Randomly restarting T-bird system

[Electric Amish]

A friend is trying to put together the following system:

AMD T-bird 1ghz
Epox EP-8kta2 motherboard
128mb PC133 ram
ATI AIW video card
etc..

I has win98se and the via 4in1's installed, but now he's been having problems with the system randomly rebooting itself. He says the temp is around 80F. He says he has a 300w AMD certified PS as well. Anyone have any suggestions?

tia

amish

[nehalmistry]

is there a specific time that it reboots... and is the CPU overclocked in any way?

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P5A-B MoBo w/AMD K6-266@300 (100mhz FSB)
Matrox Milleniumm G200 AGP (oh, lets party)
Creative SB Awe32 (a classic, superb card)
Realtek 8029A NIC Card
64meg 100mhz SDRam
Ali V agp chipset (2x)
6.4 gig HD 5400 RPM UDMA 66
ALI 1543 IDE Controller (ATA 33)
Optiquest Q53 15" Monitor
Actima 36X CD-Rom
Windows 95B
ICQ UIN: 24730025

[Electric Amish]

CPU not overclocked.

He says it happens rather randomly. Anywhere from a few minutes after boot up to 15-20 minutes after.

thanks

amish

[Novdid]

When I was putting togheter a system with my friend, the rig was also an athlonrig. His computer shut down randomly. We switched the powersupply and everything worked out fine. The bottom line was that the powersupply didn´t work correctly.

[SteveC]

I vote PSU too (Or overheating).

My 250W PSU just wasn't up to a 1Gig Tbird on an Asus A7V - trouble starting up.

What's the temp of your CPU?

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Electric Amish]

I haven't seen the system. I just got a phone call from him.

He claims the CPU temp is ~80F (from the bios).

thanks all

amish

[Novdid]

what is the temp(in celsius) when the CPU is under load????

If he starts up the computer and goes strait into bios he will get a low temp reading.

[Wombat]

Another vote for a probable PS problem.
What is the etc, etc in his system? Time to start unplugging stuff...

[Alfie]

Power supply,overheating,wrong memory settings in bios,or wrong voltage settings.
How is the board set up(auto or manual settings on the motherboard?
I'm currently using the same board with a Duron 700@1000,so have some experience with it.
The Epox board if not set up properly,tends to be less forgiving than others.
If it's making it into Windows and then shuts down,one of the problems listed above may be the culprit.
You may change the memory to cas 3 or set it to 100mhz just to eliminate that as a possible cause.
As far as power supplies,make sure that the supply supports up to 1 gig.
High Power makes good power supplies and virtually all of theirs (250 watt included)supports the full range of AMD cpus.

[Ant]

Been having a similar problem with my Athlon system until a couple of hours ago when I finally found the solution. Mine would randomly reboot all though quite often this would be when I opened Windows Explorer. I tried everything to find the problem, today I had added another 128MB of RAM to the system, still had the problem so took the first 128MB out and lo and behold the problem vanished. Put the first 128MB back but in a different slot and still no problems.

[Greebe]

I agree with Ant on this one... I had many problems with memory when testing Eclipsed Athlon's and found that most PC133 spec'd generic couldn't handle the timings of PC100 Athlon MB's. Same problem exactly as your friend is having, Paul. With that in mind I bought verified to work, Crucial (Micron) "7E" mem and all has been fine since.

[Electric Amish]

Wow! Thanks for all the suggestions!

Alfie- AFAIK, it's set for auto detection. At least that's what I recommended since he's a newbie.

Wombat- I'm not sure what else he has in the system. I know that sound is "on-board". He has a DVD player, CDROM, and HD or some sort.

This is kinda difficult because the system isn't in front of me. I'm trying to relay this to the guy building it. He's one of the "IT" people here at work but, frankly, he doesn't know DICK about computer hardware. I'll pass on the suggestions and see what he can do with them...

Try different PS.
Clock RAM to 100/CAS3 and/or try new/better RAM.
Check for overheating of CPU.

Thanks everybody!

amish

[Hamlet]

I vote for the RAM. Has happened to me with several Athlon rigs.

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Athlon 800@1GHz/MSI 6167/256mb/7200rpm UD66/SB128/G400Max/Win98/Win2k/RH6.2/Be5

[Jorden]

If the problem is at booting (when you just get into Windows and the background programs kick in), and then the machine reboots, then it might be an old version of the Anti Virus program. We have a lot of promblem PC's like that at work. Only solution is to update the AV, or get rid of it for the moment.

But since it doesn't do this after 15-20 minutes, I would look at the above given solutions

Jord.