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General discussion

newly built pc issues

Apr 4, 2004 7:32PM PDT

Ok heres the problems I'm having maybe you guys can help me out.

1. The main problem is random reboots after starting CPU/RAM intensive programs. It was doing this faster before I replaced the Heat sink now it will wait till I start the heavy program to reboot. The CPU temp never seems to get over 42C.

2. I cannot get my PC to do anything with the floppy. In the device manager it shows it there as working but anytime I try to use a floppy proven on other machines it doesn't work. Cannot format or anything. I wanted to be able to use a bootable disk to do a RAM check.

PC stuff:
Windows XP Pro
AMD Athlon 3200 mhz 400FSB
MB: ASUS A7N8X-X
RAM: 1 gig
heavy duty heatsink
400 Wat PSU
Ati all-in-wonder card 128mb

Any advice will help please.

Discussion is locked

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''Event''
Apr 4, 2004 9:40PM PDT
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Re:newly built pc issues
Apr 4, 2004 9:46PM PDT

Athlon CPUs are well known for their high demands on power supplies. They draw a fairly considerable amount of power very quickly when going from idle to full utilization, and a lot of cheaper power supplies just can't handle it.

Not all 400W power supplies are really capable of delivering 400W of power. To test to see if this is your problem, try unhooking a few things like the floppy drive, any optical drives, take out any PCI cards you can live without for an hour or two, and if you can, swap in a lower end video card. See if the reduced power requirements solve the problem. If so, get a new power supply, if not then you have another issue.

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Re:newly built pc issues
Apr 6, 2004 1:12PM PDT

Floppy issue fixed. It was a bad drive.

RAM isn't the issue with the reboots. Have tried other ram and reboots continued.

Checked the voltages on the 12v and it was going up to 12.992. I'm not sure but I think thats high. I went and picked up a new 450w PSU and it seemed to fix the problem. I was watching a DVD and running Seti@home. Not sure if you know what Seti@home is but it is hard on the CPU and was one of the programs that would reboot the pc before. It didn't reboot after running for like 10 minutes. The 12v was staying at a solid 12.66. Is this still high? I shut these things down and started a game called Everquest. Didn't even get into the game fully before reboot. Not sure what to think now. Everything except for Everquest works. Haven't tried any other games yet but I'll be giving them a shot later tonight.

I'm currently running a RAM burn in program. As soon as thats done I'll better know the status of the RAM.

Let me know what you guys think.