Here's my system: Mobo: Asus M4A78 Plus (latest bios version 1214, also latest chipset update) Processor: AMD Phenom II X2 550 BE (i planned on OC'ing, but have not yet because of the crashes) Overclocking: Not yet because the system is already unstable. Vid Card: SAPPHIRE 100283L Radeon HD 5770 (Juniper XT) 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 RAM: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel PSU: Thermaltake toughpower W0103RU 600W ATX12V / EPS12V HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black WD5001AALS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" OS: Windows 7 64-bit I've got a 3rd party Zalman CNPS10X Extreme cpu cooler on the phenom II. (which I have already taken off, removed the paste, and reapplied much more carefully). I've got the latest of all drivers/software (all Win 7 64 bit compatible). I have completely reseated every component. Problem: Annoying gray vertical line/restart (various colored vertical lines suddenly appear and then the system restarts) OR BSoD which can be counted on to occur VERY often (both for graphics intense programs or just sitting at the desktop). The gray vertical line issue has been widely reported by other ATI 5XXX owners. I ruled out this problem by first trying all of the proposed tweaks in that thread, and finally by replacing my Radeon by an old nVidia... the crash persists but manifests itself as only a BSoD and not vertical line crash (I assume the difference here is just the same crash but different expressions of it because of the vid card switch). Testing: *Memtest86+ v4.00 ran overnight (12hrs) with 0 errors. *Prime95 crashes for small FFT's, in place large FFT's, and Blend. At first it gave me the Fatal Error: rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4. I manually set the ram to 400 frequency and 5-5-5-15 with 2.0 volts (the specs recommended). The rounding error goes away but the system still crashes (either lines or BSoD) before 15 minutes pass. *Since Prime95 crashes quickly, it isn't surprising that all games i've tried also crash. *All temperatures are normal: GPU never above 65C, CPU never above 39C, mobo never above ~33C. My Guesses: My problem here is that I purchased all the components from Newegg Dec 21... 30 days is coming up way too quickly and my system still doesn't work. So since it doesn't work now anyway, should I just try to RMA all three below and hope for the best? 1. PSU (hopefully) 2. Mobo 3. CPU (least hopefully) Ideas, input, answers, or comments are very welcome. Also, much more welcome, is any known issues with my components that I don't know about.
Sounds like you have stability issues, Have you tried increasing the Vcore voltage on your cpu? try upping it by about .2 and run prime95 again. The maximum the cpu handles is 1.425v so don't go above that limit. For the GPU issues have you tried just using windows 7 generic drives to see how it performs? Also for your ATI card make sure you have ati poller service disabled. If you still have issues I would try a frsh install of windows 7 as there could be a problem with the kernel.
I actually tried that at one point in my troubleshooting. The cause of all of my problems was ZoneAlarm firewall. I analyzed the minidump files created during the BSoD's with the help of another forum and it was a driver installed by ZoneAlarm causing the very hardware-like crash.
Intresting, thanks for sharing. it does make sense because zonealarm does embed itself within the kernel. I would suggest using comodo firewall and Anti-virus and it's free works brillaint can't fault it, it will annoy you at first with the constant pop ups but after its trained works extremely well.
