Stability issues

[Tom Brown]

I've got a two year old Antec Sonata with the 380 watt TruePower PSU. It's been home to many different system components in the last two years and I've enjoyed superb stability with it.

Yesterday, I swapped in a Chaintech nForce 4 Ultra motherboard with an X2 CPU, 1 GB of RAM, and a geForce 6200 based PCIe video card. The system has locked up a few times since changing these components.

The system has been home to another brand of nForce 4 Ultra board, 1GB of RAM (the same RAM), same video card, and a 3200+ with perfect stability.

The only thing I can think of is insufficient PSU capability to handle the extra load of the X2 CPU. The reason I suspect this is when I first turned the system on, it would come up for about 10 seconds and then turn off. I disconnected everything except the core components and it came up, I undervolted it to 1.4v, and then I reconnected everything. It starts fine now.

I turned the core voltage down to 1.25 volts and that seems to have helped. At least, it ran overnight and was running this morning when I checked.

Temperatures are good. GPU = 61C, CPU = 38C. MB = 34C, hard disks = 32C, exhaust coming from the case = 28C, room temperature = 22C.

Any ideas?

 

[mlc]

you may be right about the PSU, it sounds like its rating might be right on the edge with your setup.. the 12v rail rating on the PSU is usually the most concern with an NF4 setup...

...aside from the PSU, make sure you're using the correct BIOS settings for your setup, paying particular attention to the DDR voltage and timings.. Also try disabling any unused features/ports, etc, within BIOS (e.g. unused IDE/SATA ports, 1394 and parallel port connectors, etc...)

 

[Tom Brown]

Thanks for the response, Mic. I hadn't thought about turning features off. It's a good idea.

With the unused features off and the core voltage set to 1.25v, it has been stable now for 2 days. I think this is strong evidence of a power issue.

Just a few minutes ago, I ordered a 600 Watt PSU so that ought to keep the system happy.


Thanks again....