I have not been around many of my local online community’s recently do to major computer issues I have been suffering through.
In my last post I made you all aware that I had ordered a new bare bones kit from TigerDirect.ca. Well I received all the parts, put it together, turned it on… install Windows XP Pro… Install drivers then bam… random reboot. So I ran it for about a week. Very fast bur random reboots. I ran the great utility “Dr Watson” that’s built into Windows to see what was going on. Checking through logs I found that every reboot was caused by the nVidea driver taking a dump.
My first thought was the video cards so I took on of the XFX nVidea 8400 GS’s out. Again, still the same problem. So then my second thought was RAM… Took 3GB of the OCZ RAM out. Still same issue. Last thought was power supply… changed that… still same issue.
My calm father called MSI and gave them the situation of what was going on. They gave us a tag number and we shipped the board back.
A week later we were starting to get concerned about where the board had gone because we had herd nothing from MSI. That Friday a package showed up from MSI with a brand new mother board.
Again, hooked it up, installed Windows XP… still same problem.
Well I was pissed by this point. (Who wouldn’t be)
So me and my dad were talking about the MSI mother board. All of our computers we have ever built we always used AMD processor, ASUS mother boards and ATI graphics cards. Having a MSI mother board and nVidea graphics cards was a new realm but we figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. Every thing pointed back to the motherboard.
We order a nice ASUS N2M-SLI from ShadowTech Computer Services. (There located a few blocks away from my house) The next day the motherboard was in and still the same problem but this time when we went to install Window s we would get a memory flow error… something witched I have never seen before. This time we called up our friend Tim from ShadowTech and asked him about the problem.
Tim nicely tolled us that OCZ RAM needs to have voltage bumped up for it to run stable. Sure enough, bumped up the voltage and away it went. 4GB of RAM… AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5400+ 2.81 GHz and XFX 8400+ GS running software SLI.
Not bad for a months worth of screwing around… Now I just need to find where the Christmas video’s went 😛
