New Athlon system Freezing Up

[Guest_imported]

Hi All

I have recently purchased the following system:

AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz
Jetway 663AS PRO VIA based Motherboard
20 Gig Samsung 5400rpm HD
Samsung DVD player
Samsung CDRW
128 Meg SDRAM
NVidea TNT2 M64 32Meg Video Card
Soundblaster Live 1024
Soundblaster LiveDrive IR

Whe I first installed and activated DMA using the VIA 4-in-1 drivers, the system was freezing completely all the time. After some time on VIA forums, I managed to install the IDE drivers separately and the machine started to run as it should.

The problem is that it still freezes quite ofting but only during heavy operations (and I do a lot of heavy work!). For example:

Recording a lot of music (up to 650M Audio File in one go)
Burning a CD from the above file at 8 or 4 speed.
Copying a CD from DVD to CDR at 8 speed.

I'm currently creating about 1 'coaster' for every good CD, yet I knwo people with Pentium 1 machines who can burn at 12 speed!

Can ANYONE please give me some suggestions as to what could be causing this?

Sorry for the length of this posting but I wanted to get as much info for you as possible. Thanks in advance.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

1st suspect = HEAT.

1. Check the temp of the CPU. Athlons get very hot.
2. Buy an efficient cooling system such as Chrome Orb.
3. If the Disk drive area is also hot, consider adding an extra fan or disk cooling card.

2nd suspect = Virtual memory settings. Set VM to equal the amount of RAM you have - both minimum and maximum settings.

3rd suspect = HEAT.

4th suspect = Hard disk needs defragging

5th suspect = HEAT...

 

[paparazi]

Use the hardware monitor straight after hard use and check the CPU temp.
On a 1 gig you shouldn't be seeing anything over 50
degrees C, unless you have unusually high temps in the room where the PC is situated.
If this is the problem, tidy the wiring to help airflow, fit an extra 80mm case fan to the front lower mounting point (if it has one) fit an extra fan to the centre rear blowing at the CPU (again if it has one)and make sure the heatsink and fan are rated for at least a 1 gig, you can fit something rated higher if heat proves to be the problem.

 

[Snork]

I have the exactly same problem in Windows. I suspected heat at first, but my system runs w/o problems in Linux(SUSE7.0). I think the problem is some sort of conflict between the motherboard and an Nvidia video card. (I also have a Via based motherboard, an Athlon classic 650 mghz and a TNT2 M64 16 meg.)

 

[Enigma666]

I have written an article on this exact topic. It is located under PC Hardware - General Issues. FAQ 4.b. Check it out, it is right up your alley.

 

[LCD]

I had similar problems, and they where solved by purchasing a better, higher capacity power supply.
original supply = 300w generic
new supply = 400w Antec
No problems since.

LCD