Bad motherboard?

[Levantis]

A while back I built a computer, and had nothing but problems from the beginning. I get random blue screen errors. MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION.

This has been ongoing for a long time, and I only fight with the computer when I have the patience, so now everything is basically out of warrantee. I think some piece of hardware in it is bad.

1 problem I have is the computer doesn't reset all the time when I hit the reset button. It goes black, then doesn't do anything. Everything still runs, fan and all, it just doesn't boot back up, so I have to power down, then back up.

Then I have the blue screen errors. I get them randomly, even if I'm doing nothing more than moving around the desktop. But some stuff will always trigger them. For instance, when I was messing with disabling all my unnecessary stuff, when I was done, it would crash every time I tried to turn the sound card back on. Safe mode or normal mode, it would crash, didn't matter which. Just as soon as I clicked accept after reactivating it on the system hardware window.

It's not the sound card though. I crash without the card in, and I crash with another card in.

It's not the video card either, because I use the same card in this computer, which is where the patience thing comes in. Every time I try to play with my other computer, I have to put this card into that computer. That's why I eventually give up trying. Gets to be too big of a pain. But this card has never given me a problem in this computer.

My RAM scans ok. I've also put sticks in from other computers that run ok, and it still crashes. All the ram is detected though.

I EMailed the motherboard manufacturer. They told me some stuff to try for the not rebooting issue. I tried it all, and did realise my power source was severely below what they recommend. It was a 400 watt source, but being my first build, I didn't know to pay attention to the outputs of each voltage, and figured 400 watts is 400 watts. So I bought the CompUSA brand power source. Well, I changed my power source to something that was more than minimum requirements. The computer still crashes and fails to reboot at times.

Is there some tool or technique to diagnose a bad motherboard or bad CPU? Video cards and such are easy. I can take them out, and see if it clears the problem. But the CPU and board ARE the computer. How do you test them to see what's bad?


Motherboard ABIT AV8
CPU AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Enermax 460w Power Source
Seagate 80GB Hard Drive
Radeon 9250 Video Card
Soundblaster Live Sound Card
1 Stick 1GB KINGSTON RAM 33MHz DDR

[avx]

I assume you have checked your device manager for any obvious errors once you had it up and running, right?

One more thing you might want to try and eliminate before you start checking the board, is the HDD. Seagate does make a decent HD, but I have heard that some of their recent ones are not as up to par as they once were. Try slaving it to another PC in the house, and try booting from it, and if you get the same problems, safe to say that was your problem.

It could also be heat...Did you apply the thermal gel yourself? Checked you temps?

[juppy]

You're not overclocking it, are you? If so, try setting the speeds back to what they're supposed to be. Have you tried going into the bios and using the "Set system defaults" option? It'll set all the bios options back to their default settings, so if you've changed very much in there you'll want to take note of what you've got stuff set at so you can change it back if the default settings don't improve the situation.

[Levantis]

I'm not overclocking. I've tried different BIOS settings including default, and fail safe mode, and neither help.

I'm curious about the overheating the CPU thing though. My computer has a program to monitor the temperature of the CPU. I can watch it rise a little, from 91 to 104 so far is the tops. But that's just doing little things, like opening programs. What could I do to really work the CPU for a sustained period? I want to watch the temperature when the CPU is really going for a long time

[Levantis]

Since I have this program open, I might as well post some voltage stats. Maybe something will stand out.

Temperatures
CPU 95F
SYS 85F
PWM 97F

Voltage
VCORE 1.44
DDRVDD 2.7
DDRVTT 1.37
NBVDD 1.58
SBVDD 2.59
HTV 1.25
AGP 1.6
5V 5.19
3.3V 3.35
5VSB 5.24
3VDual 3.32

CPU Fan RPM 2040

Most of this stuff I don't even know what it means, but if you all see something wierd, let me know

[jayb1234]

Those temperatures are fine, nothing to worry about there.

MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION would indicate a hardware issue.

Here is the first Microsoft link from a google search.

If you enter the specific error code you might get something that will narrow it down further.

You can get the Seagate diagnostic at this page.

[Kuch]

Try running Memtest to check your memory. Even though your system is recognizing it, you might find something it wrong.
Are you running XP? Have you installed all available updates?
Are all your hardware drivers up to date?
Like avx said, what does your device manager say?

[Levantis]

Well, I completely wiped out my hard drive(the big 7 hours zero fill formatting) and started from scratch. I know the first time around I had trouble getting windows to install at all. Took me a dozen tries because the computer kept freezing up. I tried reinstalling windows after a while of blue screens figuring maybe the interuptions the first time messed the install up some.

This time I just plain formatted and started from absolutely nothing. Still getting crashes. And the computer fails to reboot 9 out of 10 times. At the very list, I'm willing to say my motherboard isn't working at 100%. Even if it's just the failure to reboot when you reset it. ABIT told me that themselves. They said either the power source or a bad motherboard will cause failures to reboot. And I've been through 2 power sources.

So now I'm just gonna try a new mother board.

I need suggestions on a good AMD Socket 939 Motherboard that's not ABIT.

[jayb1234]

ASUS with whatever features you want and a NVIDIA chipset.