New CPU and BSOD's

maxinflixion

maxinflixion

Gawd
Joined
Apr 2, 2007
Messages
625
So I picked up a q9400 a little over a week ago. It’s running great. (specs in sig)

But… Last week, I noticed I kept getting BSOD’s. I narrowed it down to the fact that it was occurring when I was using Azureus/Vuze.

Through my research on the topic, I narrowed it down to one of two things:

1. Hard Drive issue
2. Memory issue

I double checked all plugs on motherboard and hard drives. I ran disk check and error repair on all disks. The BSOD’s came back.

Then I found someone stating that it may be that the bit torrent client is causing a memory error when it is caching. So, I removed two of the 1gb sticks I had in there, and I didn’t seem to get a BSOD overnight at all (or this morning) when I was using the PC w/ Azureus/Vuze running.

So, I am wondering if since I just switched my CPU, flashed my BIOS to accommodate that CPU, and the FSB is now changed, should I not be using DDR2-800 RAM? I’d like to go back to 2x2gb or 4x1gb (and never had this issue before upgrading from an e2200 to the q9400).
 
Put the e2200 back in, flash your BIOS back to what it was. Does it still happen?

Flash the bios and use the e2200. Does it still happen?
 
E2200 has been sold.

Provided I get no reboots today, I am going to pull the 2x2gb out of my Linux Box to see if it is a "too much RAM" or just a "too many sticks" thing.

I am only running 32 bit XP currently anyway.
 
Run memtest on each stick for several passes. Then run it on all four sticks for several passes (overnight is best). If it passes all those, its not a hardware problem. If it fails, make sure your vDIMM is properly set according to your RAM specs. Also, if you're using four sticks of RAM, you'll need to bump your mch voltage. If you didn't have it bumped before, somehow the quad's higher power consumption affected the power delivery to your mch, I'm guessing.
 
enginurd said:
Run memtest on each stick for several passes. Then run it on all four sticks for several passes (overnight is best). If it passes all those, its not a hardware problem. If it fails, make sure your vDIMM is properly set according to your RAM specs. Also, if you're using four sticks of RAM, you'll need to bump your mch voltage. If you didn't have it bumped before, somehow the quad's higher power consumption affected the power delivery to your mch, I'm guessing.
Click to expand...

This actually makes perfect sense. The issue occurs when I am running a bit torrent client. My downloads are saved to separate 1TB drive.

Perhaps the 3 hard drives, 4 sticks of RAM, video card, soundcard, and quad core CPU are drawing too much at certain instances. This could actually explain why at times, it kind of appeared liek a hard drive fault and other times like a memory issue.
 
Even at full load, your system shouldn't be drawing much more than 400W, so your 520W HX is fine.
 
** edit** Posted this last night, but it didn’t stick.

Tried dropping 2x2gb RAM in there last night, and got a BSOD as soon as I loaded up Azureus.

Tried bumping the voltage. Still BSOD’d.

Then, I tried setting the paging file on all 5 of my partitions to Automatically Managed by XP.

Voila. No BSOD’s all night. Ran iTunes (it checks for podcasts every 2 hours) and Azureus all night w/ no hiccups.

I had paging turned off on all but my C drive (read somewhere that this was a good idea).

Best I can figure is that this was causing major cache issues.
 
Well....

Further update...

BSOD's came back. I noticed that the 4 partitions I had on my 1tb drive were not showing up properly in Partition Magic. Further research told me that Partition Magic sucks.

So I changed the partitions around using Gparted Live Cd and may have solved my issue.

Another thing that may have been contributing was a SATA cable that I had plugged into my motherboard, but not into any hard drive at all (I do not know why).

either way, smooth sailing so far.
 
Did you reinstall windows after changing the CPU? If not, make an image/backup your stuff and do it. That is your problem. You cannot change architecture without a reinstall (unless you used sysprep...which I doubt and am not certain if it would even work)

Once thats done, if the problem persists..you say nothing has changed aside from the CPU when you started getting BSODs. First trigger would be that the Q consumes more power than the E. Check if you supply enough power. Disconnect all drives/usb devices aside from your OS drive, and try to make it crash.

oh..and btw...Azureus/Vuze sucks, use utorrent..
 
After 5 more weeks of enduring intermittent BSOD's, I bit the bullet, backed up and reinstalled XP (I would have gone to Win 7 64 bit, but my company's VPN won't support it yet).

Running fine now. Plenty of uptime. Torrents, encoding, etc....
 
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