Help with persistent BSOD's

Gaidal

Member
Jul 9, 2000
86
0
0
Hey guys,

I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this situation that is driving me absolutely crazy. I've built my current system about 1 year ago with the following hardware:

CoolerMaster Centurion
Asus A8NE Socket 939 Mboard
AMD Manchester dual core 2400+
ATI X1800 XT (512 MB) (still a nice video card!)
2 GB Corsair DDR ram (I'd have to look to get the speed)

At the time, I powered this setup with an FSP 500W power supply. I guess I totally missed the power supply revolution which took place and, in retrospect, was likely underpowering the system. It all worked fine and was stable except for when playing games utilizing the video card. Anywhere between 30 seconds and 2 hours into the game the system would abruptly lose power. Well this went on for awhile (with me ignorant of the true problem) and eventually led to a corrupt Windows install. I took the opportunity to purchase a new hard drive (320 GB Seagate Barracuda ATA) and did a full reinstall. Life went on.

After one day (still putting up with the abrupt power loss during games), I was greeted with a BSOD STOP error. After rebooting I was greeted with the motherboard flash screen, warning that my BIOS was corrupted and would need to be reinstalled. About this same time, I stumbled upon the Sapphire tech support forums and was educated about power supplies. Figuring that this was the problem all along, I dumped the FSP and picked up an Antec TruPower Trio (650W). Immediately after installing this, the flash screen went away and windows booted up as normal.

Good thing: no more crashing during gaming

Bad thing: persistent BSOD's at random intervals. I wish I could say that there was one particular kind, but I've been greeted with the following:

IRQL NOT LESS THAN EQUAL
INTERNAL POWER ERROR
STOP (with some hex codes)

and on windows startup: "hard error loading ntdll.dll".

These persist for a period of time and then sometimes I can fix them by booting into safe mode or performing a chkdsk /f and all is well for a day or two. Gaming is rock solid stable now with no issues, but if I leave my computer on for a period of time I'll come back to find a blue screen. Reset and am greeted by another blue screen. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Things I have checked into and ruled out:
1) temperature (never more than 40C... the scythe ninja was a good investment)
2) virus (no virus per AntiVir scans)
3) no obvious RAM errors with memtest86
4) no CPU errors with Prime95 for many an hour
5) uninstalled a bunch of potential bad software (thought I had it fixed by uninstalling ActiveSync... system was up for 72 hours and then got a blue screen yesterday).

The frustrating part is that at one point the system was rock stable except for gaming and now I seem to have the reverse. Is it possible that I damaged system components (i.e. motherboard) by the abrupt power loss during gaming? I'm not thinking a windows reinstall would do much good since all the BSODs imply to me some sort of power error. Should I reflash the BIOS?

I'd appreciate any help that someone can give me about this 1 year old problem. The most puzzling part is the lack of consistency with the BSOD's, not really indicating to me any specific problem. Is it possible the system is STILL underpowered??
 

oynaz

Platinum Member
May 14, 2003
2,449
2
81
Forget about the PSU, your current one are already overkill. I am 95% sure you have a defective RAM stick or two. Memtest is not 100% foolproof.