Serious Problems With my New Computer

[DrKnish]

I am having a ton of problems with a computer I built. It’s a Pentium 4 @ 2.53 GHZ and 256 MB of Samsung 1066 MHZ Rambus RDRAM 32Bit Memory (I'll be getting another 512 soon), an ATI all-in-wonder Radeon 8500DV video card on an Asus P4T533 motherboard, with 3 120GB Western Digital Caviar SE WD1200JB hard drives (2 in a RAID 0 configuration and one as an extra IDE drive, a Toshiba SD-M1612 16x/48x DVD drive, a TDK veloCD 40/12/48 CD-Rewriter, in a Lian-Li PC-68USB aluminum case with an Antec PP412X 400 Watt power supply. I am running Windows XP Professional and Windows 98. I currently have the RAID disabled and am dual booting from the BIOS until I get things working right.

The machine is giving me all sorts of problems. It was rebooting itself until I changed the restart setting in control panel. I am getting a variety of Windows errors from “PFN List is Corrupt”, to “IRQL is less or equal” (plus a bunch of others). I am also getting a bunch of DVD2SVCD errors too. Besweet crashes, sometimes and both TMPGEnc and CCE give me errors like “Floating Point Divided By Zero” and a few I can’t remember at the moment. I also have noticed some issues running other programs, but most programs don’t work the CPU very hard.

All of the problems happen when I am running XP, however I have to underclock to 1.9 GHZ to even boot Win 98 (under Win98 NDIS won’t work beyond 2.1 GHZ) so I don’t know how it would act under Win 98 running full speed. I am not sure what is causing the problems. Could it be a hardware issue, or a configuration problem? The CPU temperature is around 140º. I tried a RAM testing program I downloaded but I can’t get it to work under XP. It doesn’t show any problems under 98 though.

That is about all of the basic details I can think of. I might add that I have formatted and reinstalled everything twice (OS and all). I also flashed the BIOS to the newest version and downloaded the newest drivers for the video card (the latter seemed to help some).

If I have omitted any details please ask. ANY help will be appreciated! I do have the “minidump error files but I don’t understand what they mean. One of the error messages read:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: System Error
Event Category: (102)
Event ID: 1003
Date: 10/2/2002
Time: 11:24:29 PM
User: N/A
Computer: BRUCEDESK
Description:
Error code 1000008e, parameter1 c000001d, parameter2 bf9caf6d, parameter3 f9c814d4, parameter4 00000000.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 53 79 73 74 65 6d 20 45 System E
0008: 72 72 6f 72 20 20 45 72 rror Er
0010: 72 6f 72 20 63 6f 64 65 ror code
0018: 20 31 30 30 30 30 30 38 1000008
0020: 65 20 20 50 61 72 61 6d e Param
0028: 65 74 65 72 73 20 63 30 eters c0
0030: 30 30 30 30 31 64 2c 20 00001d,
0038: 62 66 39 63 61 66 36 64 bf9caf6d
0040: 2c 20 66 39 63 38 31 34 , f9c814
0048: 64 34 2c 20 30 30 30 30 d4, 0000
0050: 30 30 30 30 0000



Event Type: Information
Event Source: Save Dump
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1001
Date: 10/2/2002
Time: 11:24:24 PM
User: N/A
Computer: BRUCEDESK
Description:
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x1000008e (0xc000001d, 0xbf9caf6d, 0xf9c814d4, 0x00000000). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini100202-02.dmp.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

[manono]

Hi-

RDRAM works in pairs, so you have 2 sticks of 128MB, right?

And that temp is ridiculously high. So you have the heatsink and fan on properly, and the fan is spinning away?

[DrKnish]

HI

I have one stick of RDRAM and one CRIMM in the other bank to terminate the circuit (per the MOBO instructions).

As far as the heatsink and fan, all is as it should be as far as I know. I used the stock Intel heatsink and fan that came with the processor (no thermal compound, the h/s had thermal tape on it already). I was lead to believe that this would be adequate if I don't overclock. Is this wrong? This the first computer I ever built so I am open to suggestion.

(BTW) The latest error XP gives me is "Pagefault in Unpaged Area".

[sarahjh69]

take the covers off
position a desk fan to blow on the processor
if it works the cpu is overheating!!!


sounds like overheating problems 2 me!!

[manono]

Hi-

Good advice (as always) from sarahjh69. Yes, the stock heatsink and fan from Intel are good, and the thermal tape should be OK, although I don't trust tape much. I'd go to Radio Shack if I were you and get some heatsink compound. But that's not the cause of your problem.

When I set up my P4, I thought I had the heatsink on properly, and then wondered why the computer crashed all the time. It turns out that the heatsink wasn't flat on the CPU, but sort of tilted at an angle. I took it off and then put it back on again, and it worked fine after that. Good Luck.

[DrKnish]

Hummm. I have tried that as well. I actually had the computer completely apart and back together a couple of times wondering if there was some issue as you discribed causing this. Everything looks fine though.

As for the temperature it's 140ºF or about 60ºC under 100% load. I just wanted to make it clear that the temp I gave was in Fahrenheit. As far as I can tell that is not too high. It's hard to find a definite answer about temperature. The temp reading is from the Asus monitoring utility. Even this is a topic that is not spelled out clearly. Some people say that as a general guideline, the temperature difference between the die and the bottom of the CPU is about 30°C. I am not sure what Asus is measuring. I will try to use a desk fan and see if that helps.

I am stuck using my old computer at 450 MHZ! LOL! Any help would be welcomed!