Gigabyte 7N400 Pro Reboot Issue (Too much Arctic?)

[mrEvil]

Not sure exactly what the problem is here, but let me run down what I have in the system:

512MB Stick of Crucial PC2700 RAM
Hercules GF2Mx
Antec 350W PS
AMD Barton 2500+

2.45 Nvidia Unified Drivers
XP Pro w/Sp1 & all latest updates

Running it at the default settings (166Mhz bus). Absolutely no overclocking going on here. I have also disabled the SATA, on-board RAID and 1394 controllers.

The machine will run through some iterations of SiSoft Sandra's Burnin Test. I've had it run anywhere from 1 & rebooting to over 30 and then rebooting.

I have left the machine on all evening and had no problems or reboots with that. The only thing that sending the error report to Microsoft states is that this is caused by a device driver.

Here are my thoughts and I would greatly appreciate anyone else's. I have worked too many hours this week and am not thinking clearly. Could this be related to the Nvidia IDE drivers, since I still have those installed? Actually, now that I think about it, I have the default XP Nvidia drivers installed also...will check that one out first. I believe I can rule out the memory, but that would be the last thing I would check. May swap that out for the other stick of Crucial 2700 that I have.

This is all a stability test before I swap this out with my main machine. Anyone's thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

TIA!


<update>

To update the situation...I decided to pull off the 2500, since that was the last thing left...slapped in the 1800....ran through Sandra 50 times, no reboot. Figure that's pretty good. However, it seems as if I applied about 3x too much Arctic Silver....as the stuff was all over the cpu...at least out far enough to come in contact with the cache. I used some acetone along with rubbing alcohol to get off what I can...doesn't seem to be enough.

Looks like I get to take the 2500 off the nForce and slap it into the KT400...ugh.....

New Questions:
(1) Could I have permanently damaged the cpu, since the MB seems to be fine?
(2) What else can I use in an attempt to get the remaining AS off the cpu?


Moving to Tech Support since this is no longer a MB issue IMO. My 1800 ran Sandra for >2hrs on this MB.

 

[mechBgon]

Scoot the memory voltage up to 2.6 or 2.7 volts and see what happens.

 

[mrEvil]

Tried it...no such luck. Still rebooted....going to drop the FSB down to 133 to see what happens there...

 

[Sunny129]

Sorry for my lack of input, but i just had to mention that i'm building a system for a friend very soon. I haven't ordered parts yet, but i was planning on a Barton 2500+ and the same Gigabyte 7N400 Pro mobo. The OS was also going to be WinXP (i can't recall whether its home or Professional edition...whatever he has now). Has anyone else had similar issues with this combination of parts, or should i be ok using them together?

PS - as far as your problem goes...you said that your system randonly reboots in the middle of Sandra tests? Then when exactly do you get a chance to send an error report to microsoft? Do the Sandra tests sometimes fail without rebooting?

 

[mrEvil]

When I send the report back, all it states is that there is an unknown driver problem. That leads me to think that it might be the IDE driver.

To further test the system, I am loading Win2k, with the default IDE drivers. I will redo XP here in a little while also. To eliminate the video card, I plugged in a Radeon 7000 PCI board I had laying around.....no different results in XP...thus I'm thinking it is something in the nForce2 drivers.

I'll post more as I test more. I am not disappointed with the board, I just need to isolate the issue. Then again, it is way better than the FIC board I temporarily had (AU13)...that wouldn't ever load XP (10 or so tries)....just kept telling me that I had a media problem. Of course, the guy at the computer store told me I was smoking something...too bad I attempted to use the board with every working piece of hardware I have (memory, video and power supplies).

 

[mrEvil]

New update posted...MB is fine...runs like a champ....me, on the other hands, seems to have pulled an I-D-10-T error.....should never try to put this stuff together on 4 hours sleep....

 

[kzkpsp]

I have found Usenet posts that indicate that there may be a problem with dual channel memory support in BIOS version F9. There apparently is an unofficial BIOS version 10a that fixes the dual channel issue but it may cause the NIC to quit working in some instances. There are a number of posts in the Gigabyte forums on www.nforcershq.com from people with similar problems.