Parhelia bluescreens - please help...

[Captain Marvel]

actually...I read a PSU round up somewhere once and I think some bargain psu by .......Fortran?? or something like that did as well or better than the big boys....but maybe I was drink'n then also...........

[DGhost]

Originally posted by Captain Marvel

I read once, as a general rule of thumb mind you.. - the heavier the better (the quality)

the heavy power supply rule of thumb works well to see how well designed it was, but unfortunatly it does not tell you a thing about how well manufactured it was. Case in point is Enermax units. some work fine, others don't. mine had the problem of a slowly dropping +5v rail that led to stability issues with a 1.33 tbird. doing the resistor mod to it improved stability for about another 3 months, but it continually slipped. a fair number of other people have had problems with Enermax units. again, its not how it was designed, its how it was manufactured.

another case in point with PSU's.... Hi-Pro... excellent power supplies, except one problem... they use sleave bearing fans in them and every one i have owned (plus a fair amount of ones i saw) had the fan die within a year. work like a champ with a replaced fan, but i saw a fair amount that died because the fan failed on them. the 235W that i referenced several times in this thread already was a Hi-Pro... i ran my 1.33 tbird w/ 256mb ram, an 8500, 40gb hdd, cd-rw, nic, etc, off of it perfectly stable for several days. no problems at all. *very* well designed and manufactured, except for that slight problem of poor choice in fans.

keep in mind its a rule of thumb, and there are exceptions...

[K6-III]

My personal preference in PSU's is Antec/Compucase (same thing but Compucase is cheaper), PowMAX, and Sparkle...

[DGhost]

out of curiosity, whats your opinion of Channel Well power supplies?

[K6-III]

Don't have a clue...never used them. Those that I'm referring to I have used personally and have held very stable voltages...even at intense OC on an 8K7A that is extremely sensitive to 5v power...

[DGhost]

ahh, i see... it was kinda a trick question as Antec power supplies are pretty much remarked Channelwells. so far i have not been that impressed with my Antec... the +3.3 and +5 v rails ride a little high (3.4v and 5.2v respectively, still well within tolerances), and the 12v rail also rides a little high, but that is pretty normal. it works and is quiet, thats about all i can ask for in a power supply.

[K6-III]

A power supply is not to be impressed with....it is something you don't want to think about to the least...

[raschi]

Hello again.

I have now purchased a new PSU. I ended up with a Lepont 470W mostly because of price/availability. However this didn´t solve my problems. I´ve been playing around a bit and found out that I was using Opera v.6.05 when my machine reboots on certain webpages. This doesn´t happen with IE at all. I tried installing the 1.0.4.231 drivers for the Parhelia and guess what, no more reboots with Opera. So I´m guessing this must be a driver issue after all. I´m going to continue using these older drivers for a while and see if all my problems have disappeared(but I would of course like to be able to use the newest drivers)...

[K6-III]

ATI had a similar problem in their 6118 drivers....

....which websites???

[raschi]

Not necessarily just certain websites, but certain pages. At the moment I can only give you this example, since I can´t always be sure which page caused the crash. When open this particular page and try to scroll it, my machine reboots. Also I haven´t had a crash yet with the older drivers...

[KeiFront]

Raschi you're not alone my PC also reboots when viewing that page. Do you also get freezes in OpenGL games or any other problems? (At the moment I'm writing a thread on my OPenGl problems into the Matrox hardware forum because it's driving me nuts )

[raschi]

Well, when I set AGP Aperture Size to 256, all my games crash after a while, but with OpenGL games they crash to the desktop often leaving it (desktop) with very washed out bright colors. I need to reboot to fix it. My solution for now is leaving it at 128.

I´m relieved to see that others are having the same problems (I saw someone posting about it over at the Matrox forums too), since there now probably isn´t anything wrong with my hardware.
I hope the Matrox driver team has been able to fix it in the next release...

[Kurt]

might still be the RAM.

drivers are one thing (the P being new, the software is bound to be a little flaky), then there RAM and PSU for 90% of the usual problems.

most of the times it's the RAM though...

either because it's a cheap OEM that barely made it past Qual(am)ity Control, beacause it's not been certified on the particular chipset you're using, or for "electric" problems (usually that involves double sided DIMMs).

that particular Abit board isn't working great even with the best memory either...

check if the RAM is double-sided and how many sticks you have. also, it's not always advisable to mix types/brands/sizes.

better to have single sided DIMMs.

maybe try to set the AGP to 2X ?[I'm having a bad time with a lot of Radeon xxxx and the CATALYST drivers - on VIA and SIS chipsets. solution: lower AGP -this might apply here too]

[lAmerZ]

Have you tried another RAM? I've had similar problems but solved it by replacing two 256MB against one 512MB DDR RAM.
Give it a try. :-)