Quake3World

Hi,
First off, here's my specs:

Core 2 Duo E6600
ASRock 775Dual-VSTA
Corsair xms3200 400MHz 1024MB
Antec NeoPower 480
xfx GeForce 6800 128MB
Samsung SpinPoint P120 250 GB S-ATA
Creative Audigy 2
MS Windows XP pro SP2 [all updates]

The thing is, at certain times the machine just locks up and I can't understand why.
It happens usually either if I open a folder, program or sometimes when I surf the net.
I never get a BSOD, it just locks up. The BIOS is running the latest firmware.
I never encountered so many lock-ups in 48hrs, somewhere between 20-30 now. I kid u not.
I'm all new to intel chips as I've been an AMD guy for the past 6 years,
but NEVER have I encountered similar problems with an AMD chip, and I've been running from k6-2, athlon, xp and finally athlon 64.
My first thought was the motherboard, since thats the cheap part in my comp. Still I chose this board out of 2 reasons;
1. The possibility of merging from AGP to PCIe in the future.
2. The ability to change from DDR to DDR2 ram when I can afford it.
So what I really need to know is what's the cause of all this?
Might it even bee the ram? Powersupply? Might it even be a faulty cpu?
Fyi I only run at the default settings in bios, so nothing is OC'd. I even checked cpu-z to see if there was anything wrong, but all seemd ok. It even locked up 1 time when I was about to open cpu-z even O.o

This is so frustrating and as I have no more money to spend on another board or ram, I'm kinda stuck.
Just wish I could narrow down the problem, cuz I sure dunno why it behaves this way. The cpu temp is also normal, unless 50C is too high.
Any feedback is much apreciated.

Thank you.

-yourDudeness

First thing I would try is moving the ram stick to a different slot or, if there's a pair of ram sticks, shift one of them to a different slot.

Also if there's two sticks, try running the PC with just one of them. If that doesn't fix it, swap and run on just the other one. This will establish that both sticks of ram are ok. If it starts working with just 1 stick, the other stick is bad and needs to be sent back for replacement.

Thanks Foo for replying.
The odd thing is I was running with 2 sticks of ram to begin with [2*1024MB], but for some reason 1 of them never showed up in bios.
I found this odd, so I swaped the sticks and found out 1 of them most likely are dead. This mobo has 4 slots, 2 for DDR and another 2 for DDR2. One can not run with both DDR and DDR2 ram at the same time, so there are of course just 2 slots to use. I have tried what u said, and like I said one of the sicks seem to be dead. I have not been careless in the way I've treated the 2 sticks so I can't see how I've could have destroyed one of them. Anyhow, I just got one of them working and have tried it in both of the slots and it boots up with no problem, how ever while in windows it just freezes after a while, and at no apparent reason. It can work ok for 20-30 min even an hour, but when it do locks up it's always in the process of doing something. Either opening a webpage, a folder, program, shuting down windows and even starting windows. Can it be that it's the motherboard that's causing all my greef? I've not had any of these problems when I was running my old system an athlon64 with an asus k8n-e deluxe motherboard with those same 2 sticks.
I will swap the ram to the other slot and see if anything changes. If it doesn't I'll have to put in my old system see if it's still unstable.
I know there are software to stress test ram but I can't remember what its called. Anyone know?

Anyways, thanks again Foo for your reply.

-theDuder

So many of my friends have problems like this with their PC's when they build their own PC's.
Thats why I allways order costum PC's from Dell, or similar services.

One of the problems might probobly be your windows, maybe there is mallware on it. Try restarting and runing the pc without internet conected for a while.

Are there any strange processes in the Task Manager?
Try running the PC on safe mode for a while, does it lock up then?

Turbine, that is horrible advise...

"Dont Bother to build your own, let others do the work..." :/

Anyway, as for the topic i would point to the Mobo right quick in that situation... i have built three computers with Asrock Mobo's and all 3 times the thing has been nothing but bitchy or at times dosent work.

i ended up replacing all 3 mobo's for my Clients...

Hi guys, thanks for replying.
Thanks for the advice AmIdYfReAk. This is ofcourse a new board, should ask for my money back or another board, I think I'm entitled to? If so, what board u recommend for an core2duo cpu?

Thanks.

Go to this link,
http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/cpus ... uage=en-us

Then Select cpu, then Core Series, Then 6600, and Press Go...

then look at any of the supported mobo's..

Edit: Tell the Store that it is a Faulty product and you would like to exchange it for another, they shouldent give you any issues for that.

I have a similar problem. XP Freezes....

I occurs usually within 1 minute if I do this simultaneously:
1) Run memtest (see post of Tormentius)
2) Run Prime95 in Large FFTs test
3) Start FireFox or IE, and open quickly open multiple tabs with websites. (Use crtl-click in firefox on links to open tabs, and shift-click in IE)

More people with problems in: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview ... id=1896616

I work in tech support at the moment, and I can tell you for sure that the Asrock boards are a cheap piece of crap, they die all the time. Get a decent mobo and you should be fine.

RRROOOAAARRR wrote:I work in tech support at the moment, and I can tell you for sure that the Asrock boards are a cheap piece of crap, they die all the time. Get a decent mobo and you should be fine.

I missed the Asrock part of his post. You're right, its probably the motherboard.

Hi, been away for a while now but I'm back now with a fully working machine.
Sorry to say to most of u guys, it's NOT the mainboard nor is it the CPU as I feared. It all has to do with a conflict between the mainboard and my PCI soundcard. Ofcourse I disabled the built in soundcard in BIOS, still it has no effect on the stability of the machine. Why I didn't think of removing that card before is beyond me. It only came to me when I was playing wow the other day and the machine locked up when I entered a new area and the sound went in a continuos loop.
The machine's been rock solid now for almost 2 weeks now. The downside is that the sound is crap compared to that of my old Audigy 2 card, still it doesn't bugg me that much, it's doable.

For those of you having trouble with an unstable machine, remove all of your PCI cards.
Ofcourse this goes without saying and I should have known better, but all in all no harm done just about 1 and a half month of scratching my heard is all.

ElDuderino wrote:
For those of you having trouble with an unstable machine, remove all of your PCI cards.
Ofcourse this goes without saying and I should have known better, but all in all no harm done just about 1 and a half month of scratching my heard is all.

I doubt that its a conflict between your mobo and sound card (although with Asrock's poor rep its not outside the realm of possibility). What you're describing sounds a lot like a bad sound driver or, at worst, a dying sound card. Had we known about hanging, choppy, or looping sound we could have helped faster.

Thanks for following up and letting us know what happened.

indeed, i agree with Tor...