Well i was having some mass BSOD's during gameplay or movie watching or anything that was stressing my machine out. I tried memtest and all the good stuff, when i was researching it on google, i found a program called Prime95 which i'm sure most of you are familiar with...Well with the first test after 1 minuet, it returned this error... FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4 Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file. So I googled it some...found that turing up your RAM voltage helps, so i turned it up from 2.6v to 2.7...and it helped, but still crashed... So today i read some more about turning up your vcore to help...I cranked itup from 1.6 to 1.85 and my ram voltage up to 2.8....sure enough i ran it for 2 hours without a crash... My question is...are running these voltages bad for your computer/components. According to ASUS probe, i was running a 48C under full load, and 38C currently typing this message. My system specs: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Zalman Pure Copper Heatsink Asus A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard 512 x2 Crucial Pc2700 DDR 128MB Geforce FX 5200 AGP 1 80gb segate HD - Primary 1 160gb Wd HD 80 GB - Games/Movies/Music 80 GB - Installers, Game Patches, Game Mods, Demos 52x24x52 CDRW so if anyone can tell me if i'm going to melt my machine before i do, i would appreciate it.
I've run up to 2v through my Athlon XP chips and up to 3.4v through my RAM without any adverse effects - I'd say that "safe" voltage goes up to about 1.85v vCore for an XP chip (with sufficient cooling of course, I assume by Zalman copper heatsink you mean a 7000 series or better, rather than one of the passive jobs) and 2.9v for vDIMM. Those temperatures look fine, I'm perfectly happy with less than 50°C full load. Are you overclocked, and were you when you first started having problems? If so, then just make sure you stress-test before using an overclock, as if you're not supplying enough voltage then you will get errors. If not, it could be one of your components giving out - everything should run at stock speeds and voltages perfectly without a worry. If something starts to fail then you can frequently put off the inevitable with voltage increases, but it's not a good thing - you're much better finding out what's failed and getting it replaced.
I wasn't overclocked....I never really messed with anything in the bios when i built the computer...so i'm not sure what the "stock" ratings would be... I'm not sure what would be giving out though. Before during gameplay i would get bad_pool_caller page_fault_in_nonpaged_area irql_not_less_or_equal driver_irql_not_less_or_equal Usually pointing to nv4_mini.dll....*shrug*
