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View Full Version : What's causing my crashes?


mikegray
02-24-2006, 05:27 PM
Well ... here goes!

I've just installed some new bits and pieces on my 'puter, and things are NOT good. It started with a new TV card - with an ATI 550 Pro chipset. I wanted to run some good filters on live video and started running into performance walls, so I added a modest OC to my system - taking it from 2.8 to 3.0 by nudging the FSB to 218.

For a week or so everything seemed great - the filters had just what they needed and the system seemed fine - till I started getting random crashes. Then, this morning, I had a crash followed by massive disk corruption - so bad that chkdsk hung! Well ... these things happen, I thought - and I reformatted and reinstalled XP.

The system is set up pretty well now - I hadn't added in any more USB stuff than a keyboard - mouse combo. So far, everything was rock solid. Then, I (stupidly) changed three things between boots:

(1) I noticed that dual channel was turned off, so I turned it on in BIOS.
(2) I noticed that I'd forgotten my OC - so I went from 2.8 to 3.0 again.
(3) I added the Sapphire TV card.

The PC booted just fine. I got a "New Hardware" alert from XP and was about to start loading drivers - when I got a BSOD. It was an IRQL Not less or equal message. I found this in System Events:

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x1000000a (0xfffffffc, 0x0000001c, 0x00000000, 0x804e1456). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini022406-01.dmp.

I've put the dmp file here (http://homepage.hispeed.ch/mikesusangray/Mini022406-01.zip)

I didn't change anything, but simply rebooted and have been using the pc without incident for about an hour and a half.

Anyway, the question is: was the BSOD cuased by an installation problem or by something brought on by my dual channel & overclocking adventure? I really, really don't want to end up with another corrupted HD!

Peace,

Mike

saphalline
02-25-2006, 09:40 AM
The BSOD was most likely caused by OC'ing. If you don't know exactly what you're doing and how to tweak things in the BIOS, it's very easy to fail when OC'ing. I took a brief look at your dump file and it seems to indicate that the RAM couldn't keep up with the OC. I'm not too familiar with that mobo so I can't say for certain how it OC's, but even a seemingly small OC like 200 to 218 FSB can be too much for most components. Most serious OC'ers configure their systems from scratch to have good OC'ing potential. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but the experts can increase their chances.