From: Tcharter on 03/08/2003
(too long post here is the end of it)I Know a bad power supply can cause system instability, especially if you got a lot of hardware/Fan/drives. Mine is an old 300W athlon certified one. I think it should normally be enough to power my system, but the fact that increasing CPU Vcore increase system stability make me think it could be a power issue. What do you think ? I feel this will be very hard to troubleshoot unless I can get spares parts to test everything independently.
Keep in mind that everything was going well until the northbridge fan noise increased and I tested CAS Latency 2. To correct what I thought was a heat problem, I installed 2 new powerful fan and replace the CPU one with a more powerful one. The frequency of the lockup did not decrease, but didn’t increase after that. The volcano and smart fan are taking their power directly from de PSU, not from the MOBO.
Also, what do you think of the other following hypothesis?
Me having damaged my SDRAM by playing with CAS latency. The ram would then send back corrupted data when a given broken cluster is used. I don’t know if it’s even possible to damage the ram by setting it to a CAS latency it can’t support.
The northbridge being damaged by heat when it’s fan was failing. If this had happened I would think the computer wouldn’t even boot.