Barton dying?

N

Nineball

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 1, 2005
Messages
89
Alright, my Barton was running completely stable for a few months, then, about a month ago, it started to get unstable.
Sometimes if I had a game or winamp running for a bit, it would lock up completely, no response. I find this unusual, since the hottest it's been getting is about 45c.
What do you guys think? Is it really dying, or is it my shitty chipset?
 
Happened to me once in a while (I use past-tense because I no longer have that system). Cleaning the heatsink of dust and reseating it always helped me even though my temps were even lower than that.
 
yup, sounds like a heat problem. clean everything off, and be careful not to bump the heatsink unless you plan to remount it anyway.
if that doesn't fix it, just back off on that OC a bit ;)
 
My Barton just recently died. Mobile XP 2600+ ran great at 2.5 Ghz for about 15 months, the all of a sudden the temp started creaping up. I took off the water block, cleaned everything, put on new AS5, changed coolant, etc, but the temps just kept going up. I tried taking down the overclock, messing around with voltages, everything. Finally I opened up one of my crash dumps from XP and it said that my instruction pointer was mismatched. I figure electromigration killed my transistors, which made them leak more, driving temps up. It ran for a few more days at 800Mhz and 1.8 volts (Hey, I figured I had nothing to lose...), then it just died completely (as expected). Athlon 64 parts are supposed to get here on Friday.
 
I had the same instability and my nVidia SS was full of static. I started lowering my overclock. I did this until finally it wouldn't run at even 1.9Ghz stable anymore. I checked everything.

Finally, I pulled out the digital voltmeter and found my Antec TruePower 430 was slowely dieing a painful death. The 5volt line was at 4.57 volts. Put in my 5yr old Enlight 350 watt to get by and my PC runs great back at 2.65Ghz again.

So, grab your digital multimeter and check your PSU. (Note: Just check the molex connectors..dont open up the PSU.)
 
Met-AL said:
Finally, I pulled out the digital voltmeter and found my Antec TruePower 430 was slowely dieing a painful death. The 5volt line was at 4.57 volts.
Click to expand...
my true430 is the same way :(
 
(cf)Eclipse said:
my true430 is the same way :(
Click to expand...

Are you serious? I wonder if there is some flaw in the design.

I would like to hook it up to a osciloscope to see what the wave pattern looks like. Not only was it killing my overclock to the point my CPU wouldn't even run under stock speed, it made my sound become full of noise, my Hauppage TV Tuner couldn't tune stations, and lastly, but this is subjective, my hard disk speed was a tad slow like it was getting some interferance over the SATA line.

I don't think I am going to turn it in under warranty since they already replaced it when I fried my original one due to my own carelessnes even though I told them it was my fault.
 
mine's rock solid on my barton, even at 2.2ghz and stock volts, just with a very low 5v rail. i'm tempted to try to figure out how to tweak it up some, i'm sure it's just a failing resistor/pot or something.
 
Thanks guys, looks like I may need to get a Venice sooner than I thought.
 
Met-AL said:
Are you serious? I wonder if there is some flaw in the design.

I would like to hook it up to a osciloscope to see what the wave pattern looks like. Not only was it killing my overclock to the point my CPU wouldn't even run under stock speed, it made my sound become full of noise, my Hauppage TV Tuner couldn't tune stations, and lastly, but this is subjective, my hard disk speed was a tad slow like it was getting some interferance over the SATA line.

I don't think I am going to turn it in under warranty since they already replaced it when I fried my original one due to my own carelessnes even though I told them it was my fault.
Click to expand...

My true 430 has been RMA'd once already! -5 line COMPLETELY died on me, it's the standby power that also happens to power the mouse and it couldn't provide enough power for the optical mouse, the mouse kept flashing like it was low on battery even though it was a wired version. System also kept crashing on me and I checked the voltage and it was really dipping to insanely low levels.

I really think something was wrong with the True 430 line.

As for the barton, yeah, my 2500+ XP seems to be dying as well. Temps are 10-15 degrees hotter than ever, and I've changed heatsinks, tried new AS, everything...it's just dying probably due to electromigration. Ran 2.5GHz fine for more than a year, now I'm down to 2.0GHz.
 
I'm having the exact same problems you all describe. I have a mobile 2500+ in my A7N8X deluxe rev2 and the temperatures have been gradually creeping up and up, but not hot enough to be the cause of the crashes, I don't think....

I also have the instability problems with restarts, and freezing up during games or audio playback with the horrible static screeching noise (NOT good when you have headphones turned up loud). The only solution I could find is turn the FSB/memory speed down from 200 to 166. Underclocking the CPU whilst keeping the FSB at 200 didn't work. Running at 166 now and have just over 7 days uptime, during which I've been doing games and audio frequently.

I'm pretty sure the cause is something to do with the soundstorm audio and/or FSB speed. I mean, I've done 18-hour CPU burn-ins at 2.3GHz/200FSB that have gone without incident, but as soon you start using the audio, it's all over. The problem has definitely worsened over time, I'm sure of it.

I noticed that one time I had this problem where the audio device or drivers suddenly went bad for some reason, and I couldn't get any audio playback, but the computer was stable for days... but then when I rebooted and got the sound back, it crashed within minutes of playing a game. I also used to use a Turtlebeach santa cruz in this machine, and while I had extremely annoying stuttering (something to do with aspi that wasn't easy to fix, so I ditched the card), I don't think I had any stability problems... can't quite recall though.

I'm also using an Antec Truepower 430, but I don't think it has any faults. The +5 line is reading about 4.9 in Asus probe, and the +12 is about 11.8

Gonna be building a brand new system soon though, so I'm not particularly concerned... can't wait for my pay cheque to clear :)
 
meatfestival said:
I
I also have the instability problems with restarts, and freezing up during games or audio playback with the horrible static screeching noise (NOT good when you have headphones turned up loud).
Click to expand...

Check your PSU. My audio was screeching bad long before I started having instability problems. Since the PSU switch, all is well.

I think the problem is that the A7N8X Deluxe uses the 5 volt line for more than other boards that have the P4 12 volt 4 pin connector. This is just my own theory, but I beleive the CPU is powered off the 5 volt line instead of the 12volt one and other boards with the P4 12v 4 pin connector draw power off of that for the CPU. So, when the 5 volt line gets weak, the CPU is drawing more power than it can deliver CLEANLY which causes dirty power to be delivered to the board and the APU in the southbridge. And that's where the screaching in the audio is coming from.

If you have a spare PSU laying around, this may be worth a try. I was very suprised after I plugged my spare one in and the audio problems went away. I was actually chasing the instability issues I had with my CPU's clockspeed.

Good Luck and keep us informed.
 
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