300 watt PSU woes?

[lobo235]

This is my system:
MSI KT6V-LSR
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
1 x 256MB Elixir PC3200 DDR
ATI Radeon 6500 32MB DDR
Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160 GB SATA HDD
DVD-ROM
CD-RW
2 case fans
Thermaltake Volcano 11+ CPU Fan/Heatsink
Standard 300w PSU (Came with the case)
Windows XP Pro SP2

I have been having some issues with my SATA drive cutting out. There are a bunch of entries in the Event Log that say "The device, \Device\Scsi\viamraid1, did not respond withing the timeout period." and then "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation." Eventually this leads to a bluescreen error which I have read about and determined that it's caused by the hard drive being unavailable for a page file operation or something of the sort.

So for some reason either my HDD is cutting out or the VIA SATA controller is cutting out. Sometimes when I turn on my computer is doesn't recognize the sata drive and fails to boot but by rebooting a couple times it recognizes the drive. When I run chkdsk or the hitachi hard drive tools sometimes it locks up before completing and other times it runs through the whole process and reports that the drive is fine.

I have also noticed that the voltage readings from my PSU are consistently low, for example the Vcore is 1.6, the 3.3v voltage is 3.17, the 5v voltage is 4.92, and the 12v voltage is 11.4.

Also, this issue may or may not be related: my CPU shows as a 3000+ instead of a 3200+ when I boot up the system even though the FSB is still 400mhz and the CPU is running at 2.21Ghz.

Could my problem be that I have a PSU that is possibly not providing the power that my system needs? Any help with these issues would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Big B]

Make sure the CPU multiplier (might be called CPU ratio) is set to 18x for starters.

Next, go over to VIA Arena and get the latest drivers for the KT600 and VT8237 chipsets.


The 5V, 3.3V, and 12V rails are within tolerance of 5-10% of the prime value, so while you certainly won't hurt from going to a bigger PSU, it doesn't look like that's the root cause here as much as a driver issue.

 

[lobo235]

Well, I already had those latest drivers installed but I reinstalled them to see if that will fix it. Also, I went and got a new TTGI 450w power supply. I will have to see if that solves the issue with the HDD.

About the processor showing as a 3000+ instead of the 3200+, I do not have a cpu multiplier of 18x, the highest is 15x. 18x seems too high to me, are you sure that 18x is correct? If the frequency is set to 200Mhz then it seems like I would need a 11x multiplier to get the 2200Mhz that the 3200+ is supposed to run at. Currently I have set the frequency to 200 Mhz and the multiplier is on Auto.

 

[Big B]

Yeah...that's it, 11x. Sorry, I was thinking of the Athlon XP 2500+ which runs at 1.8GHz and has the same multiplier as the 3200+ (and many 2500+'s can be easily overclocked to 3200+ speeds by changing the FSB frequency to 200MHz).

Re-reading your original post, there's also the possibility that the hard drive is on it's way out, judging by the symptoms.