AMD Athlon 2600+ System With Problems

[jeepkid]

My System Was in a fire and i bought a new moterboard and Processor the other hard ware was fine, i got a Gigabyte GA-7VAX MotherBoard, AMD Athlon XP 2600+, 512MBC2700, ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and a volcano 9 cooling fan, Windows XP Pro. It has the latest Bios and for some reason it will freeze when playing games (Return To Castle Wolfenstein) And When It doesnt Freeze It Crashes The Monitor Just Goes Black and some times the Monitor Wont Come Back On and the system doesnt boot until i press the reset button, other times it just reboots it self. How can i fix this. also...
I am not sure if i installed the processor right all i did was flipped the switch to "OFF" next to the PCI slots and after i did that it reads my CPU as a 2600 but im not to sure is this correct??

Thank you
anything helps

Jeepkid

 

[cqpanis3]

you didn't mention the specs of your old box and i'm assuming that you used the same case and power supply. did you check if your power supply is at least 300W? some devices use up power too much that some of the devices will fail to work causing a system crash.

hope this helps.

 

[jeepkid]

I have a ANte 1080 Case with a 430 watt power supply. the old parts are fine just the cpu fan went out and the CPU went out so i bought a new board... in the fire it wa just in the same room as the fire and it got filled with soot and smoke. but now for some reason when i have my system set to run at 2600 it will not load windows or boot from CD it says files are missing but if i flip the switch and let it run at 1250MHZ it boots fine but freezes almost every 5 minutesi am thinking of returning the board and processor unless you guys can help me fix it...

 

[paparazi]

It could be an overheating CPU, are you sure you fitted the heatsink the correct way around? the recess in the heatsink base over the socket "A" wring, also with a small amount of thermal paste (about a rice grain amount) applied to the small raised core of the processor.
Either of these two could cause reboots and lockups because of overheating.
If you think you may have had the heatsink on the wrong way around or without paste even for 20 seconds there is a possibility of CPU damage (again I have seen symptoms like yours, where a system would only run at a lower clock speed and this turned out to be a damaged CPU after incorrect fittment of a heatsink)
Memory could also be an issue, I have seen damaged memory that would allow a boot but at a lower front side bus settings only.
Also are you using a floppy driver power connector on the Radeon 9700pro (I understand it won't run properly without it)
I have the GA7-VAXP and experience a burning out main power plug (two pins had been seriously getting hot and another two on the way) the plastic plug had gone brown and brittle on four of the red +5volt lines (worth pulling out and checking) Martin


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[paparazi]

I just noticed that you have a Volcano 9 heatsink/fan unit, I hope that you havn't placed the flat ribbon thermal sensor between the CPU core and heatsink base? I appologise if this is an insult but we sold this cooler and had several of our customers who fitted it like this with disasterous results.(obviously you must not place this tape thermister between the core and base) follow supplied intructions if you havn't already done so.
Martin

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