Random Lockups with K7S5A and older hardware...advice desperately needed

[bozack]

Hello all,

Well just upgraded my system from a P3 650 to an Athlon XP on a K7S5A and am getting a few random lockups and it will always lock when trying to load battlefield 1942 however will play Unreal Tournament 2003 just fine....

I was getting the lockups in an unclean version of Win98 so I upgraded to a clean install of Win XP Professional, however the Lockups are still persistent.....

What is in the system:

Retail Athlon XP 1600
ECS K7S5A Mobo
2 Sticks 128 Meg PC 133 Crucial Memory from abit BH6
Radeon 32meg DDR Video
Creative Labs Soundblaster Xgamer
Intel Pro 100S Network card
Fortron Source ATX 2.01 Compliant 300W Power supply (someone before told me this was on the low side for these chips)
Pioneer DVD player (on its way out when I buy a new sony CDRW)
Memorex CDRW (Also going when I get the new drive)
20gb WD Hard Drive
Floppy
Internal Zip 100 Drive

I turned off ACPI and my system wouldn't boot ...however I turned it back on and then disabled AGP 4x and also clocked the memory/CPU to 100/100 and now it seems to be Rock stable

Tried the system with one of my 133 128 meg crucial sticks at 133, and while it was slow, it seemed to be stable, so I popped in a 256 meg PC 133 Samsung stick that I borrowed from work and got no lockups in BF 1942 and system performance seems to be much improved.

Here are the readings from the hardware monitor in the bios....

2.5 = 2.480v
3.3 = 3.248v
5 = 4.999v
+12 = 11.968v
SB3V = 3.360v
-12 -11.885v
SB5V = 4.945V
VBAT = 3.360V

Sys-temp = 26C/78F
CPU Temp = 45C/113F

I am still at a loss if it is memory or the powersupply.....however I am leaning towards the powersupply...any ideas would be apprecaited, Thanks.

 

[Peter]

Both are suspect. Check the 5V/3.3V total allowance on the power supply unit (should be around 180 watts, else forget it). You also wouldn't be the first to discover that your RAM that behaved OK in your old system actually isn't - revealed only by the Athlon system that pushes a lot harder on RAM throughput than ye olde P-III does.

www.memtest86.com is your friend - AFTER you asserted the power supply adequacy. Don't rely on the voltage monitors, they're way too slow to detect the brief dips and spikes that typically make for unstable systems. You'll only see dramatically underpowered or plain broken PSUs there.

regards, Peter