Help - random crashes in XP but not 98

Does the Abit BX6-R2 officially support a P3 850?

I tried running a Celeron 900 in this board, while in Windows 98, it
worked fine, XP would freeze on bootup. I eventually came to the
conclusion that while a Celeron 900 would work in this board for the
most part, the 900 was not fully compatible. I tried running a Celeron
300 with XP and there was no problem, I ended up changing the MB to a
slightly newer Asus socketed model and the problem disappeared. I
wonder if the P3 850 has the same problems.

If you disable the L2 cache, and your problem disappears, you will
know there is a CPU/MB compatibility problem.


"Kadiir" wrote in message
s.com...
Hello:

Sorry, this is a bit long...

My system has recently started randomly crashing (no 2 BSOD's the
same
in a row and I've seen at least 5 different ones). So far (I'll do
more extensive testing tonight) it only happens in Windows XP Pro
SP1
(all the latest WindowsUpdate patches) and not Windows 98SE (fully
patched as well).

At first it appeared to be a heat issue. According to BIOS case
temp
(the only measure I have), when it hit 49C it would CTD (games) or
reboot. So, I changed cases (from a case w/ poor airflow to an
Antec
Sonata w/ the optional front fan). I've got round cables, so now
nothing is blocking airflow (I had a flat cable that was blocking it
in the old case - replacing it gave me 3C more before crashing).

I also replaced the stock Intel HSF with a Zalman 3100+ (includes
the
FM123 + 1 92mm fan) and on my GF I put a Zalman ZM-80A (just this
weekend I added another 92mm fan over that heatsink, but it still
crashes).

Doing the above bought me some time - it seemed to stay at a higher
temp longer for a short while. Then, it was crashing many times per
day.

At this point, let me cover the hardwa

Abit BX6-R2 (QR BIOS)
Intel P3-850
512MB RAM (oh, I ran memtest for 5+ hours last night - no errors).
Gainward GF3-Ti500 (product info is a Ti-550 Golden Sample)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz w/ Roland daughterboard
3 Hard drives (15GB IBM, 75GB IBM, & 120GB WD)
Adaptec 2930CU SCSI card
Plextor UltraMax 40 CDROM (SCSI)
Plextor PlexWriter 8/2/20 (SCSI)

The mobo is a slot one design and I've got a Socket 370 CPU w/ a
slocket. In order to fit the ZM-80a, I removed the support on the
side of the slot closest to the vidcard, however the slocket still
has
a slight contact with the heatsink.

A mech. engineer friend of mine assisted me with performing a little
surgery on the board - I have a rev 2.01 board which has (had) the
CPU
temp monitoring capability (very inaccurate and had a bug in the
last
bios release). Because of the bug (couldn't run ACPI in Win2K or
XP),
I finally got around to doing the fix (remove resistor R266 which is
part of the temp monitoring line). After that, all of my crashes
stopped.

In retrospect, I think the crashes stopped because I had to take
everything out of the case in order to remove the resistor. I
suspect
that one or both heatsinks it too heavy and is either warping the
mobo
sufficiently to cause a crash or pulling one or both devices (cpu
and/or vidcard) out of its socket. However, since Win98 doesn't
crash, it really has me perplexed.

Any ideas?

TIA!

Kadiir wrote:

ON Mon, 21 Jul 2003 12:35:53 -0500, Bob M
WROTE:

My bet is on the power supply.

Bob

That's what I thought, too, until I changed the case to the Sonata -
it comes with an Antec TruePower 380.

Although, I suppose it could be a bad one.

kad

I just RMA'd an Antec TruePower 480. Made the system unstable and
smelled like it was burning up. It also got really hot and made my
system temps skyrocket. I've heard great things about Antec and that's
why I tried one. I went back to using my old Sparkle and system is
stable and cool.

Bob

In article m,
says...

It BSOD'd a few more times this evening (different each time). Also,
now MBM is having wild fluctuations in its readings - the temp ranged
from 0-79C and all voltages ranged from 0 to about double the named
voltage (i.e., the 3.3 was showing from 0-6.6 or so).

This is really weird - it was good for 3 days (only crashing during my
"stress" tests) and now it's crashing a lot. The pc has been on for
about 6 hours now. In the first 2.5-3 hours it crashed 3 times
(probably would have crashed more except I was out & it crashed while
I was gone). Since the last one, though, it hasn't crashed.

Why don't you send an e-mail to ' He is the guy with this
web page http://www.motherboardrepair.com/ and see what he says about
these problems. The board you have is known to have the defective caps
that flooded the market a few years ago. Just because you don't see
anything leaking from them does not guaranty they are good.

Doug