PlasmaEye
Thread Starter
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2004
- Messages
- 14
This post may be long, but I've been having this problem for almost a year.
Last July I decided to upgrade my computer. So I got a Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra Platinum Edition Motherboard, an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, a AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton Core, and 1 GB (1 512MB stick and 2 256MB sticks) of Ultra RAM, plus a new case and some nice case fans. All this was powered by a 400W PSU, if I remember correctly.
All was fine and dandy until late August when I went to a LAN party. When I booted up, after all of the BIOS checks and the RAID utility check, it gave me an Exception error while trying to boot to Windows XP Pro.
Not knowing what to do, I wiped my harddrive and did a fresh install of Windows XP Pro. This didn't solve my problem but I did find a temporary solution to the Exception errors; if I unplugged my PSU for 3-5 minutes it would boot fine.
Then in December, at yet another LAN party, my PSU took a crap. So I bought a new PowMax 500W Aluminum PSU, thinking my board needed more wattage. At about the same time, BF 1942 started to freeze after about 5 minutes of gameplay, but BF was the only game that did this.
Then in January, I went to another LAN party. My friend, seeing that I was still using the Soyo Hardware monitoring software, suggested I use VCool instead. BOOM!! In one fell swoop my bestest best friend in the whole wide world inadvertently fixed all of my problems; no more freezing games, no more exception errors, and I could finally restart my computer withougt worrying.
About 2 weeks ago, I decided to switch around my case fans and left the computer unplugged for about 10 minutes, and when it booted up, it gave me an Exception error! I thought I was through this already. So I tried different settings on my board. But this made it worse, it wouldn't even boot into BIOS anymore unless I shut it down for a good 10 minutes.
Finally fed up with this crap from my board, I asked one of my more computer savvy friends to come over and diagnose the problem. Since the Exception error gave an address, my friend and I suspected the RAM. So, we ran a memory test on the RAM on my board, all of the sticks failed. Then we tried testing on a different board that was exactly the same, they all failed. So we tested them again on a different brand of board and they all passed.
Seeing the results from the tests, we assumed that the problem was the RAM controller on the board. So, eventhough I was kinda low on cash (although my tax rebate was coming), I bought a new Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 nForce2 chipset board.
Thinking this was the end to all of my problems, I hooked everything into this new board, turned it on and ... it didn't work.
The fans only turned on for a split second but the power LED and RAM LED stayed on. I can still hold down the Power button for 5 seconds and the LEDs will go off.
Since the power comes on for only a split second, I tried the board with a different PSU. One of my friends had a extra 300W PSU sitting around, so I tried that. The board turned on and booted. I set the BIOS up, and tried to boot Windows, but it gave me a BSOD (Windows XP style) saying it had to stop to keep from damaging the computer. Thinking that the Windows problem would be solved with a bigger PSU, I ignored it for the moment.
Now I tested the 500W (the PSU that didn't work on the Gigabyte board) on a different board, and it worked. So, I am left with a riddle; the 500W won't work on this board but will work on the other board, and the 300W will work on this board and the other board.
If any of you guys have any comments, I would love to hear them. I am all out of ideas, and I am going to try to send the 500W PSU back to the manufacturer to see if I can get a replacement, and see if that works.
P.S. Thanks for reading this god-awful long post.
Last July I decided to upgrade my computer. So I got a Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra Platinum Edition Motherboard, an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, a AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton Core, and 1 GB (1 512MB stick and 2 256MB sticks) of Ultra RAM, plus a new case and some nice case fans. All this was powered by a 400W PSU, if I remember correctly.
All was fine and dandy until late August when I went to a LAN party. When I booted up, after all of the BIOS checks and the RAID utility check, it gave me an Exception error while trying to boot to Windows XP Pro.
Not knowing what to do, I wiped my harddrive and did a fresh install of Windows XP Pro. This didn't solve my problem but I did find a temporary solution to the Exception errors; if I unplugged my PSU for 3-5 minutes it would boot fine.
Then in December, at yet another LAN party, my PSU took a crap. So I bought a new PowMax 500W Aluminum PSU, thinking my board needed more wattage. At about the same time, BF 1942 started to freeze after about 5 minutes of gameplay, but BF was the only game that did this.
Then in January, I went to another LAN party. My friend, seeing that I was still using the Soyo Hardware monitoring software, suggested I use VCool instead. BOOM!! In one fell swoop my bestest best friend in the whole wide world inadvertently fixed all of my problems; no more freezing games, no more exception errors, and I could finally restart my computer withougt worrying.
About 2 weeks ago, I decided to switch around my case fans and left the computer unplugged for about 10 minutes, and when it booted up, it gave me an Exception error! I thought I was through this already. So I tried different settings on my board. But this made it worse, it wouldn't even boot into BIOS anymore unless I shut it down for a good 10 minutes.
Finally fed up with this crap from my board, I asked one of my more computer savvy friends to come over and diagnose the problem. Since the Exception error gave an address, my friend and I suspected the RAM. So, we ran a memory test on the RAM on my board, all of the sticks failed. Then we tried testing on a different board that was exactly the same, they all failed. So we tested them again on a different brand of board and they all passed.
Seeing the results from the tests, we assumed that the problem was the RAM controller on the board. So, eventhough I was kinda low on cash (although my tax rebate was coming), I bought a new Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 nForce2 chipset board.
Thinking this was the end to all of my problems, I hooked everything into this new board, turned it on and ... it didn't work.
Since the power comes on for only a split second, I tried the board with a different PSU. One of my friends had a extra 300W PSU sitting around, so I tried that. The board turned on and booted. I set the BIOS up, and tried to boot Windows, but it gave me a BSOD (Windows XP style) saying it had to stop to keep from damaging the computer. Thinking that the Windows problem would be solved with a bigger PSU, I ignored it for the moment.
Now I tested the 500W (the PSU that didn't work on the Gigabyte board) on a different board, and it worked. So, I am left with a riddle; the 500W won't work on this board but will work on the other board, and the 300W will work on this board and the other board.
If any of you guys have any comments, I would love to hear them. I am all out of ideas, and I am going to try to send the 500W PSU back to the manufacturer to see if I can get a replacement, and see if that works.
P.S. Thanks for reading this god-awful long post.