Possible CPU trouble.

[Woodisjericho]

I've been having some computer trouble lately. I've been experiencing crashes to a blank screen with vertical bars mostly in games. I've tried swapping everything short of the processor which I suspect is the problem. Today after swapping a power supply I recieved a series of 5 short beeps, which indicates a processor error. Is a processor something that slowly fails (giving random errors until failure) or is it something that just dies right away?

---Sorry for the blank earlier, bumped enter reaching for the phone---

AMD Athlon XP 3200+
Enermax 430w power supply
Gigabyte GA-7VT600 1394
1GB Kingston HyperX DDR 400
Gigabyte Geforce 6600GT

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

oooh.... k

 

[aGreenAgent]

Have you tried memtest?

The video card might be overheating. Also, run chkdsk /r on the drive with your swap file. I've heard of weird errors with bad sectors on the hard drive in the middle of the swap file.

 

[Woodisjericho]

Chkdsk didn't report any errors. My idle temps are these according to EVEREST... Motherboard 35C, CPU 48C, and AUX 29C. Let me know if they seem high. And I'll be running memtest soon.

 

[aGreenAgent]

Yeah, but did you do a chkdsk with /r?

That'll check for all the bad sectors and stuff.

 

[Woodisjericho]

Yes I used the /r and it said the drive was clean. Memtest is on 22% and no errors so far.

 

[aGreenAgent]

Run memtest to like 500%, with as few programs open as possible. If that passes, I'm thinking overheating.

 

[Woodisjericho]

I used the version of memtest that creates a floppy and when that was running it failed and left ##### a bunch of those at the bottom of the screen. Now when I run games the computer restarts. Is that a heat issue or something more.

 

[aGreenAgent]

Ick, if mem test fails, that means there's a problem with accessing your memory. Your games might be crashing because they're trying to access that particular area of memory.

If your computer is overclocked, put it at stock settings and run memtest again.

If it's not, make sure your memory is all at the correct timings and run it again.

 

[Woodisjericho]

Ok, I'll have to try that. I'm gonna do it tomarrow however because I have to get up early. Thanks so far for the help and I'll keep you posted.

 

[montag451]

Also, make sure the voltage for the RAM is not set to auto -
Set it to between 2.6v - 2.8v [start with the lowest, and raise it in the smallest increments to 2.8v]

IN THE CMOS settings

 

[Woodisjericho]

Ok, I increased the voltage by .1 volts like montag suggested and memtest ran for about an hour and a half with no errors. However my games are still locking up, any suggestions?

 

[Woodisjericho]

Today I changed the cpu to an old XP 1900+ I had and everytihng seems to be working.