Freezes and Lockups Out Of Nowhere

[SCompRacer]

Been like the middle class here; fat, dumb and happy with my 900 T'bird/KT7A RAID/Crucial 7E set up. Been running at 133/33/7.5 for 1000MHz about a month and a half, life was good.

Of late, I will return to PC to find it locked up. Mouse stuck on desktop, must reset to reboot. Now I can be typing in Word, and same thing. So I start setting memory timings back to normal settings and it still happens from time to time. Geting pretty close to stock settings here and it still happens, last thing to do now is go back to 900 @ 100/33.

CPU has an Alpha PAL6035, is at 28C right now, 38C loaded. Arctic Silver on everthing including the VIA chip, but not oozing. No viruses detected.

Installed a 350watt Fortron power supply to no avail. And my multiplier came unlocked from AMD, so it doesn't need re-penciling.

Any long time over clocker advice for me? Is there impending doom I can look forward to, like Death of a CPU? Or just upgrade again?
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ABIT KT7A, RAID 0 * 900MHz Athlon T'bird, 133/33 @ 7.5 for 1000 * 256MB Crucial 7E PC/133 RAM * Two 30GB IBM 75GXP's * The Rest




[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 09 March 2001).]

[The PIT]

Sounds like something has fried over a period of time.
Try running it at stock settings and see what happens. Then push the memory and see if it falls over. Even better use the problem as an excuse to upgrade another memory stick and see if the problem occurs with only the new stick.
Other things to try is running the graphics card at low colours. Yes I've seen machines do this and running the card at 16 colours the machine would run forever.
If it ain't memory try removing other hardware you got installed to elimate items.
The last time I saw random locking was faulty memory. I had three sticks and the machine wouldn't lock for hours so it took several days to get the culprit.

[Taz]

I agree with The Pit, sounds like dodgy memory. When it happened on my system it would do it once a week and then got progresively worse until it was crashing about every two hours. Replaced the DIMM and all has been well ever since.

[Indiana]

First check if it does lockup as well when the CPU is not oc'ed. If it works well at the default speed, I'd check the "pencil drawing" to unlock the TBird - erase the old ones and do it again.

I had to do this three times now that I've unlocked my Duron800 (running at 1026-1064) - the pencil-method seems to be not very lasting and it can have various strange effects including instability when those bridges are not properly connected.

[This message has been edited by Indiana (edited 10 March 2001).]

[Six Of One]

I know it is an old story, but it doesn't need to be the OC or the memory that is at fault.

I had the same problem on a Epox EP7-KXA with Athlon600@690(KX chipset) and Hyundai PC100 SDRAM -overclocked by 15% - and it wasn't the clocks fault. It turned out that the motherboard/g400 combo was to blame.

Try the following: Enter BIOS, set AGP speed to 1x or DISABLE AGP 4x whatever option you have. Also DISABLE AGP Fast Write. Then force your graphicsboard to AGP 1x (MTSTU for Matrox, for ex.). This will not have any impact on performance, so you can do it without hesitation.

Try this before buying new stuff.

[Wombat]

Try ripping a DVD to DivX. Nothing seems to stress bum memory or CPU's more.

6-10 hours of tough love. I had faulty memory that would pass memory checkers all night, but a DivX rip would crash in 5-15 minutes. New DIMM -&gt No more problem.

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Epox 8KTA3 w/ Duron 850@7.5*133 with Alpha 6035, 256MB Crucial 7E, G400MAX,SBLive!-MP3,Pioneer 10x DVD, Plextor 12/10/32A, IBM 45GB 75gxp, and a Sony 420GS. Running RH7.0 (2.4.0-final), and Win98 (when I have to).

[SCompRacer]

Thanks for all the suggestions, MURC's!

OK, the last thing I did seems to help, slowly cranking things back up, so far so good.

There is this BIOS option for the KT7 motherboards that disappeared then reappeared with later BIOS updates. It is "K7 CLK CTL Select."

The manual says "Two options are available; default or optimal. The default setting is optimal. This item can decide some of the internal parameters which can optimize the CPU. If you choose optimal, AMD's suggested optimal values will be used. Or you can use the default settings by choosing default." (There words exactly, not mine...)

It has been on optimal for weeks since the last BIOS flash I did. On default now, and I am back up to 133/33/7.5 for 1000 and all memory settings maxed. Wierd.... Maybe the CPU is starting to whine? Or is it the MB?

Now my next question is the system bus. Overclocked it is at 266MHz. I read in a post that AMD has removed the Abit KT7A from it's recommended MB list due to the fact the board would only run reliably with a 200MHz bus, and not with a 266MHz CPU BUS like it's supposed to.

Could this be a viable reason, or is it more likely that the 200MHz bus CPU just doesn't like it?
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ABIT KT7A, RAID 0 * 900MHz Athlon T'bird, 133/33 @ 7.5 for 1000 * 256MB Crucial 7E PC/133 RAM * Two 30GB IBM 75GXP's * The Rest



[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 10 March 2001).]

[Taz]

This is what Chris Tom at AMD Zone had to say about Abit's KT-7A being removed from AMD's recommended list :-

"After talking with Abit and AMD I now have some more answers about the Abit Socket A boards being pulled from the AMD motherboard recommended list. AMD has found that some boards have a problem soft rebooting when using high speed CPUs. They have to be hard rebooted instead in many cases. This does not just apply to only the Abit boards. So that is the only reason why the Abit boards were removed. This is no other known problem. If you are having this problem contact who you bought the board from. Most motherboard companies do support directly to the resellers, and not the end users."

[SCompRacer]

Thanks for the info Taz. That 'other' forum seems to have gotten unreliable since they resurrected it from the dead.

[Wombat]

I don't really know why your system is complaining. But the KT7A is back on the list.