Cool Barn Posted December 22, 2004 Share Posted December 22, 2004 Okay, here’s my situation. I have just upgraded from a P4 2.8C Asus P4P800 to an AMD A64 3500 Asus A8V Deluxe. Windows runs fine (of course I clean installed), games run fantastically, but the problem occurs as soon as I try to exit from a game to the desktop – every time I get a blue screen with the following information… 0x0000008E (0xC0000005, 0x80535E23, 0x?????350, 0x00000000) where the question marks start with either E or F and then four numbers which vary each time. However every other address remains exactly the same as displayed. Originally I had Kingmax DDR433 RAM (which ran perfectly on my old Intel setup), and so tried changing various settings in the A8V bios. I tried stipulating timings, leaving them on auto, enabling/disabling 2T, enabling/disabling fastwrites, changing DDR voltages, changing Burst Length from 4 to 8, and just about any memory-related combination I could think of. Eventually I assumed the Kingmax RAM was not compatible with the motherboard, and so I bought a 1 GB matched pair of Corsair XMS3200 XL memory sticks. However I am disappointed to find that the problem still remains (memtest showed both sets of RAM to have no errors). Please if anyone has any ideas or settings I should try please help me out. Also if you think I have a hardware problem with either the motherboard, RAM, or CPU then please let me know. I really want to get this problem sorted out, because apart from these blue screens I am very happy with the upgrade. However I have already spent money on RAM which didn’t solve the problem and am not far away from selling these new components altogether and going back to the stability of Intel. My setup is as follows… AMD A64 3500 Asus A8V Deluxe 1024 MB Corsair 3200 XL matched pair System Drive: WD 120 GB Sata (running on Promise controller) Antec 480W Truepower PSU 2 Optical Drives on Primary IDE, 2 storage HDDs on secondary IDE CM Stacker Case with 3 fans, so doubt heat is a factor. Audigy2 ZS Albatron 6800GT running 67.03 forceware Windows XP SP2 Appreciate any advice and thank you very much in advance :-) Tony. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corsair Employees RAM GUY Posted December 22, 2004 Corsair Employees Share Posted December 22, 2004 What bios version do you have in your MB, the latest is Version 1.007 and what slots do you have the modules in? I would suggest you install them in slots 2-4 and then load setup defaults in the bios setup with the latest version installed and set the Dim Voltage to 2.8 Volts and I would try the settings listed bellow: CAS Latency CL=2.0 Row Cycle Time tRC Bios Default Row Refresh Cyc Time tRFC Bios Default Ras# to CAS# delay tRCD 3 Row to Row delay Bios Default Min Ras# Active Time tRAS 11 Row Precharge Time tRP 2 Write Recovery Time Bios Default Write to Read delay Bios Default Read to Write Delay Bios Default Refresh Period tREF Bios Default Enable 2T Timing Disabled Then test the system with http://www.memtest.org and make sure it's stable! If you have problems, I would set Enable 2T Timings to AUTO and test it again! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cool Barn Posted December 22, 2004 Author Share Posted December 22, 2004 Thanks RamGuy, will try those settings now and will get back to you with the results :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cool Barn Posted December 23, 2004 Author Share Posted December 23, 2004 Unfortunately the results are not good. I did everything you said and still the problem remains. The good news is I think this rules out the memory/settings, the bad news is I now have to pinpoint what is wrong with my computer. My gut instinct tells me it's the motherboard, but I'd love to find out it is something which doesn't involve the letters RMA. Thank you very much for your help anyway, and if you or anyone else has any other suggestions to help me narrow it down I would be very much appreciative :) Regards, Tony. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cool Barn Posted December 23, 2004 Author Share Posted December 23, 2004 Okay, the problem seems to be fixed for the moment, but the perplexing thing is that I really haven't done anything to justify this. Put it this way, I have posted about this in a few other forums around the place and received a number of various suggestions and things to test. I would try one suggestion at a time, but none of them seemed to do any good. Things like upgrading the BIOS, trying one RAM stick only, using VIA Sata rather than the Promise controller, installing different video drivers, running software tools like Memtest and Prime95, and someone even suggested running Norton's WinDoctor (which I did, I was willing to try anything). The last thing I was did was run MemTest from a floppy, and this was after having no errors whilst running Prime95 and another CPU stressing program called "Toast". So I then decided the last thing I could try to totally determine it was hardware rather than software related was to format and try out the games on a fresh basic install of Windows 2000 (if it did it in both 2K and XP then I knew it was hardware issues). Before I formatted I just wanted to check a second time that it was happening in all games, as for the last few days I had only been testing it with HalfLife2. Lo and behold I fire up Star Wars Battlefront, kill Jar Jar Binks, and then quit to the desktop. Amazingly it works!!! I then start Need For Speed Underground, get beaten in race 83 by some amazing computer driving because in one of the corners I had to shift down to 2nd gear for a split second, try and exit to the desktop and amazingly it works. "Now for the acid test" I think, and fire up Halflife2. I walk along for a bit thinking I prefer the image quality of the other drivers, try and exit to the desktop and AMAZINGLY IT WORKS!!! I am quite happy right now. I pray that it stays like this forever and I never have to experience a bluescreen on this computer ever again, but I'm still buggered as to what happened which could have solved the problem? Could it take a couple of reboots for the different video drivers or memory settings to really have an effect. Could one of the CPU stressing/memory testing programs done something to wake up my lazy hardware??? My memory and CPU are brand new afterall, maybe they needed a bit of a jolt to get the circuits running properly. I don't know why, all I know is that I'm happy and I hope I don't have to resurrect this thread tomorrow when I wake up and it starts doing it all over again. Thank you RamGuy for your assistance, I am grateful for all the help I've been getting in various forums. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corsair Employees RAM GUY Posted December 23, 2004 Corsair Employees Share Posted December 23, 2004 N.P. With Win2K and XP it is a good idea to do a fresh format and install from time to time. Especially if you update the bios or make major changes to your configuration. But glad too hear you are up and running, please let us know if you have any questions! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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