I'm a Tech, but damn, give me a break!

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Layzie Bone
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This new system I built, giving me a lot of grief. First the motherboard I ordered was DOA, sent it back, machine seems to work but now it reboots every 30 minutes, tried both vista, xp and ubuntu, all are doing the same thing.

The motherboard is a MSI P7N Diamond, with the nVidia chipset and JMicron RAID chipset. The memory I have is not listed at all under MSI's compatible hardware list.

The thing about the symptom is it usually occurs upon playing mp3's or videos or increased disk acsess. When I loaded MS Vista, the machine rebooted first when installation was "Checking System Performance." I figured it was simply that drivers weren't loaded caused the problem. However I did have difficulty installing the Video Drivers. MSI 8600 GT1G-EZ, The machine seemed to run fine for several hours, the machine rebooted randomly while running Vista, no correlation with anything. The funny thing about the reboots is that the operating system did not show any signs of errors, no messages about recovering from a serious error. So I assumed it was a driver issue, so I loaded XP. I had zero problems loading windows xp. The machine ran fine for almost a entire day. The reboots came again when I played music or videos, using Windows Media Player. The audio would also at times become choppy or loud static. One time it caused the computer to lock.

I gave up after I tried to load Ubuntu just to be sure that there weren't some kind of rare driver issues, just to be sure. Ubuntu froze while trying to resize a partition and over 100 GB of data was lost because of that. Kinda went against what I preach, operating system uses it's own partition with no important data. The other odd thing along with the OS not showing any problems, any data that I had saved to disk was lost, as if it was never written to disk. I've been running a diagnostic program, Microscope, to test everything in the computer, no errors, no locking, no reboots.

Microscope tests, Memory, Cache Memory, Hard Disk, Mainboard Functions, and other things. Typically if there are problems with the processor the Cache Memory will fail. Now I have another program which more thoroughly tests the CPU, as it also checks arithmetic, MMX, iSSE, and other crap.

So acoording to the tests we know it's not a problem with the CPU Cache, Memory, and Hard Disks, so what the ***** is the problem?!

I can usually pinpoint a problem like this, but something always gives it away by now lol

Anyone who's techie, who has any ideas, questions, comments, suggestions.

I have reseated, and tried other memory slots, no change in behavior.
I have replaced SATA data cables
I have not reseated the CPU
I have not reset the BIOS
I disabled Execute Bit Support in BIOS - no change in behavior
I Enabled PCI Bus Mastering in BIOS - n/c


But it really comes down to a problem with the board or CPU...
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nesman
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Sorry to hear about your data loss. been there, done that, gone through therapy. :drinkers:
It could possibly be a heat issue. You might have some luck with Motherboard Monitor. I've had machines that would run for a while and then crap out when the cpu warmed up. You might have some luck checking the bios right after a crash to see if it shows the temperature. My old one would flip our around 155F.

I had similar issues with a computer I was working on for a friend. Never resolved it. :(
The computer would run fine and then blink out randomly. For me, it ran for 3 days straight and I thought I'd fixed it...
The next day it was stuck in a reboot cycle when I woke up. I think it was somewhere between mobo and cpu, but it was an older machine with no warranty so I didn't get to test with new parts.
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Layzie Bone
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Well doesn't seem to be a heat issue, the CPU is usually between 104-120 F, a bit hotter than my old Pentium D, Video card stays around 120 F, None of the temps are alarmingly high considering the hardware.

I did some research in MSI's user to user forum, as the call it. I found that there's an issue with the BIOS and I downloaded the latest BIOS, though it's a beta version, it has seemed to help the problem, still does it, but not as often, so am I looking at a problem with the BIOS, or am I still looking for a hardware problem, but at any rate irreguardless if it is a BIOS or hardware problem the system should be more stable. One thing I can note is that the memory is only running at 800 Mhz, when it's supposed to be 1066 Mhz, which I know memory doesn't like running at any other speed than what its designed for. SO I may send the memory back and use 800 MHz memory. That's the only thing I can see that could be causing the problem, and every dianostic program says everything is ok.
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