Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3031 mails)

[Per Jessen <per@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Last week I put together a new system: 

Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5  (BIOS F3 which includes the AMD patch).
AMD Phenom 2.2GHz  (quad-core)
4 x 1Gb Kingston KVR800D2N5/1G  (on Gigabytes approved list).
ATI Radeon X1650 graphics. 
2 x Hitachi SATA disks.
The usual stuff - DVD, CDRW, floppy.

The powersupply is rated for 350W.  The cabinet has 2 extra fans.

I installed 10.3 on a software RAID1 of the two SATA drives. The system
isn't overclocked or anything like that, it's mostly running on
Gigabytes "optimized defaults". 

After putting a new system together, especially one with fairly new
components like this one, I usually do some stresstesting/burn-in. 
Nothing particularly fancy - memtest86, mprime, maybe some home-grown
memory and IO-tests.  

Well, this system is highly unstable under high load.  If I start 4 x
mprime torture tests, it will automatically reboot in 30-40minutes. 

So which one is a the faulty component?  I suspected memory at first, as
that has most often been the case.  I tried memtest86+, but it didn't
work, presumably due to lack of support for this chipset/CPU. 

I ran a number of mprime torture tests with different memory
configurations - 4G, 2G, 1Gb - which all produced the same result =
auto-reboot after 30-40 minutes.  I also reduced memory frequency to
667MHz and tried that - no change.  

This to me pretty much exonerates the memory. 

Then I thought - might the powersupply be just a little too small?  The
Radeon X1650 graphics card gets pretty hot, so might it just be drawing
a little too much? 
I replaced the Radeon card with an ancient ATI Wincharger PCI-card from
around 1996. And ran the same tests on the same memory configs.  Which
produced exactly the same results. 

Which would seem to indicate that the powersupply is doing just fine. 

And that seems to leave just the motherboard itself.  OK, there is a
remote possiblity that all four memory sticks are bad, but isn't that
really a very minimal probability?

I'm tempted to send back the motherboard tomorrow, but before I do -
does anyone have any suggestions for other things to try?



/Per Jessen, Zürich

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