I recently built a computer for a friend and im having problems. Whenever the system goes under a heavy load (like a game or Super Pi) it will lock up or reboot. The specs are Thermaltake 430Watt ATX Powersupply ECS Nforce4m-a (with newly updated bios) AMD Athlon 64 X3800+ Nvidia Geforce 7600GT Pci express 1GB PC800 DDR2 (Patriot) Passed memtest86 i tried 2 different hard drives Any ideas?
I had an nForce4 board where the passive cooler on the northbridge chip wasn't good enough, and it was causing crashes under heavy load. Have you tried taking the side off your case and maybe having a desk fan blowing into it as well? If that does seem to be the problem, you can buy HSF kits that'll fit over northbridge chips, one of those should keep the temps down low enough for it to run normally.
Reapply thermal paste, possible bad motherboard, PSU, or CPU. Check for warped heatsink/fan or poor connection. First try re-applying paste then another test PSU. Check motherboard voltages/CPU temp if you haven't already, check BIOS config for CPU voltage/clock-speed/settings... if all this checks okay maybe try another MB?
Thanks for your help. I ended up doing an RMA on the motherboard. A replacement should be coming soon.
