Hyperthreading causes my computer to become unstable..... wtf?

[Shawn]

I upgraded from a P4 1.6 to a P4 3.06 w/ Hyperthreading about 6 months ago and ever since my computer has been unstable. I never was able to figure out the cause since the BSODs were always caused by NDIS.SYS. I figured my wireless card was fubar so I replaced it and still got the BSODs. I tried both Win2k and WinXP and had the same problem. It was always completely random. I sometimes went a week or two with the computer on with no crashes. Other times it'd crash right away. I was about to replace my ram when I read online that hyperthreading can cause that crash and disabling it sometimes fixes it.

Well I disabled hyperthreading in the bios a few days ago and it hasn't crashed so far. I've been taxing my computer as much as possible trying to get it to crash but it seems stable so far. Anyone know why hyperthreading would cause instablity?

 

[jtusa]

What motherboard? I have a 3Ghz HT chip with an Intel board, had crashes all the time. Went through all the troubleshooting stuff, and figured it might be the board because the memory tested fine. Switched it out with an Asus, haven't had a crash since.

 

[Continuity27]

If you've tried many things like upgrading motherboard BIOS, having the proper Intel system drivers, Windows XP SP1a+, etc and you still get these problems, what's likely is your specific P4 is somewhat defective. (Or motherboard) If it's still under warranty, you can try and RMA it. Otherwise, there's not much else you can do... either live without HT or get another processor/system.

It's definately not a common issue though, I personally made a few systems based on granite bay (dual channel DDR266 to make 533FSB which was the P4 3.06's native bus speed) and didn't encounter this.

Just make sure to keep all drivers up to date, get the latest Windows updates, etc. It would help to tell us what the rest of your components are too.

 

[Shawn]

I'm thinking it may be a motherboard problem. I added a rig page. Here are the specs... http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=30628

 

[Shawn]

ttt

 

[Chadder007]

Mine did that too. Went from 1.8 to 2.6 with Hyperthreading. Turn on HT and I get blue screens and I noticed also that Internet Explorer would peg out the CPU at 100% and then usually cause the blue screen.

 

[Chadder007]

Also note my post I made over at the Intel boards to no avail.....
http://softwareforums.intel.com/ids/board/message?board.id=42&message.id=403

 

[Budman]

You doubled your cpu power requirements,did you upgrade your power supply also?

What model/make of psu do you have?

 

[Chadder007]

...for me I had even tried a different power supply . 350 then to a 425 mhz power supply.

 

[imported_Technomancer]

Now that would explain what was happening with my dad's computer with a 2.8 Ghz HT Northwood... thing is, it only happened with Windows XP SP1. For some reason, me or mom would be using it no problems, then suddenly the machine chugs to a near halt... the system idle process would take up as much as 90% of total CPU useage (the tool manager checked total physical useage, not each virtual core, wierd). It would typically drain about 75% of the CPU... bad for doing anything at all. Then the problem was fixed once dad upgraded to XP SP2, I never understood that. I suspected it was HT at the time, dad thought it was a rogue .dll... I can't wait to tell him this.