Computer continually restarts after being built

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Punkrulz

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 11, 2001
Messages
1,458
Hey guys,

Last night I was in the process of building my friend's computer. I believe everything was done properly. He has the following:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
2x2gb G-Skill DDR2-800MHz
Corsair 550VX Power Supply
EVGA Geforce 8800GT
Zerotherm BTF90 HSF

I believe I have gotten everything installed right. His computer is recognizing the processor as being 9x266 (2.4GHz) and everything, which is a good sign. In the BIOS, the temperatures look normal around an idle of 34c. Unfortunately my biggest concern is if I put the thermal grease on appropriately... I've done it on AMD processors before which have a much smaller die. I put a line down the middle of the intel processor, and "attempted" to use a sandwich bag to smooth it out, doing the best I could have possibly done.

We attempted to overclock at first by changing his frequency to 333, making it 3.0GHz at first, however wound up setting it back to 266 because of his computer rebooting. We've been attempting to use my DVD of unattended Windows Install so that we could install Office and everything, but he says that every time it reboots now he gets a message about having an invalid boot.ini file, and it kicks itself out.

I've used this disk before, and haven't had any problems, so I can't say for sure if I think it's the disk or not. I will attempt using another known good disk if that still doesn't work. Is there anything else we should know, or look at with those components that have been known to have problems similar to what we're experiencing?

Anything you guys with more experience can have me look at (I can have answers after 5pm when I can look at the machine), specifically with the BIOS so we can get a better understanding?
 
I'll give it a shot. If I still cannot get into windows, I think I will remove the heat sink, clean it with alcohol and a lint free cloth (will any coffee filter work?), and will attempt to reapply. I will make sure I have all of this information when going to down with it to make sure it'll work. I was going to try the standard Windows XP SP2 disk installation tonight anyways should we still have had problems.

I just want to be certain: If I have installed the processor wrong, in the wrong direction, it wouldn't work at all 100% correct? BIOS is picking it up and when I was there we were able to get into the windows screen... so I'm relatively certain I have done it correctly?
 
Well, any coffee filter that doesn't have coffee grounds in it. :p Yah, it wouldn't work at all if you installed the CPU incorrectly -- it wouldn't even close properly. Your temps look fine... so I don't think you did a bad job applying the thermal compound.
 
I hope so... god I hope so... only way to tell anything else now is by installing Windows with the standard disk. I hope the temperature sensor isn't wrong and being reported in BIOS...

Anything else I should know about the setup or maintenance of the gigabyte boards?
 
Read my post a few down about intermittent reboot problems, I have the exact same board and proc, I think it might be something flakey with the BIOS honestly b/c I was getting the exact same temps you were getting. All of a sudden two days ago it just shuts down and doesn't come back on until I opened the case, and now it's having problems with either reboots or just a cold shutdown without restarting unless the case cover comes off, I'm using BIOS F8a and I even tried disabling my CPU warn temp. but it's still doing it, I'm hoping reseatting is going to help as you are going to attempt.
 
I just ran a Q6600 in my DS3L a few weeks ago, and it ran fine (and still is running fine). I'm using the F7 BIOS, btw.

There's a huge thread in the motherboard subforum by BillParish -- its a great guide for the original DS3, which is very similar to the DS3L. Check it out to familiarize yourself with the various BIOS settings.
 
I was incredibly fortunate. I was all ready to update the BIOS, re-seat the HSF, everything... turns out the only problem with the reboot situation was that Windows was not installing properly. I used a standard MS Windows XP disk and everything worked out fine.

We did run into some situations after the installation of windows, however. Apparently there are a lot of issues installing the audio driver with the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard. It turns out the only way you can install the audio driver, is by going through your Add / Remove Programs, as well as all of Device Manager, and remove every single instance of the Microsoft UAA HD Audio Driver. Once that is removed (didn't even have to reboot), we attempted to install the driver that we downloaded from Gigabyte's website for the audio...

Took me an hour to fix it, but we were so excited once we did. Everything else was able to be updated fine, Windows, Office, etc. My friend began playing his game last night and was so happy to report his FPS, and this was before we've even updated the video card driver from nVidia. Temperatures seem to be running fine, and some point in the future we will be attempting to go back to overclocking.

Nurd, when you overclocked to 333MHz, did you change your voltage at all?
 
I can answer the voltage question b/c I'm running it at that exact voltage now, and you do not need to change your vcore any, but you have to adjust your voltage to memory spec (obvioulsy), but I was 8+ hours prime stable with no vcore added so you should be golden.
 
kmS, can you enlighten me a little bit? It's awesome that he won't have to change the vcore voltage... that's one thing we've eliminated. Changing the memory voltage is another thing, and I understand that's totally separate from the timings. How much should he increase the voltage, should he have tried this?
 
The only thing I mean from increasing the memory voltage is increasing it up to spec if need be, for example my G.Skill are rated at 2.1V so I have to change the DDR2 Overvoltage Control by +.3V b/c the default is 1.8V. Although it did run at 5-5-5-15 when it was at 1.8V before I bumped it up, but I feel more comfortable tightening the timings down to 4-4-4-12 when it's up at 2.1 where it's rated. That may be what's limiting you or the (G)MCH OverVoltage Control which to the best of my knowledge controls the chipset voltage. So if you're heavily undervolting your memory you're not going to damage it but it'll possibly give you headaches in the future.
 
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