Hi!
When I bought my computer off ebay 6 months ago the heatsink and fan had fallen off in transit and I had to reattach it (with thermal grease etc) myself. Since then it's been crashing alot. At first it happened every 30 mins and the guy who sold it to me said to try setting the vcore to +3% as the BIOS had probably reset itself and ASROCK are bad for this sort of thing apparently. I did this and the freezing occurs randomly now between hours and a couple of days. It's just starting to really annoy as I'm running programs which are v. intensive and need ~days to run them.
My power supply is 350W and I've tried disconnecting all the drives to see if it was a power issue but it still crashed. I borrowed a friends half gig of ram and swapped mine and I've discounted that as well now. I really don't think it's a heating issue either as the cpu is running at a max of about 53-56C and MOBO at 28-31C. It seems to operate at this temp fine though. Although it does seem to crash a bit more quickly if I am using 100% cpu.
Other probably minor issues I'm having are v.long boot-up (over a minute!) and when I open an application when playing music the music stutters for a few seconds and the cpu shoots to 90%. That's not right on a 3000+ chip methinks.
I've still not tried a total re-format etc but it's on the cards if I can't come up with anything else. It's just the fact that the heatsink could have crashed into anything in transit that makes me think it's gonna be a hardware - possibly graphics card problem. Some people with similar MOBOs with VIA chipsets are having these types of problem. I was just wondering if anyone else had any other ideas?
thanks!
Andy