Extremely annoying and weird computer problems...

[PointlesS]

ok...when I first built my computer...it was running great for awhile....until about 1 month ago...it's been crashing in games (d3d or ogl) at first I thought it was heat....but everything was in reasonable temps (43-44 cpu temps) I tried different drivers....and it still crashed...so now I think it's a psu problem...because many say that my motherboard has problems with bad psu's...but if I leave my computer idle for a bit...and then play a game...it'll take longer to crash...sometimes it just crashes randomly...but what I do know is that after the first inital crash....it'll take less time to crash after it...there is also different ways it crashes....the most common crash is when it just locks up with it looping a sound for 3 seconds...so I have to reset it...the other one...which leads me to think it's a psu problem...is when my monitor goes black and it goes into power saving mode...and so I have to restart...becuase it won't come out of power saving mode....a few days ago...I started up my computer...and it gave me an error saying something like the memory count was wrong...and then I had to go into my bios and I had to redo all my settings like cpu multiplier...ram settings...cmos settings..etc...I checked out my voltages for the rails...and for the 3.3v I'm getting like 3.23 and for the 5v I'm getting 5.02v....which seems perfectly normal because don't you have to be within +/- 5% of the atx 2.01 specs? the psu I'm using is the one that came with my enlight 7327 case....it's 300w and I think it's made by enlight...anyone have any suggestions or other possible causes?


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Athlon 1.2 ghz w/266 mhz bus
256 megs of PC-133 ram crucial
ECS K7S5A motherboard
ATI Radeon 8500 (oem...250/250)
win 2k

 

[DAPUNISHER]

First, try to determine if your ram is faulty by switching it if possible. You may want to try fail-safe bios settings to see if it increases stability as you may have settings that are to agressive. BTW, I've used that case/PSU with the K7S5A and XP1600+ but I think your 1.2 T-Bird needs more juice yet, so it could be time for a beefier PSU. However, I've experienced a some of the same symptoms after installing the latest SiS AGP driver in XPpro which was resolved by reverting to the older driver. Another potential fix is to do the L7 pencil trick to make the Vcore 1.85v so as to increase the fault tolerance. Also, you may want to disable ACPI in win2K as it's been the source of some problems with the K7S5A's stability too and the power saving mode problem could be the result. BTW, I've read of issues when using ATI cards so I'll see if there's a patch or something that you need.

 

[DaiShan]

sounds like it may be a chipset related issue.
sis chipset drivers grab AGP driver&Support the first link, as you have the sis735 chipset, then also grab the amd agp patch
I don't think you need a larger psu tho (unless this one is truly dying) one of my comps is a 1gig axia @1.4 with cd-rom dvd-rom, cd-rw 2 7200rpm hdd's and 2 case fans on a 250watt psu

 

[PointlesS]

thanks....tonight I'll loop 3dmark while I'm sleeping and see if it's still running when I wake up...

 

[PointlesS]

darn...it still crashed...any other suggestions? or possible other problems?

 

[DaiShan]

are you running any usb devices? if so follow the instructions in this link also make sure pci slot 1 is open.