Hi experts,
I'm hoping you can help me or point me in the right direction.
I recently bought a PC which I put together. The problem I am experiencing are random reboots,
freezes and sometimes a BSoD when playing a game (world of warcraft). It's the only program I've
loaded (except the bare essentials) because of this problem. It will happen seemingly randomly
during gameplay. Once it happens, it could be another 5 minutes or another few hours before
it does it again. I do notice that there is a lot of hard disk activity a few minutes before it happens.
But the crashes always seem to happen when the graphics card is under a heavy load.
I am on the latest ATI catalyst drivers, the second-newest flashbios for the Mobo, and have
DirectX 9.0c loaded. I also have the latest mobo drivers installed that came with the mobo
(the version that came on the cd was newer than the ones I tried to pick up from the asus
website)!
I've done some searching and it seems there are a lot of other people having the same kinds of problems
with this mobo and a lot of the K8T800 boards in general. The suggestions range anywhere
from replacing the mobo, ram, psu, or all of the above, to memory timings in the bios, to turning
off certain features, to power issues, to heat issues.
There are definitely no heat issues since the case has two fans and one port hole directly pointing
at the CPU fan (air intake). The CPU never goes above 36-37C. Just to rule out heat issues, I left the
case open and it still exhibited the freezing and rebooting. I guess what's left is that it could be
anything else that I mentioned. Is there a good way to troubleshoot this and are there any utilities
out there that can aid me in the troubleshooting process (particularly memory timings and PSU loads).
I should add that the Mobo absoutely refused to post when I had the ram kit installed in the slots closest
to the CPU. Only after I moved them to the slots further away did it even post. Also, when in the
process of putting it together, and after inserting the CPU and locking in the lever, I wanted to check it
a third time (my sanity check) just to make certain that it was oriented correctly. I couldn't pull it out
that third time and it seems like its stuck in the 939 socket.
If anyone can help, I'd be most grateful.
TIA
Oh, the specs on my new system are as follows:
Asus A8V Deluxe Mobo w/1007 bios version
Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro Advantage (128M)
Antec ATX mid tower case w/350W PSU (SL350)
WD 80G SATA HDD (7200 RPM)
Lite-On LTR-52327S (says SOHR-5238S on the unit though?)
OCZ PC3200 (DDR400) Dual Channel kit 2x256 - 2.5 cas pn# OCZ400512PDC-K
