Upgraded from Athlon 64 3400+ to 64 3700+ Now system is unstable (1 Viewer)

[Mike_J_Potter]

I just upgraded my PC from a AMD athlon64 3400+ to a AMD athlon64 3700+ at first it ran hot but,
I flashed the bios to the newest build and that got the temps down and after reseating the heat sink to about 45c idle. but now the pc reboots after about 5 mins of stress testing(I am running dnet or pcmark04) Full config of pc is as follows Abit KV8 Pro socket 754, AMD 64 3700+ 1mb cache, PNY Vertigo Geforce 6600GT agp 1 gig of cosair value ram, Antec Truepower 420 power supply 40 gig Seagate 7200 RPM, HD NEC 1300A DVD burner, USR 56k hardware modem (Model 2977), 1 80mm intake fan 1 92mm exhaust, and Zalman ALCU heatsink/fans onboth the CPU and Video card The system is currently running stable with the 3400+ installed again. No problems at all before I tried thenew cpu the system would run all day with no issues even during extended doom3 sessions. I am considering returning the CPU since the benchmarks I completed are almost identical to the 3400+. Any ideas to what is causing this my only guess would be heat but unfortunatly the Abit Guru monitoring software stopped working after flashing the CMOS, but no alarms sound for overheat or under voltage.

 

[Max Leung]

Try reseating the heatsink of the CPU - maybe you didn't put enough thermal paste (or too much!) on it and it isn't making good contact with it. Also, not sure if this is relevant on an Athlon64, but make sure the heatsink is aligned and oriented correctly.

Have you accidentally overclocked the system? Does it run more stable if you downclock it to the 3400+ level? If so, it would seem to indicate a heating problem.

 

[Mike_J_Potter]

I've reseated it at least ten times already using various amounts of thermal paste.
The clock speed is the same 2400mhz the only difference is that this has 1mb of cache. I talked to a few people and it appears to be the Power supply isn't putting out enough juice. Oh well the thing is going back, I am not about to buy another power supply after spending 100 bucks on one about a month ago.

 

[Nathan_F]

That PSU should be PLENTY for what you're running.

 

[Shane Martin]

Is the 3700+ a socket 939 chip? I guess it wouldn't fit but I was under the impression that all chips above 3500+ were all 939/940.

 

[Mike_J_Potter]

Its socket 754, its more or less a 3400+ with 1 meg of cache. I sent it back for now, after the almost identical benchmarks and unstability its not worth the trouble. I'll hold off till AMD releases the dual core chips.

 

[Shane Martin]

It had to have been the 754 chipset then or some sort of how the board is handling it because I know several of us whom upgraded to 939 3500+'s w/o any instability issues. I haven't run benchmarks yet but I've never felt like I'm lacking something.

 

[Nathan_F]

Remember that dual-core will only be for the 939 chipset, so you'll have to upgrade mobo then too.

 

[Mike_J_Potter]

I figured out the issue the board is bad. Its no longer booting at all. Oh well between returning the 3700+ and what I'll get for the 3400+, I decided to upgrade. I just ordered this

AMD 64 3500+ Socket 939 Winchester Core 90NM
GIGABYTE GA-K8NS Ultra-939 NVIDIA nForce3 ULTRA Chipset
Arctic Cooling 64 heatsink and fan

Thing should go pretty quick I hope. The other components going in are 1 gig of cosair pc 3200, a geforce 6600GT and a Seagate 7200 RPM drive.

 

[Shane Martin]

Mike,
Let us know how that works. The Gigabyte board and its craptacular reviews over at Hardforum(hardocp) scared me away from it. I ended up going with an Asus Board.

 

[Mike_J_Potter]

You made me nervous a bit, I see issues with older boards but it looks like a bios flash may be in order. I got the newest bios all ready to go. I hope it works, I looked everywhere but hard ocp at reviews and benchmarks and it seemed to do quite well. Also doesn't appear to be well received since it doesn't overclock as well as other boards which isn't a concern to me. I'll find out sometime today, the online tracking says that its on the truck and will be here by 4:30 et

 

[Shane Martin]

Look more on the forums themselves than the main page.

 

[Mike_J_Potter]

I did a search on motherboard forum for the model I have, the stuff I read did say lots of issues on the older models but by the looks of it the f4 and up bios fixed it All the newer models use the f5 version. I got the pc up and running and been running for about 4 hours and its nice and stable. Running the cpu maxed out right now and its running happily at about 49C and idles at about 37-40 (using a quiet heatsink and fan.) Had no issues getting it running, even with cosair memory which allot of people said wasn't compatible. I'll install half life 2 this weekend and see how it does with some hard core 3d stuff. My only gripes are just minor things with the board layout, and that it won't take 3 dimms I can put 1,2 or 4 dimms in, I have no idea why that is, but in order to take advantage of duel channel I would two more in anyways, and right now a gig is more then enough ram.