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Nobody likes monday mornings, eh?
Well on monday afternoon, I got home to find that rather than rendering
all day, my PC had stopped with an unusual BSoD message. (0x0000004E)
Anyway, I rebooted it, and it was behaving quite strangely. Since the
malfunctioning due to overheating.
Yesterday I managed to get the room temperature down to a slightly more
test... and it almost immediately spews out thousands of errors. So it
seems my PC now has an actual hardware fault somehow. (!)
What this tells me is that the program wrote some data to memory and
then read it back, and it wasn't the same. This indicates a fault with
either the RAM itself, the motherboard, the CPU cache, or just some kind
of obscure CPU fault that makes it execute instructions wrong.
I tried running tests with the CPU cache disabled, and I still get
identical errors, which leads me to believe it's not any kind of CPU
fault. (Which is just as well; I don't imagine anybody still sells
Socket-939 CPUs...)
Next trick is to start swapping RAM modules and see if that fixes it. I
don't remember what kind of RAM this sucker takes, but given that even
obsolete PC-100 RAM is still on sale, it should be possible to replace
this stuff if that's all the problem is.
I still have no idea how the hell high temperatures would make a RAM
module go faulty, but there we are... (It's not like we're talking about
It's a dual-channel system, which presumably means RAM modules have to
be installed in pairs. (Not sure what happens if you install them singly
- whether it falls down to single-channel, or stops working completely,
or what. And I don't imagine for a second that the motherboard manual
will tell me!) I've got 2 pairs of modules installed, so I might be able
to isolate it to one of the pairs.
Failing that... I might be upgrading my PC quite a lot sooner than I had
expected! o_O
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Invisible wrote:
> It's a dual-channel system, which presumably means RAM modules have to
> be installed in pairs. (Not sure what happens if you install them singly
> - whether it falls down to single-channel, or stops working completely,
> or what. And I don't imagine for a second that the motherboard manual
> will tell me!)
Almost unbelievably, the motherboard manual *does* tell you (in the
customary broken English).
Apparently 1 module will work, 2 modules will work (provided they're
installed in slots 1+2), and 3 modules will not work under any
circumstances. (And, obviously, 4 will work.)
I currently have 4 installed, meaning that I'll have to remove 2 of them
to see what's up.
Also, it's DDR-400 RAM, which Ebuyer no longer sells in quantities
greater than 1GB for some reason. And it's not nearly as cheap as you'd
able to get my PC going again. Cos, damn, I was like a little lost lamb
last night...
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Am 26.05.2010 10:32, schrieb Invisible:
> Also, it's DDR-400 RAM, which Ebuyer no longer sells in quantities
> greater than 1GB for some reason.
As you're probably not running many memory-hungry applications in
parallel, and I guesstimate we're talking about a 32-bit system, you
won't be able to utilize much more than 4 GB anyway. So presuming that
using all 4 slots typically gives some speed advantage, 1 GB is the
maximum module size you'll want to buy.
As for the price - what do you expect from a product that is no longer
manufactured in too high quantities anymore, with the primary target
group being people desperately trying to keep their old legacy computers
running?
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>> Also, it's DDR-400 RAM, which Ebuyer no longer sells in quantities
>> greater than 1GB for some reason.
>
> As you're probably not running many memory-hungry applications in
> parallel, and I guesstimate we're talking about a 32-bit system, you
> won't be able to utilize much more than 4 GB anyway. So presuming that
> using all 4 slots typically gives some speed advantage, 1 GB is the
> maximum module size you'll want to buy.
Actually it's a 64-bit system. And there's a difference between using
one module and using two; the former gives you single-channel memory,
the latter gives you dual-channel memory, which has twice the bandwidth
(but identical latency). Using four modules yields no advantage, other
than being able to add more memory without throwing away what you
already have. (Which is what I did, incidentally.)
However, for reasons unknown, this specific motherboard only supports
4GB anyway. I guess because it was one of the first 64-bit boards...
> As for the price - what do you expect from a product that is no longer
> manufactured in too high quantities anymore, with the primary target
> group being people desperately trying to keep their old legacy computers
> running?
Yeah, figures. You wanna look at the prices for PC-100! ;-)
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> What this tells me is that the program wrote some data to memory and
> then read it back, and it wasn't the same. This indicates a fault with
> either the RAM itself, the motherboard, the CPU cache, or just some kind
> of obscure CPU fault that makes it execute instructions wrong.
When your PC starts misbehaving clearly due to some hardware failure,
the very first thing you do is check the PSU. If possible, try changing
it to another one which is known to work (and has enough wattage to run
your PC). Only then, if the problems persist, should you test other things.
In my experience 90% of PC hardware failures are caused by a failing PSU.
The symptoms can be extremely varied, all the way from the diverse BIOS test
failing (such as the CPU or RAM tests) to random crashes and reboots, as well
as the booting process failing seeminlgy due to some disk error.
If your PSU is failing, hardware tests (performed by BIOS or third-party
software) are completely unreliable and tell you absolutely nothing. Often
replacing the faulty PSU is enough to solve all the problems.
(There might be a few cases where the faulty PSU actually damaged some
other hardware in the process due to its builtin failsafes breaking. This
can be extremely confusing because neither replacing the PSU only or the
other hardware only will solve the problems, and it can be difficult to
diagnose that you need to replace *both*.)
Yes, I do have experience on this.
--
- Warp
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Am 26.05.2010 12:33, schrieb Invisible:
> However, for reasons unknown, this specific motherboard only supports
> 4GB anyway. I guess because it was one of the first 64-bit boards...
Looks like that, yes; surprises me that there do exist 64-bit boards
that don't support at least DDR2.
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Warp wrote:
> When your PC starts misbehaving clearly due to some hardware failure,
> the very first thing you do is check the PSU.
That's because computers are really analog devices. If the PSU isn't
delivering enough voltage or current to keep the thing in spec, it goes back
to being an analog device (i.e., the circuits aren't driven to saturation),
and everything that assumes it's behaving digitally stops working reliably.
That's what I mean when I say at the lowest levels, everything on the wires
and in the computer is analog. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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Invisible wrote:
> I still have no idea how the hell high temperatures would make a RAM
> module go faulty,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_runaway#Semiconductors
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
you literally shooting yourself in the foot.
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On 5/26/2010 11:55 AM, Darren New wrote:
> That's because computers are really analog devices. If the PSU isn't
> delivering enough voltage or current to keep the thing in spec, it goes
> back to being an analog device (i.e., the circuits aren't driven to
> saturation), and everything that assumes it's behaving digitally stops
> working reliably.
A failing power supply causes a system to act erratically more often due
to switching noise not being filtered out than to low voltage or
current. Typically, the electrolytic filter capacitors start to
degrade, which allows the switching noise through. This can cause a bit
of havoc to ensue in a system.
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> A failing power supply causes a system to act erratically more often due
> to switching noise not being filtered out than to low voltage or current.
Switching noise (eg at 50 Hz) is just out-of-spec voltage for a few million
CPU cycles :-)
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