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View Full Version : Follow-up on my PC problems...


Shadowhawk
10-24-2001, 05:54 PM
OK, I thought I had this blasted machine finally beat. I should be so lucky. Part of the problem before was I also had the Video RAM Shadow turned on in BIOS. Should've thought of that before... Oh well.

Anyhow, here's what's going on now. All my PCI cards test OK in the back-up PC I'm using now, so does my SDRAM. Maxtor MaxDiag, Win 98 Scandisk and Norton's Disk Doctor all give my remaining 20 gig HDD a clean bill of health too.

I've tried a few times the last week to setup my PC again, and everything seems to go fine. When I tried to test out a couple of moderately graphics intensive games though, the PC takes a giant dump on me! This latest time, it was NFS High Stakes. I reboot the blasted machine, and it'll get as far as the Win98 splash screen, then it crashes, automaticly reboots itself and will make it all the way to Windows safe mode that way.

Talking to Turbostang on ICQ last night, and he thinks it's either a bad memory or CPU problem. I was leaning toward a bad power supply before that, but it really doesn't seem to quite fit the problem...

THe SDRAM seems OK when used in the other computer. It's a P3, not an AMD K7 like my main PC, so I can't swap CPUs to test them however. I also don't have MUCH of a onboard hardware monitor either. It just checks the Vcore Voltage settings. They were all just a bit high too...

The 3.5 Vcore was reading at 3.66v and the one that primarily had me concerned was the 12v setting. It was reading a 12.8v amount internally. I'm no expert on this facet of PC technology, but that seems above the safe zone to me.

So who's got an opinion here? Is it a bad CPU or something else I should be looking at? If it were the good ol days when I had more money I'd just shotgun it until I fixed the prob. Not an option now however http://discussanything.com/Ubb/frown.gif The weird thing to me is that Windows and WordPerfect 8 ran fine for me before I fired up the game. Games do take alot more CPU power to run, but I'd have thought something would have showed itself before that point.

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Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquest of it

"There is no weapon deadlier than the will" Bruce Lee

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Troubadour
10-25-2001, 05:51 AM
You'd need a voltage mod to get 12.8v. I highly doubt that's what you're pulling off your PSU, and if you do... that's probably the problem, because they're not designed to supply that kind of power, heh. Could you take all the pci devices out and just use the cpu, memory, and video card, and see if it's stable then? Can you swap the memory and see if that makes it stable? Have you reformatted your hard disk and reinstalled windows? Do you have a high-speed internet connection so I can send you windows 2000, which is superior to windows 98 in every possible way? Could you download motherboard monitor and see how much your power fluctuates while you use your computer? Finally, could you run your computer for a few minutes and then touch the heatsink on your processor, and tell me how hot it feels?

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