Question on random shutdown..

[jo4re]

HI All,
Recently while playing FEAR my computer crashes the game to the desktop, crashes the entire computer and restarting or getting a machine check exception error. I tried digging to see if I could find the problem. Memtest ran fine with no errors, prime 95 torture test gave me an error 1 minute into the test on cpu 1 (FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4-hardware failure detected). I ran PRIME 95 with affinity set to cpu 2 with no errors. I am thinking maybe i have a cpu that has gone south. Any thoughts?? Also when running the test MBM5 has my voltage dropping from 11.25 to 11.19 durting the torture test. The voltage seems low to me but I'm not really sure.

System is as follows,
AMD Athlon 4400+dual core (mild OC)
Asus A8Nsli premium
1GB OCZ platinum RAM
evga 7800gt

Thanks for all the help!

J.

 

[Baked]

Cheap PSU or bad RAM.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Temperatures on the CPU, idle / load?

Also, try going back to default speeds and run Prime95 again. See what happens.

 

[dBTelos]

Software voltage reading don't mean anything, they aren't reliable. But I doubt it's a PSU problem, if you can run PRIME95 for a long time with no crashes. Bad RAM I'm thinking.

 

[pkme2]

I agree on the fact that your RAM might be acting up. I just had that problem with some RAM just the other day.
Switched out the memory sticks and the problem disappeared.

 

[jo4re]

Thanks for the replies. I have a decent PS (ENERMAX Noisetaker EG495P-VE 485w) although it could be the culprit I set both my memory timings and CPU to "auto" I have been running the torture test for the last hour or so with no errors.

I find it strange that for over a year the machine ran great OC'ed but now it doesn't like it. Does this help with the diagnosis?

Thanks again,
J

PS the temps while running Prime are 47C. I remember when playing FEAR OC'ed it could get as high as 57C. I have a Coolermaster Hyper 6 on the chip though.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: jo4re
I find it strange that for over a year the machine ran great OC'ed but now it doesn't like it. Does this help with the diagnosis?

That's not impossible - o'clocking does cause an accelerated degradation of hardware electronics - it shortens their life in many cases. Live fast, die young, . . . have a good looking corpse.

But, practically speaking, it can be caused by heat, which is caused by build up of dust and dirt. Remove and wipe your DIMMs clean - and do the same on other components - your heatsinks - get the dust out of the cracks, etc.

 

[jo4re]

Thanks! It hasn't given me any trouble since I put the settings back to standard. Maybe it's ebay before it goes up in smoke. Any ideas on a good replacement (socket 939)???