Friend's new Q9400 locks up randomly after 5-10 minutes.

[KingstonU]

*SOLVED* - Replaced $100 Patriot Ram with $60 OCZ ram and it's working fine, thanks for the help

A friend just put together this build and is having problems. He is running Vista 64-bit Premium. Non overclocked. Stock intel CPU fan. Vista installed no problem. Randomly locks up after 5-10 minutes after running but not when just idling. It will when surfing web or anything. (Firefox 3.0) No change on the screen but it stops responding and he loses USB power (keyboard and mouse die). Occasionally also locks during bootup. The CPU temp in the BIOS when checked after crashing is 65'C.

Any help and ideas appreciated, thanks.


Here's the specs:


Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 Quad-Core Socket LGA775, 2.66 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 6MB L2 Cache, 45nm (Retail Box) (BX80580Q9400)

OCZ StealthXStream 600W Power Supply - Active PFC, 120mm Fan (OCZ600SXS)

Patriot Viper Series DDR3 PC3-10666 1333MHz 2GB (2x1GB) CL 7-7-7-20 Low Latency DIMM Kit (PVS32G1333LLK)

Sapphire ATI RADEON HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 Dual Dual-Link DVI HD Audio Shader Model 4.1 800 stream processor PCI-Express 2.0 Graphics Card

Asus P5Q3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP @n Socket 775 Intel P45 + ICH10R Chipset Dual-Channel DDR3 2000(O.C.) / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz 2x PCI-Express 2.0 x16 Dual GigaLAN 8-Ch HD Audio 8x SATA 3.0Gb/s Support 1600Mhz FSB

 

[mpilchfamily]

Chances are the CPU cooler isn't seated properly. Sometimes those pins don't lock down all the way. So the cooler isn't making good contact and the CPU is overheating causing the system to lock.

 

[KingstonU]

Thanks we'll give that a shot an report back

 

[KingstonU]

He tried taking off the heat sink and reapplying it, say it was properly mounted and then it crashed again (this time the CPU temp was 35'C) but he did not have more thermal grease to re-apply as the stock intel one came pre-applied. Is ok to put the heatsink back on without re-applying new thermal grease?

Should he get some Arctic Silver 5 and try putting some of that on?

Any one else have similar problems? Any other ideas?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: KingstonU
*SOLVED* - Replaced $100 Patriot Ram with $60 OCZ ram and it's working fine, thanks for the help

How did you reach the conclusion that you should change the memory, and was there any change in specs between the "bad" and the "good" memories?

 

[KingstonU]

A bunch of my friends all made new builds that are almost exactly the same (mine to arrive shortly) so he just tried swapping different components with one of them until it worked, once he tried the other friend's ram it worked fine.

I believe the cheaper ram is the same speed rating of DDR3-1333 but with slightly higher timings, like 9-9-9-24 on the cheaper OCZ instead of 7-7-7-20 on the Patriot.