Please help with my new computer setup

[Snowhill]

Please help....

I am strugling with this new computer set up. I have purchased the following components.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300
Asus P5B Deluxe
Asus EN7600 512 MB Graphics Card (PCIe 16)
Corsair Twin XMS2 6400 512 MB x2 (DDR2) 5-5-5-12 1.9 V
450 W Power supply (Proven to be working)
Western Digital 160 GB SATA Harddrive
Artic Silver Thermal Paste
Separate fan for the fanless graphics card.

I put everything together and for the first hour or so, everything worked perfectly. I did not change anything in bios... and I put in my Windows XP CD, and began installing. I did the normal formatting of harddrive (which took about 1 hour) and I moved onto the windows installation. Half way through, while copying files to harddrive, computer just rebooted. And it keeps rebooting itself. The symptoms include:

computer will turn off and reboot (it even does that in bios)
computer will keep itself in rebooting loop
computer will turn off. wait a while and power up again
The on- time for the computer is so short that (2-3 minutes) that I can't install nor change a thing in bios.
I can't even install windows because of this rebooting issue....

I previously had the same setup as above excpet a different motherboard (Gigabyte GA-965P DS3 which I was successful in building and using but it started the same exact symptoms as above after 2 weeks of use. I confirmed that it is not a bad power supply issue by buying a brand new (several) PSU and experiencing same issues. The above components are all new (via RMA). It's not overheating issue as the board reports both cpu and board temperature to be well below 35 C. I am helpless and almost hopeless. Is it the memory issue? The Asus website says the the above memory of 5-5-5-12 is compatible with the board... Am I doing something wrong in setting things up???? Any advice would be very helpful....

 

[daveybrat]

What brands of power supplies do you have/or tried so far?

Also you might want to try running Memtest86+ 1.70 on your pc to check for ram problems.

 

[Double Trouble]

Do you have more than one memory stick? If so, take out one of them and leave just one stick, see if the problem persists. If it does, switch the sticks and see if it persists. If the problem goes away, you know one of the memory modules is bad.

Once you've eliminated the memory modules as the possible culprit, take off any devices you have on the IDE bus other than the main hard drive. Detach everything else and see what happens. The hard drive itself could be bad too, but that usually doesn't cause the PC to just randomly reboot like that.

The fact that the time it stays on is so short makes me question the temperature of the CPU. It might be cool when you first boot, but if the CPU is not making proper contact with the heatsink, it will heat up incredibly fast and the system will shut itself down long before you can see any kind of high temp reading.

 

[Snowhill]

Thanks for the replies, guys. So I disassembled everything and packed them all up to ship back. But I figured, maybe I will take it to a local shop to check it out, avoiding a 90 buck restocking fee. So I put everything back together, making sure every connection was tight. And Instead of having the my corsair XMS2 Dimms in Dual channel mode, I stuck them in single channel mode.... and who knew? it worked! I was able to install windows xp and the computer stayed up all night (about 5 hours) without problems....

Was it that I somehow made the bad connection between mobo, cpu, heatsink better by reassembling it or was it the memory arrangement...? I know it's easily solved by putting the memory back to dual channel and seeing what happens... but does anyone know if Asus P5B Deluxe board gets unstable if Dual Channel is used with Corsair memory? Or is there a setup in Bios that I have to change?

And on bios, my FSB is at 1024Mhz. And my memory is 800 Mhz, is it normal or wrong?

Thanks for the inputs....

 

[daveybrat]

Originally posted by: Snowhill
Thanks for the replies, guys. So I disassembled everything and packed them all up to ship back. But I figured, maybe I will take it to a local shop to check it out, avoiding a 90 buck restocking fee. So I put everything back together, making sure every connection was tight. And Instead of having the my corsair XMS2 Dimms in Dual channel mode, I stuck them in single channel mode.... and who knew? it worked! I was able to install windows xp and the computer stayed up all night (about 5 hours) without problems....

Was it that I somehow made the bad connection between mobo, cpu, heatsink better by reassembling it or was it the memory arrangement...? I know it's easily solved by putting the memory back to dual channel and seeing what happens... but does anyone know if Asus P5B Deluxe board gets unstable if Dual Channel is used with Corsair memory? Or is there a setup in Bios that I have to change?

And on bios, my FSB is at 1024Mhz. And my memory is 800 Mhz, is it normal or wrong?

Thanks for the inputs....

It's normal for it to say 800MHz because your memory is 800MHz and running in single channel mode now.
And yes, i have had a lot of issues lately with corsair ram running in dual channel on ASUS boards for some reason......so it doesn't surprise me.