Topic: What is wrong with my PC?!!!

[chelski]

I have just bought a pc but it keeps crashing/rebooting/freezing when I play games. It has happened with loads of games and downloading patches does not help. Please help me to get it to work!

It is an AMD Athlon 2500 overclocked to be Athlon 3200, 1GB DDR400 RAM, AsRock K7s8xe motherboard, GeForce 5200 128mb graphics card, 160GB hard drive.

Once you turn the computer on the games will play for about 15 mins before crashing but after that it keeps crashing very quickly. There is a big fan inside and everything seems to be staying cool apart from the graphics card which is getting extremely hot. But even when I replaced the GeForce with a state of the art Radeon with massive fan, it still crashed. It did not make it through to the end of 3Dmark (graphics testing program) with either card.

The motherboard manual says that it supports only 1 slot of DDR400 RAM but I have been supplied with two but taking one out does not solve the problem. Also the RAM is running at less than 1GB per second which seems odd. Could the overclocking be causing the problems?

I am clueless as to how it can be fixed. Maybe I should get a refund for it but I only paid £450 for it which seems quite good value for money. Thanks

[Serenity]

Hello Chelski and  

In order for us to try to help you, can you please let us know what operating system you are using  

[Sandra]

I would think that your problem is definately caused by overclocking.
I had problems last weekend installing XP on a 2500 Barton running as a 3200, I had to drop it to its normal rating of 1833mhz in the bios to get it to install XP.
If you are ok with going into the bios just reset the CPU speed to 1833 and save and exit then hopefully it will be ok  

[chelski]

The operating system is Windows XP Home. The bios settings were already 1833mhz and I dont seem to be able to change them. Any ideas?

[Dack]

Depends on lots of things when overclocking is involved

For a stable system on the last 2500, k78xe system I put together I did the following:

1. Set the jumpers on the motherboard for a 200MHZ bus (as the dividers for the other clock derived buses e.g. AGP would be correct)

2. Went into the bios and set the FSB to 197. You can not change this setting unless you change the setting from JUMPER to manual.

3. Went into the memory setting and changed it from auto to DDR400 for both sticks.

This only shows as a 3000 but was very stable.