Wierd lock ups

[OCedHrt]

My computer randomly locks up when in game (WoW in this case). When it locks up, one or more of my hard drives spins down as if there was some sort of power loss. This never happens out of the game. Am I safe to think that the PSU may not be handling the load properly?

CPU: Athlon XP-M 2600+ @ 1.45v @ 2 ghz [Stock I think]
MB: ABIT KV7
HD: WD 200GBx2, 320GBx2
RAM: 512MBx2 [Generic/SPD]
PSU: Antec SmartPower 2.0 500W
VID: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro [5.12 Catalyst]
WLAN: D-Link DWL-G520

Originally I attributed this lockup to my failing chipset fan, which I finally replaced two weeks ago with a replacement from ABIT. The only 2 components I'm considering atm as potential culprits are the RAM and the PSU.

Update 2/6: Added more details

 

[Zim Hosein]

OCedHrt, if you run your rig at the stock VCORE, does it still lock up?

 

[OCedHrt]

I forgot to mention that it is an XP-M. Stock vcore for that is 1.45v. It does lockup still when I set all voltage (agp, ddr, chipset, cpu) to default (1.525v for cpu as determined by bios).

Actually now that I think about it, at default I think I get blue screens with no text instead of a lock up. I think this was the save dump: 0x1000008e (0xc0000005, 0xe10ed94c, 0xb876e91a, 0x00000000). I will try with defaults to make sure and post back.

My wireless also randomly stalls, quite often during game play, and I am now investigating whether or not it is related to my lockups. Trying a different driver atm.

 

[rcllbrg]

Ive had impossible to trace bluescreens and it turned out to be the chipset on the motherboard

The fan was stopped and a capacitor was blown, it slowly died and eventually stopped booting

 

[OCedHrt]

Originally posted by: rcllbrg
Ive had impossible to trace bluescreens and it turned out to be the chipset on the motherboard

The fan was stopped and a capacitor was blown, it slowly died and eventually stopped booting

Hmm, my chipset could be damaged considering that the fan had been semi-failing for a year before I replaced it.

Maybe I will look into upgrading then. I don't really want to invest in another socket A board. The ASRock Dual is tempting since I wouldn't need to get a new video card for a while, but I'm not sure if I want to tie myself to socket 939 with M2 just around the corner.

 

[OCedHrt]

Seems like I have multiple problems with my PC. Found a semi-defective 4 pin power adapter powering one of my hds, which I fixed. This stopped the hard drives from spinning down, but for some reason lockups became more frequent in game. Decided to try without my wireless so I switched to my wired connection, and finally got a blue screen instead of just a lockup.

Error code 0xEA: 0x100000ea (0x841b01e0, 0x85f4bc68, 0xf7c9acb4, 0x00000001).

Seems like it could be my video card/drivers?

Just noticed an error for ati2mtag as well, describing the same kind of problem as the 0xEA stop message. Seems like it definitely is my video card/driver combination then.

 

[AdamSnow]

It very well could be your video configuration... I've had those symptoms as well, and have my system just shut down and reboot on me... (in WoW too)...

Doubting that your chipset on your motherboard is damaged even though the fan semi-died a while back... If anything, that would just burn out the processor. Board and chipset should be just fine.