random crashes

[roblob]

I'm using a Core 2 Duo e4400 which was stable at 3.0ghz with voltage at 1.4. I tried to decrease the voltage when I wanted to run it at stock clock again and found that it will not boot unless it is at the oc voltages. It will also no longer run at the overclock which I had before. Even while at the stock clocks I am getting random crashes. I was getting hard drive errors as well so I tried running chkdsk. When I ran that it would stop at almost the exact same spot everytime. I ran memtest and passed with no errors. Could this just be that my processor is fried? I have been using this system since september 07.

My Hardware:
Core 2 Duo e4400
Gigabyte Ga-P35-DS3
2 x Western Digital 400gb raid 0
4 x 1gb OCZ Platinum Rev. 2
Radeon 4850
ABS Tagan 700w

 

[roblob]

by the way I'm not using stock cooling. I use a tuniq tower 120

 

[mpilchfamily]

Could be any number of things really. Could be the PSU, the motherboard, the CPU, or the HDD. hard to tell at this point. If the HDD is coming up with errors then it may be currupted or failing causing some of the problems. But i'm kind of leaning twards the PSU. If the PSU is going bad it can look as if other parts of the system are where the trouble is at. So try a differnt PSU, if you can, and see what happens.

 

[roblob]

How could the psu make it so I can not boot at stock voltages? I might be able to get another one to test with.

 

[Denithor]

If your PSU isn't providing the stated volts (example: only cranking out 11.5V on the 12V rail) you might have overcome the problem by pushing the chip voltage above its rated point. Now that you've dropped it back to "stock" the PSU isn't giving enough juice so your system isn't stable.

Or, I have heard of chips eventually becoming "used" to high voltage and not playing nice if you drop them back down. CPU on crack or something? I think error8 has had that problem, you might send him a PM to ask.

 

[roblob]

well I was able to get into the bios while at stock voltages. The readings of the voltages on the 12v rail was the same as it was with the overvolt. So maybe its the cpu on crack problem. Even if I keep it at these voltages I still get crashes all the time so I'll have to try something else. I might be able to borrow a friends psu next weekend so I'll try that unless you have any other ideas.