PCA Forums

As any regular read of these forums can tell you, my new system is less than stable at this point. Every once in a while, the system will freeze or crash or reboot. I seemed to have solved the earlier ASPI problems because I haven't had that problem for the rest of the day. But the hang/restart deal is a new one. A few minutes ago my system restarted and the clock read 12:00 midnight and the date was 10/1/02 (a wierd reset date...). This is a brand new board, so I'm inclined to go against the motherboard battery being dead already. I have two theories:

1) High ambient temperature. I'm running an Athlon MP 1600+ (only one) right now. The last few days have gotten pretty warm where I live, but my roommates and I have been too cheap to turn on the A/C. Are XP/MPs very sensitive to ambient temp as well as chip temp?

2) Power Supply. I've got a 300W Antec 303 power supply in their now that meets all the ratings in terms of current and voltages. Thanks to the handy molex connector on teh motherboard, I didn't bother to get a new PS with the ATX 12volt connector. I knew that I might be pushing my luck with this power supply, but I figured I'd give it a shot. Its powering the board (Tyan Tiger MPX), one MP chip, SCSI HDD, SCSI CDD, IDE CD-RW, video, sound, and several case fans. To me this doesn't seem to draw any more power than my old system with a P3-700 and IDE RAID array.

Any thoughts on either of these ideas or something that I might not have thought of?

I can't see how a temp problem can cause the BIOS to reset or change the clock. However a program corruption in Windows MIGHT (unlikely but possible) cheange the clock from within Windows.

I wouldn't discount the battery problem. Sometimes you get a lemon - I've seen it happen. You have a digital meter? Check the voltage.

Most mobos use the same battery now, and it's so standard they have it at Radio Shack in the watch battery section. It's like 2 bucks so it's worth a try swapping it out.

Some other ideas off the top of my head:

- Power supply? You got another to test it with? Athlons are fussy about power. It's not a matter of overall wattage, it's just that Athlons pull more current on certain voltage buses and some power supplies aren't rated for this.

- I've seen situations where leaving an external peripheral like a printer turned on, when the computer is off, will drain the battery (very technical explanation for this that I won't bore you with). Usually only happens with cheap mobos.

- Could be something is shorting the battery and draining it. Check your jumpers and make sure there's nothing plugged into the CMOS reset. Make sure there's no metal standoffs under the board that aren't lined up with a hole and are touching a wire trace.

- I've seen defective or cheaply built peripherals short out the USB bus (had a pair of USB powered speakers that did this) and cause all kind of wierd problems.

- RAM? Ram compatibility problems can cause all kinds of wacky effects.


Basically I'd start eliminating suspects. Try disconnecting everything from the computer that is not required to make it run (disconnect all jumpers except the power switch, disconnect all USB devices, printer, etc).


I'm no Athlon expert - maybe the Athlon guys can give you something more specific.

I would suspect teh power supply myself. I tried using my Antec 300watt when I put together this XP1700+ system. It always ran the 5+volt rail low around 4.75-4.85. It also is not on AMD's recomended list.

try installing motherboard monitor and keeping an eye on the various voltage lines (as well as the heat if your mobo supports it)

not sure how a bad cmos battery would cause a reset - if your cpu fun running off a mobo header or a 4-pin - i know one time i tried a monster delta off the mobo header because i couldn';t find an adpter and it crashed the system and screwed uo the cmos which had to be reset

do you have an extra ps you could offload dome drives to for test purposes

another mystery of computers in action

I had/have that problem here with a few 1.33Ghz Athlons.. and have heard of it with almost any new Althon which has a 300W P/S. So I picked up some 350W ( no 400's available ) and this smoothed out, FWIW.

Well I guess its back to the pocket book for me.

The power supplies AMD reccommends are fricking huge! Can anyone recommend a pretty big case? I have a full tower now, but its not deep enough to accomodate the power supply and a CDD next to it. Also what is the difference between ATX form factor and PS2-180 form factor? The PS's AMD recommends are PS2-180 form factor cases. Will this make a difference in what cae I choose? Thanks.

Watch out with Motherboard Moniotr. The latest version incorrectly reports voltages, or at least on my motherboard.

Believe it or not we had a system come in our shop with this same problem and it drove us crazy! well believe it or not it was the "tweak" program that screwed with the bios and clock settings, and tweak could not be uninstalled! we did a complete fdisk/reformat and its working fine now, go figure..just thought i would add my experience for what its worth?