problems at start up. possibly CPU

[zylander]

when I start up my computer, it goes strait to the BIOS. when I exit the bios it just goes to a blank screen and the monitor light blinks. also, when i first turn on the comp, when you get that black screen with the vid card specs up in the top left corner, it says that my vid card has 0mb of ram.

today I reset the bios, and when I turned on the comp again it went into the BIOS and had me choose the speed of my CPU, I did (1.47ghz) and exited the bios, when I did, it went back to the blank screen, so I reset the comp. This time when I went into the BIOS, there was an error message on the right side saying "your computer hung during hte previous startup due to an invalid CPU speed seting" or something like that. so I turned the cpu speed down to 1.1ghz and now the computer works fine.

could this be a sign of a failing CPU? (its an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ with I think a thoroughbred core) and it is a few years old.

also, why during the startup does my comp think my vid card has 0mb of ram?

 

[LiLithTecH]

Are there BEEPS while the PC is POSTING (before the video display screen)?

 

[zylander]

no beeps

 

[mechBgon]

What brand and model of power supply is running the show there, and what is the overall hardware specs of the system (drives, cards, etc)? Maybe the power supply is marginal and cannot quite manage the demands of the CPU when it's at full clockspeed... seen that a few times.

 

[zylander]

the PWS is an Antec SL400 400W
mobo: Asus A7V8X-X
HD: Maxtor 40gb, not sure on rpm
Lite on CR-RW
vid card: Elsa GeForce 2 Ultra 64mb

this pc has been running fine with no problems for over a year now, as far as i can tell, this problem just came up out of no where.

 

[mechBgon]

Definitely not power-supply overload, then Do you have a different AGP or PCI video card you could try in there?

By the way, if that motherboard fails to get through its POST attempt, then it will revert to failsafe defaults for the CPU speed the next time it tries to POST, just in case you over-overclocked it to an unachievable speed. So I wouldn't worry about the CPU quite yet.

 

[zylander]

Yes I have another AGP vid card that I can test, but it means taking appart my main comp so I wont be able to do it for a few hours. I will report back when I have more news. Thanks for the help so far.

 

[zylander]

turns out thers is no problem with the vid card, it was just a simple mistake. during post when it shows the specs of the card, the screen is not centered on the monitor, and instead of seeing 64.0mb of ram, i was just seeing the .0mb.

so now the only problem left is with the cpu and or mobo and why i can not run at the proper speed.

 

[zylander]

bump....anyone got any ideas?