Underclocking

[Reloader]

Hi,

Does anyone know why I would have to underclock my cpu in order for XP to be stable?

[bigandy]

Where did you hear this? I doubt that you would need to underclock your CPU. If you overclocked, and then was causing issues, then you might have to bring down the OC a bit, or even set it back to stock speed, but still, that wouldn't be underclocking it.

[Reloader]

Well it's happening to me.

I have P4 2.4B (533 FSB)

If I run at this my system crashes after an hour.

If I underclock it to 100Mhz so it runs at a P4 1.8A (400FSB) then the system is stable and runs as one would expect.

Any thoughts?

[Designer]

Could be bad RAM casing it to crash, run memtest86 to test your memory, download it from www.memtest86.com

So many problems with crashing are ram related, so thats probably a good place to start.

Hope this helps

[Reloader]

I have two sticks of Ram

Elixer 512Mb 333
Kingston 512Mb 400

I've tried both and one or the other. There's no difference.

[Designer]

Still try memtest just to eliminate it as when I had my problem both sticks were bad, anyway memtest is worth downloading as it's handy for future problems.

This could also be an overheating issue.

[Reloader]

What could be the issue with overheating?

My cpu temp is 30.8 oC and system normal runs about 25 oC

I have a very decent Zalman Copper heatsink and fan (which cost £30 / $45)

[Designer]

Alright them, overheating's eliminated, still sounds like a ram problem to me though

[Reloader]

Thanks I'll try that tonight and post a reply later on.

[fudtone]

I would try the correct FSB with memory set to 266 timings.

[Reloader]

I'm not sure if I can adjust the memory speed. I will try tonight.

[glc]

Reloader, this forum is not the place to make political statements such as that. Thank you.

[Reloader]

Originally posted by glc Reloader, this forum is not the place to make political statements such as that. Thank you.

Sorry it was only there a few hours.

Euro 04 is my only excuse.

[Reloader]

My BIOS wouldn't allow me to adjust the speed of the RAM and I couldn't get the memtest to work. It only gave instructions for a Linux system.

I did run some other software to test the ram, that I got on a XP mag. It was a benchmark program. And that worked fine.

[Designer]

Well hopefully that's eliminated the ram as the problem.

BTW did you test it at stock speed or underclocked as you mentioned previously. If there was a RAM problem it may only surface when running at the correct speed. Also to get memtest to run properly you nedd to unzip it to a folder (assuming v3.1) put a blank formatted disk in and run the install.bat file from command prompt, then boot up from the disk and it'll run automatically.




Now can someone correct me if i'm wrong but doesn't the ram have to be run in dual channel to achieve the 533 speed

[Reloader]

I tested the stock speed.

memtest: I unzip'd and ran the .bat file but the cmd prompt appeared for half a second didn't do anything. I copied the .bin file onto a floppy and tried booting but it didn't recognise it as a bootable thing.

[Designer]

Id make a new folder in the root directory and unzip to that

You've gotta have the command prompt open before running install.bat to get it to work properly (I had the same trouble when I first used it) Click start>run and type in "command" then change directory using "CD \###" where ### is the name of the directory where memtest is and then type install, this way the screen stays on rather than flashing up for a few seconds only.

[Reloader]

Thanks, that's really really good advice, for years I've never known how to do that.