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New hand-built system freezing

M

mdavis0509

Junior Member
My new system is freezing randomly. Whether its installing software, powering a game, or surfing the net, it will lockup and not respond to any command. Here's the system and what Ive tried:

System:
Thermaltake Tsunami Dream tower
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard (nForce3 based)
AMD Athlon 64FX
2x Crucial dual channel 512MB DDR400
nVidia GeForce 5900 FX Ultra
Maxtor 120 GB SATA
Antec 550 "TRUEPOWER"
Logitech wireless keyboard & mouse

I've tried:
Reinstalling games
Reinstalling/updating all drivers for motherboard and graphics card
Lowering RAM speed from 200 to 166
Disabling CPU internal cache (MSI's idea--slowed computer down incredibly)
Device manager shows no conflicts

I'm out of ideas--please help!
 
Hi mdavis, welcome to the forums! Wow two new users in one night, I'm lucky! 😀 I am priveleged to try to get discussion going on your problem...

Firstly what version of Windows are you running? Do you have all Windows updates installed? Have you upgraded your motherboard's BIOS? Looks like a nice hardware setup, hopefully we can figure it out.

- Melty
 
You guys are fast! Here's the answer to your questions: I am running Windows Xp Professional versoin 2002, with SP2 installed (and some small update that the Autoupdate installed today). I already upgraded motherboard bios to latest from MSI, version 1.4.

Oh, and my HD is partitioned into two 60 GB drives, with the OS on one drive and programs on the other
 
When is the last time you did a full fresh install of Windows? just curious. how often does the freezing happen and when did it start happening?
 
Did a fresh install of windows when I put the system together last week (installed for the 1st time, without incident). The freezing happens anywhere from a few seconds after startup to an hour or so of gameplay. The only kind of pattern I've been able to observe is when I installed World of Warcraft: it froze every single time the installer got to the first large terrain file. This happened 3 times, until my buddy and I discovered that we had installed the RAM dimms in slots 1 & 2, whereas MSI wants them installed in slots 1 & 3 for my RAM setup. Correctly installed RAM and World of Warcraft was able to install, but the freezing still happens unpredictably (as does my swearing).


Sample readings right now:
CPU temp is 102F
Memory voltage is 2.7v
AGP voltage is 1.5v
 
your cpu temp is nice and cool.

have you tried running memtest? (to test your memory? 😛) btw your avatar change freaked me out. you went from the nice lady with the wavy hair to the greenfaced bedhead sleepy-eyed guy. 😀
 
Sorry about the avatar change. I am a teacher, but the gender was wrong 😉
Sick better describes my mood about my new system anyhow.
Ran MemTest for a little while, and it didn't find any errors after checking about 15% of my RAM. Everything looked smooth on Task Manager performance tab.

Something I tried worth mentioning: I noticed a tiny, tiny "chirp" coming from the inside of the tower everytime I used the scroll wheel on my cordless mouse. The receiver/charger base for the mouse had been located right next to the tower, so I moved it away, far enough (I measures by moving the mouse farther and farther away from the base) so that it shouln't present any interference to hardware in the tower (no more "chirp," too). Since then, no freezes, but the freezes are unpredictable anyways, and it hasn't been very long.
 
Well, all you can do is try to isolate the problem, even if it means RMA'ing some of your new parts. Not all builds go as planned... RMAing is quite common and maybe even moreso with certain MSI boards. they are good but I have heard there are bad ones in the bunch that need to be RMA'd. Perhaps 1 of your ram sticks is bad? Hard to say.

edit: see if the problem persists with only 1 stick of ram, and try them both seperately
 
I take that back--there's still a "chirp" noise, but we'll see if this makes any difference. The logitech manual said to keep the receiver base 8" away from "electrical devices," and I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
 
Though the post is old, it's worth updating:

I solved my freezing issues by turning off MSI's overclocking software in the BIOS. MSI has overclocking software which features several levels of overclocking (about 3%-11%). Well, it turns out that even on the lowest setting, it was messing with my system. Based on this experience (even with good quality parts in my new build), I think MSI's overclocking software is probably needs lots of tweaking to operate with stability, or it's just complete garbage.

System has been rock-solid ever since I turned overclocking off!
 
Geeze, This could be a million things but the two I would like to troubble shoot first are the PSU and the memory. First the memory you are using is not validated by nVIDIA and is not on their list http://www.nvidia.com/content/nForceMem...ility/lstnForceMemoryCompatibility.asp, I hope that when you purchased your memory from crucial that you used their memory selector or they will not provide you with support for your RAM.
http://www.crucial.com/store/listmodel....28Micro+Star%29+Motherboards&submit=Go
Check the AMD memory compatabily list http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/DevelopWithAMD/0,,30_2252_893_10125,00.html

Also I have seen this problem before and was related to the power supply so go to friend or someone and see if you can borrow theirs or go to http://www.pcpowercooling.com/products/power_supplies/ and get a turbo cool if you do not have any luck.

Remove all PCI cards and IF possible remove your video card (use onboard video or pci video) and uninstall all the drivers. One by one replace and remove them to see if you can reproduce the problem. If that works but you cannot figure out what card is causeing the problem try combinations of PCI cards to see if there is a conflict between two devices.

Reset your bios to factory defaults for trouble shooting purposes, with all of todays overclocking options any one of those settings can cause instability problems.
 
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