Strange behavior

W

wiper

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 4, 2003
Messages
73
I'll start off by mentioning that I'm upgrading my machine in phases due to the rediculous memory prices right now. I have an e6300 and a cheap coolermaster hsf to hold me over while I put together my new case and water system. I went with the asus 650i based board and some cheap pc6400 ocz mem. The machine's been rock solid at 3ghz (429x7) and the mem is running async at factory speed of 800 with spd timings, the first time I booted it, it was up for 2 weeks gaming almost every day after work. So, that's the history, now to the problem.

This isn't a software problem, I promise :p

I decided last week to give Vista a try. After installing it, it bluescreened 5mins later. I figured it was a driver issue so I got the drivers loaded in between bluescreens and it didn't help anything. At that point I said screw it and restarted to XP cause it was close to raid time but XP was just flat out rebooting. I finally fixed that by shorting my bios and went to get dinner and upon returning was surprised to see Vista not at a bluescreen. In case it was a fluke I started up the game and played all night without a prob and realized afterward that I'd never gone back in to set my oc settings. Upon reboot with my oc settings loaded, it blue screened 5mins later. I reset my bios again and set my oc settings again but booted to XP this time and it's been running solid for 3 days now. I still haven't entirely eliminated a driver problem since more often than not the bluescreens mention various sys and dll files starting with nv. Other strange but seemingly unrelated symptoms which *only* occur under Vista include: unusually high core temps as reported by ntune and speedfan read from the proc itself, and harddisk click of death sounds on a brand new Seagate 750gig hd but only during Vista's shutdown routine.

So, it appears Vista will *only* run on my machine if it's running stock settings, even minor oc's with mem set to 1:1 sync cause it to bluescreen. I was wondering if anyone else has had similar symptoms and if so was it fixable. I've found various posts around the net with similar symptoms but most were turned into 30page "vista sucks" or various other this company vs that company debates or had no replies at all. Any help or similar symptom posts would be appreciated.
 
rediculous memory prices?! DDR prices are droping like crazy in the last few months, i paid $350 for these 2x1gig sticks like 6 months ago now they are worth half that.

moving on... what power supply you running? have you run memtest, orthos, TAT or any other stress testing programs? also 99% of temp programs have some problems with vista. use coretemp or intels thermal annalysis tool for monitoring temps (check for vista compatibilty, im not sure what works and what doesnt anymore) ive always hated ntune for being completely wrong every single time ive ever used it. updated speedfan is accurate in xp, not sure about vista.
also your dual booting? do you have 2 separate hard drives or partitions? ive heard vista having problems sharing with other OS's
when you notice unusualy high temps reboot and look to see what bios says they are at. also we need a list of complete hardware overclock and voltage settings.

"and harddisk click of death sounds on a brand new Seagate 750gig hd but only during Vista's shutdown routine." could be a bad section thats only has files needed when shutting down.
 
Thanks for the reply,

Stress tested with prime95 and 3dmark running at the same time in a loop for a few hours, I really don't think this is a hardware issue since XP runs with absolutely no probs for weeks, I mean literally the machine was booted in XP for 2 weeks strait, no sleep or hibernate and only rebooted at the end of 2 weeks to free up some mem from a leaky app. I don't think this is a heat issue since the bluescreens occur wether I'm the machine is sitting there with 99% idle or 100% utilization. From XP, both speedfan and ntune report the same temps, from Vista, both report the same temps. The unusually high temp is the idle temp, load temps are normal compaired to XP

I am dual booting with XP and Vista on the same disk but different partitions and had no problems even similar to this on rc2, but I was also running a completely different set of drivers. Scanned from XP, diskdoctor and chkdsk report the disk is fine, scanned from Vista, chkdsk reports the disk is fine.
 
Have you considered the possibility that the new features of Vista that keep your RAM under load constantly be causing your crashes? Remember, Vista likes to fill the RAM with as much information as possible and keeps it there until you do something else that needs it. You mentioned Vista has higher "idle" temperatures, and that points to something in your case being on when the rest of your system is idle.

Try to get more cooling to your RAM chips and see if that improves your stability.
 
I hadn't considered the ram, the system monitor hovers at 400-500 physical used which is about what XP sits at but that doesn't tell if it's just constantly doing read/writes. I'll crack my case tonight and try putting a spare fan on them.
 
Increased cooling and running the mem at 200mhz didn't help, same exact symptoms.
 
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