I havent had a working pc for 3 years. bought a new one and it still doesnt work

[Fortune]

greetings,

as the title says, for the last 3 years i havent had a fully functioning pc. first, i had 2 cd drives that would work once out of every ten start ups. then my pc would randomly lock up, wich lasted about a year. then whenever i used a cd it would randomly restart. Now i've got a new pc, and guess what?

It still doesn't work!

so whats wrong this time? well, whenever i play games it hangs and i have to restart. At first it was once an hour, if i had the video settings in games set to low. then i formatted, and now its every 10 minutes no matter what.

Specs:

MSI K8mm-v mobo (754, agp, micro-atx, 2x ram)
amd athlon 64 3000+ (2 ghz)
ATI 9800 SE @ 9800 128 mb
2x256 apacer ram @ 200 mhz - 2.5-4-4-8
Zalman zm400B 400 watt psu
Maxtor 6l200M0 200 gb hdd Sata
2x dvd drive

Any suggestions?

[anger] WHY CANT I EVER HAVE A WORKING PC?!! [/anger]

-Fortune out

 

[Solaris17]

wait so you flashed your grfx card?

 

[Fortune]

wait so you flashed your grfx card?

no, i downloaded the softmodded drivers from this site. AFTER i started getting the hangs/lockups and it made no difference.

 

[Deleted member 3]

Use systool to check system temperatures. Sounds like somethings overheating (higher settings cause more load and more heat)

Monitor both CPU and GPU, run atitool or systools picalculation to stress those parts.

 

[Fortune]

Use systool to check system temperatures. Sounds like somethings overheating (higher settings cause more load and more heat)

Monitor both CPU and GPU, run atitool or systools picalculation to stress those parts.

Systool and Motherboard monitor do not support my motherboard, and atitool doesnt give me any temperature readings.

the best i could get was speedfan, but that only reported temperatures as 'temp1' 'temp2' etc..

temp1: 38C
temp2: 53C (this is the CPU, i believe)
temp3: 68C (i think this might be wrong as i've never seen it go below 65C, even with 3 fans blowing into my case after i left my pc off for a day)

HDD: 33C

Temp1 goes up by a few degrees if i turn the fan off thats blowing onto my 9800, even though theres a good 30 cm between the fan and the core

 

[Deleted member 3]

68C might be videocard, are hese temps stressed?
Might also be a PSU problem, when hardware gets loaded it consumes more power (hence the higher temps)

 

[Solaris17]

oops.

 

[regg187]

I really got a feelin the psu is too small or about to die!!

 

[Spinal C]

no way psu is to small that vid card doesnt take a lotta juice. maybe bad ram? are your psu leads balanced? i had a problem i had to much stuff one on lead and my comp was rebooting then i evend out the load and it was fine. maybe bad ram? do a memtest.

 

[regg187]

Yeah it still can be the psu ,especially since some items (cd rom) do not boot up with sys all the time , shortage of power somethings gotta not get fired up if your short on power at boot when EVERYTHING tries to grab power at once. or when gaming and a larger load hits the system at one instant, not enough juice to run'em all at that peak , MB will blink and then instant reboot for no reason. the 5.5v rail on my psu was screwin up only givin out 4.34 and sometimes cd roms wouldn't boot up sometimes HDD's wouldn't boot . Then the next time I turned it on everything would boot up and run just peachy . The psu was a true power 550 by antec, which has voltage sensing circuts and adjusts it self ,but it was dying and that was its problem, hey the 12v and the 3.3v were workin just bitchin givin out exactly what they should have been.Try borrowing a psu from someone and see if that makes your system more stable. definitly check any thing that was in your old system that was put in your new system, since both have these problems something you moved from old to new will be your culprit

 

[jeremymtc]

Just so you're aware, 9800's don't support temperature monitoring. It sounds like the temp #3 being reported is likely the northbridge (#1 looks like MB environment, #2 should be CPU). If legit, 65-68c is way too high for idle. Have you pulled off the side cover and blown fresh air in?

Temp1 goes up by a few degrees if i turn the fan off thats blowing onto my 9800, even though theres a good 30 cm between the fan and the core

See above. The PSU is also a possibility. Verify that it's not cooling first (it's cheaper).

Good luck!