AMD Cooling Problem???

[caliente]

I need an expert's diagnosis... My system freezes up. No blue screens, etc. It just stops dead. The system is an AMD 1.2G, ASUS A7V133, Enlight 7237 w/80mm rear exhaust, Tiasol w/Sunun fan, Arctic SilverII, 256M RAM, W98. I've taken the side case off to help with the temp. Ambient is about 75F.

The first thing I noticed is the ASUSprobe reads the CPU temp about 10 degrees higher than the BIOS setup. Per this group I downloaded MBM5 and it reads the same as the BIOS. The temp averages about 49C. The ASUSprobe reads an average of 59C.

Is this a cooling problem or should I be looking at the BIOS, OS, or a better motherboard?

 

[cirrus1]

System freezes can be related to SO many things that it is impossible to mention them all (Drivers etc.)

But since this is the cooling forum I'll be more hardware oriented

In which situations does your system freeze? While gaming, heavy diskload etc.

What videocard do you have?

What kinda of powersupply do you have in your case? Also try to look at your voltages. If they look totally wrong this might be the problem.

Asus motherboards usually reports higher temperatures than others so the temp should always be taken with a grain of salt.

<edit>Typos</edit>

 

[caliente]

You're right, it could be alot of things so I'm starting with hopefully the obvious. The freezes usually occur when downloading files with Forte Agent. So I assume this is a somewhat heavy diskload. The power supply is the stock Enlight 300W. The video card is a Creative Labs NVIDIA GeForce 256.

I've been watching the voltages and I noticed that the VCore occassionally spikes and I just saw the CPU Fan Speed spike up and down. The temps been holding steady at 49C - which seems a little high.

 

[cirrus1]

Downloading shouldn't cause the heavy diskload that I'm thinking about (if that's the case I'd be willing to take over your connection . It more sounds like a software problem and could be related to bad written software. Try using another download manager (that's what I think the program is for) and see if it helps.

The old geforces draw quite some power because they use a 0.25 (my-sign) core. But your powersupply should be suffecient for that.

Don't worry about those spikes. It's normal for a fan to vary a little in speed (like 5% or so) and it doesn't cause a problem. As for the VCore I've had the same experience when using Asus-Probe. Other monitors like MBM5 don't give me that problem.

Try running your computer for a while with the case open to see if it helps with the temperature.

 

[BD231]

It could also be memory related. I had a stick of Crucial PC133 cas 3-3-3 Ram and i set the cas to 2-2-2 on my motherboard. Low and behold, it froze about every 5 min after i would get into windows. Try seting your cas number to 3, it may or may not help but it worked for me.

 

[caliente]

What is cas?

 

[caliente]

I've been running with the case off and its been holding pretty steady at 49C.

 

[cirrus1]

Basically CAS is a number that is set in bios and decides how fast the ram shall run. A lower setting is faster, but the ram might not be able to run stable. It's usually set in the advanced section of the bios. If you use the standard settings of the A7V I guess you have run CAS 3 from the beginning. But be sure to check. You can set the ram speed to manual and then choose the CAS.