Help: Troubleshooting ideas

[crikerat]

Just finished building a new HTPC with the following:

ASUS M2A-VM HDTV
AMD X2 3800+
2GB DDR2
VisonTek Radeo 1550
WD 500GB
HP DVD Writer
ATI 650 TV Tuner

I assembled the system, loaded Vista 32-bit and updated all the drivers. The system ran well for two days with no load. I boxed it up and placed it in my A/V cabinet and ran it with the HDTV. Again, all well. I was concerned a bit about the temp. Ambient temp in the case appeared to be 44c....

Ran for about 3 hours, then I walked away. Came back an hour later and the system was shutdown. I didn't restart it for another day. When it came back it was right where I left it so I assumed it suspended. The Catalyst control panel gave an error. Upon reboot Explorer crashed. Reboot again, something different crashes. At one point the system came back with corrupt video.

I'm thinking heat problem. Any chance something is borked for good? What's the best order to troubleshoot in?

I added the Radeon 1550 because the on board card is a 1300 and I had dreams of running games as well as media center. I'm thinking of removing the card and seeing if the temp goes down.

Any other suggestions? Each time I ran a different app crashed. It even died in safe mode which tells me its hardware related.

 

[airhendrix13]

44C actually isn't that hot. It might be a bit above average, but certainly is far from needed worry. On the other hand, this doesn't mean you GPU isn't overheating, in fact, that sounds like the case. Try running the 1300 and see if that solves it, if it doesn't it could be a memory problem. Sometimes BIOS doesn't detect the correct amount of voltage need run your RAM, check with your manufacturer to get those numbers and make sure it is set right in the BIOS. If that doesn't solve it, try running memtest and see if you have bad RAM all together.

My guess, it's the RAM.

Keep me posted, I'm curious to see what the problem is.

Ryan

 

[yuppiejr]

Agreed, remove the extra video card and see where you end-up. I'd also disable the suspend feature of Windows Vista (in fact you will want to run with a custom power setting that sets the CPU min/max to 100% unless you like choppy video playback) until you get this sorted out just in case you've got a mainboard that has problems with S1/S3 resumes.