System instability problem

[tungtung]

I have a VP6 setup with a P3 1.1 GHz (100 MHz bus) which has been working great for almost a year now.
Two months ago I moved this board along with the CPU on another case with a generic 300 Watts PSU.

This setup was working great without any stability problem until last week, when suddenly out of nowhere the system just kept on crashing randomly. The solution at this moment is to downclock the chip to 726 MHz (ie 66 MHz bus) and the system stays very stable, never had a crash at all.

Any suggestion as to why this happen? ... could it be the PSU gone bad or the motherboard gone bad? ...

The system had a CD-RW drive, DVD drive, two Western Digital 100 GB SE, SB Live 5.1, 3Com Ethernet card, and a Radeon 9500 Pro.

 

[jackschmittusa]

First guess is the psu. A far off second guess is the ram.

 

[BG4533]

I would think the PSU as well. Maybe try removing one HD, the optical drives, any other nonessentials and maybe even throwing in a slower video card. Then up the processor back to 1100mhz. If this works it is likely the PSU. What you have would be fine for a name brand PSU, but for a generic it could be bad. It is much more rare for regularly clocked mobos, cpus and ram to just go bad, but it does happen.

Brian

 

[tungtung]

Thanks for the suggestion ... I've tried removing both CDRW and DVD drive as well as one of the HD ... no luck.

Haven't tried with the video card though ... as for RAM ... I've tried downclock the RAM to 66 MHz with the CPU bus at 100 MHz ... same problem ... so I guess the RAM is still ok ... cause right now the RAM is clocked at 100 MHz with CPU bus clocked at 66 MHz and the system is stable as a rock.

So I guess PSU is the diagnosis then (btw it is a generic PSU) ...