Bat Flattery

Oh, and I have managed to charge up 38 Batteries in the last 35 Days. One. By. One. Almost glad I lost 2 the other day.

Still be my beating heart

So - I just thought I'd drop in to say 'HI'

I mean it's not like THE DEGREE is proving to be difficult or anything.

PC Works pretty well now.

This 'blog - it's aims. V1.20

This blog is now also about poetry and jobhunting.

There - I said it.

PC testing via elimiation

Well, it's been several days since we last had a crash on the new PC so I am beginning to think that it may have been solved, huzzah!

There were two small things I did which may, or may not have helped here: adjusting the cables between the motherboard tray and the removable side door so they, and the Molex/fan connectors are not squashed. And finding a poor quality Molex with a pin pushed half out by inserting the other plug, which may well cause noise on the PSU rails and errors.

Seeing as the fault manifested itself as a nonspecific 'memory error' I am well inclined to believe that a fault in the QPI transmission would cause an error like this, and bumping the QPI voltage should help to fix it.

More as I get it! And bike stuff next time too.

Compy 386 Update

I was a bit freaked out when one of the guys on Tom's hardware forum said he'd heard of a lot of problems with the UD3R, but later he came back saying that it was mostly caused by RAID issues, which is not something I worry about at the moment!

More Computer Testing

Over 6 hours of memtest passed. Will now try prime95 - Large, in Safe Mode.

Prime seems fine for 40 mins or so, so I doubt the CPU has gone faulty. I have bumped a couple of voltages in the BIOS, as it seems to be a stability problem with the motherboard.

Vcore is/was 1.2625
QPI/Vtt is 1.275 was 1.175
IOH Core is 1.3 was 1.1
DRAM Voltage is/was 1.66 [reads 1.65 under load in SpeedFan]

If this doesn't help I will try some graphics card tests I guess.

PC Troubleshooting

So, what do you do when you start to experience a series of random reboots, some with no 'Blue Screen' in BOTH windows and Ubuntu?

Start to pull your hair out I'll bet!

There is no easy way to diagnose this, but I'll keep you informed as I try to fix it. Firstly the system:

• Gigabyte EX58-UD3R V1.6 BIOS: FB
• Core i7 920 @ stock, HT and Turbo both on. Vtt 1.235, others: Auto
• Zalman CNPS 10X Extreme
• 6GB Crucial Ballistix [3*2] 1333 7/7/7-24 Turnaround:2 VDIMM 1.66 [Sticks say 1.65, but I can only choose 1.64 or 1.66. Crucial support say 1.66 is fine]
• 700W Cooler Master Silent Pro
• Zotac Geforce 470 @ stock BIOS V70.00.1A.00.03
• WD 1002 FAEX
• Sony DVD R/RW Drive
• D-Link DWL G-520 WiFi
• Cooler Master Scout Storm

• Windows 7 64Bit Pro

Symptoms are: At some, seemingly random point the system will either BSOD or just straight reset. Sometimes an application will freeze first, sometimes not. This can happen in ANY application, and does not seem to be just because of load. Once it did it as soon as I ran Prime95, once when I was doing next to nothing. Has happened a few times in Assassin's Creed, but not always.

Once even happened after I had been stressing the system with Prime95 AND Assassin's creed and a 4GB 64bit Photshop pounding and streaming a video. Seeing as it took this for half an hour I had closed them all and given up to just browse the web!

So far:

Removed the reset switch.

Checked and reseated all connections, cards and thermal paste etc.

Checked all temps and cleaned heatsinks [all temps are less than 60c, bar the grfx which hits 90 under load]

Gently shock tested the motherboard, RAM and video card [tapped them gently while running looking for a poor connection causing a reboot]

I have updated my BIOS to FI [from FB] which is 9 months and 6 versions newer, and gone through the BIOS options with a fine tooth comb.

The PSU's Rails all look OK [loaded and unloaded], bar the -12v which seems to be at -14v, but this may be because there is no load on it [I'm guessing at this]

Windows sometimes reports "There maybe a problem with your RAM" afterwards, but Memtest+ 4 runs fine for a loop, and has run before for a night [will test this again tonight]

I am not enjoying this one bit.

What is the next step after running Memtest+ for 6 hours I wonder? Any other suggestions?

Sam

This 'blog - it's aims

It's rather late, so I shall keep this short. Like all 'blogs, this site will be filled with my opinions and views, but I aim to give objective insight too, mainly into the following: Computers, Bicycles, Books and Product Design. If you know me already you will know that this comes naturally. :)

Sam

Earlier today

Earlier today I worked for half-a-day. It was thrilling, and I'll bet you are all thrilled to find this out too. In other news, I created scantarg.blogspot.com. I'll bet you knew this too...