Quote :

"Just a side note: if you use Symantec AV from the school, I uninstalled it and put AVG on a friend's computer the other day and it found 35 more viruses that Symantec had never seen. So you should probably use something other Symantec."

that's not because symantec inherently sucks or misses more viruses than AVG, but because one of the viruses probably had rendered it ineffective long before you got to his computer. there are many viruses that can disable or damage symantec, norton, mcaffee, avg, etc.

5/2/2006 2:20:20 PM

bttt

5/5/2006 9:50:01 AM

ok i just stopped prime95. it ran a torture test for 118 hours straight with no errors or warnings. im going to go watch tv, and i guarantee my comp will be locked up when i get back.

this is such bullshit

5/5/2006 11:10:34 PM

format c

5/5/2006 11:17:09 PM

locked up 16 minutes after i posted that


^dude if i do that and it doesnt fix the problem...

i know where you live man

5/6/2006 2:15:38 AM

before you re-format do me a quick favor and turn down your fsb in your bios please then tell me if that worked. Because if you have a small imperfection in your cpu I could see it possibly failing under 0 stress. If it's not that then it's your motherboard and your doomed. Software is unlikely to cause it while it's idleing...unless you have a massive memory leak in windows or another program. But that would affect you no matter what unless something else was clearing it.

5/6/2006 8:35:52 PM

Hooooollddd up your list doesn't say your cpu is using a cooling device of any kind. Most modern cpus almost require one other than stock. Especially intel. I don't have a lot of knowledge with amds but if it's even a fraction as bad of an intel then it's cooking itself in there..Never ever trust readings given by a cpu temperature reading. It's such a fragile thing. And it can be off HUGELY. It wouldn't suprise me if your cpu is just freaking out because it's so hot. Also i believe that amd cpu uses a system where when it's not being used it slows itself down to stay very cool however if it's doing that and your computer is switching off 20 mins after you go idle that would be a pretty good area for that to happen. Turn it off in bios.

5/6/2006 8:40:07 PM

i looked for an option for that in the BIOS and have no idea what it would be called. i also suspected something like that. also, i think the FSB is set to auto, so what should i put it at?

5/6/2006 9:08:36 PM

^^ He says it's never crashed when he was using it though and were it simply a temperature thing that wouldn't seem likely.

^Have you tried having something cpu intensive running while you're not using it and seeing if it still crashes? Have it play a large avi file and scan for viruses and maybe show a maple animated graph of something complex for a while when you're not using it and see if it still crashes. If so, then it's probably not the technology that basically throttles down the cpu.

5/6/2006 9:13:08 PM

^that's what prime95 is. it keeps cpu at 100%

it has run for days straight that way.

i'm thinking it has something to do with the cpu not being used. there must be some feature like power saving or something where it "turns off" or something when nothing is using it, and that is causing problems.

there's a ton of BIOS settings that i have no clue what they do. i dont know if it is even a BIOS setting though.

lol i've never had this much trouble with a PC in my life. guess that's what i get for trying to build one.

and i REALLY don't think re-isntalling windows will fix this. there is some setting, somewhere, that is fucking this up. has to be.

5/7/2006 12:40:33 AM

well I believe the option you'll want to turn off is called "cool'n quiet" but I beleive you should have been able to disable that within windows anyways. maybe you can shut it off in the bios too though.

[Edited on May 7, 2006 at 12:54 AM. Reason : ]

5/7/2006 12:46:43 AM

cool & quiet is disabled already.

could my cpu voltage be too low?

here is a pic of my cpu power monitro. middle % is cpu usage (nothing was running so it was 0%)

left bar appears to be voltage and it is in the red. the other tools i used made it appear as though my voltage was low as well. i know nothing about what to set that to, and i don't want to fry my computer by setting it too high.

know anything about that?

5/7/2006 12:55:18 AM

I don't know, at this point I'd be looking at trying to exchange the PSU, CPU, and motherboard.

5/7/2006 1:00:48 AM

might be too late for that, it's been more than 30 days

5/7/2006 1:03:54 AM

send the board and the cpus back and say they're broken. if you're persuasive enough, and don't lose your temper or throw around insults and lame threats, you'd be surprised what can happen.

you might have to cry for this one

5/7/2006 1:58:12 AM

then im without a computer for a week or more and i'm not even sure that will fix my problem. i don't like blindly trying to fix shit. i'd rather find the root of the problem and then fix it.

5/8/2006 1:38:11 PM

I'd strongly reccomend trying to get these RMA'd and replaced over diagnosing them to death. There's so many little things that could be wrong on the board and causing this, and I've scoured message boards looking for people with the same problem and I haven't found it. There's people with similar problems, but those involved cool'n quiet issues that were reportedly fixed through bios updates. This suggests to me that if the problem is not software based, then it's a very unusual and very specifict hardware issue. Either something is conflicting, in which case there would likely be reports of it online since none of the parts you are using are too unusual, or something has a very bizarre defect.


The most likely location of a defect that causes your kind of problem could be in the motherboard, cpu, memory, harddrive, or psu. Software utilities can verify the harddrive and memory. Perhaps the PSU is failing and providing fluctuating power at low utilization levels. This would more likely cause a restart then a freeze though wouldn't it? One thing to check is how hot your power supply is getting when you're letting the computer idle.

You can check CPU voltages and stuff like that in the bios, but if it's something that only happens after being idle for a long time that may be tricky. you also might want to try switching power connectors to the video card or harddrives with one that's not being used. You could also connect a voltmeter to some of those unused connectors and see watch what happens when you let it idle. If the power provided to the mobo was fluctuating at low utilizations, then it'd most likely go through a hard reset. If the power to the video card or harddrive is fluctuating though and caused those devices to fail, then you could indeed see your computer freeze.

I don't really know enough about how the CPU and Motherboard work at different utilization levels to tell you what could be going on there. It's got to have something to do with how the component behaves differently when it's not being used much. It seems like you've deactivated everything that would tell them to behave differently when idle though and it's not fixed anything. Maybe it has something to do when almost nothing but the scheduler is running?


(this may sound dumb but...) You also may want to verify temperatures with something other than the onboard sensors. I'm not saying stick a thermometer on components or anything, but run the computer on idle for a while till it crashes, then right when it crashes start feeling around for hot spots that shouldn't be there. May sure you're grounded of course. At the temperatures you've listed, nothing should REALLY hurt. If anything does, it's way to hot.

[Edited on May 8, 2006 at 2:14 PM. Reason : ]

5/8/2006 1:53:06 PM

Go to Start Menu -> Run and type "chkdsk" and hit enter. I'm starting to wonder if it's the hard disk.

Also, I would go into the bios and set you memory speed yourself. Do not leave it set to Auto.

Make sure all your connections are plugged in hard and that you are not running with any cd or floppy drives attached.

Check the mobo for leaking or bulging capacitors.

What version of the nForce 4 drivers are you using? Try updating/reinstalling them without any of the NAV stuff http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

5/8/2006 1:57:45 PM

alright i'll try updating those drivers

this sucks. i guess i'll start talking to newegg and see how receptive they'll be to me RMA'ing it.

looks like i can RMA my mobo (and HD). for the CPU i'd have to go through AMD's 3 year manufacturer warranty.

just got a potential solution in a thread i posted on a dfi forum, anxious to get home and give it a shot...

[Edited on May 9, 2006 at 12:56 PM. Reason : ]

5/9/2006 12:38:52 PM

let us know how it goes, I'm kind of curious what's wrong and what fixes it

5/9/2006 4:57:20 PM

here's the solution posted:

Quote :

"I used to have this problem. It was the Marvell NIC. Disabled it and no more lockup. Weird."

my mobo has 2 network cards apparantly, and i've been using the nvidia one. according to this guy, the other one (which is from Marvell) was causing the problem. i'll disable it when i get home and see if it works. hopefully it does.

really fuckin weird problem if that's it though.

5/9/2006 5:01:07 PM

eh, it's suprising what they can do. windows ME (spawn of the devil) wouldn't shut on a particular motherboard I had back in the day down because of an intel NIC we had installed. When we removed it, the system shut down fine. It was fairly od.

5/9/2006 5:02:59 PM

yeah, that didn't work...

5/10/2006 3:34:33 AM

Quote :

"windows ME (spawn of the devil) wouldn't shut on a particular motherboard I had back in the day down because of an intel NIC we had installed."

you expect people to read this shit?

5/10/2006 1:37:48 PM

Now Warlick, sure it's a screwed up sentence, but it's not too hard to figure out...

Quote :

""windows ME (spawn of the devil) wouldn't shut down on a particular motherboard I had back in the day down because of an intel NIC we had installed.""

And come on, for the 45th hour without sleep that's not as bad as it could be.

Troll elsewhere

[Edited on May 10, 2006 at 5:30 PM. Reason : ]

5/10/2006 5:18:43 PM

well it looks like the problem was software related.

i finally decided to just reinstall windows, but instead of formatting/reinstalling, i installed windows xp pro x64 edition, which is the OS i wanted all along, but i think there were problems with the NCSU MSDNAA server and i couldn't get it before. i got it now and installed that, and no lockups.

i'm currently installing all my drivers and all that shit and once i get the critical stuff i'm gonna go one at a time and make sure nothing causes the lockup. hopefully whatever it was has been fixed for good and i can finally have a working pc.

thanks to all that read this thread and made suggestions, i'll give an update after i've had this running longer.

5/11/2006 1:53:23 AM

Heh, this has got to be one of the first driver/software related issues I've heard about that the 64 bit version of windows fixed instead of created.

5/12/2006 1:30:48 AM

haha yeah...

i figure this can hold me over til vista comes out. i've been told not to go for x64 but whatever, my comp doesnt freeze up anymore, i'll see if it becomes a pain in the ass or not...

5/12/2006 6:24:13 AM

xp tried to divide by zero is what happened

5/12/2006 8:12:06 AM