs return if I boost the RAM back up to 200FSB (and it's 400DDR ram too). Time to find decent RAM that can take at least 220FSB I think.
The RAM came from the previous xp2200+ that was crashing randomly, now that system is running on some spare DDR333 ram I had, and it's running stable (and overclocked a bit too). guess I should have susspected the RAM was faulty once I had the 2200+ running again, but it seemed to be working.

§
_________________
my sig disappeared from the image host (?)
But at least I have a Josh Award!

[fussnfeathers]

Glad you figgered it out.
_________________
Big enough to scare you