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System boots, system memtests, artifacting...


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Hey guys, I'm pretty sure I'm having a heat related issue. I can boot my system, it'll start, and I can enter bios and even memtest all day long. This suggest that the CPU and RAM are fine, and I'm using KNOWN GOOD RAM, so that isn't an issue. Well, after about two or three reboots, it all goes to hell. The main boot splash shows up with rows of missalligned dots ( I wish I chould give a picture), descriptions of various entries in the bios looks garbled and when I try to boot gentoo, it crashes in various places.

 

I am using a single stick of kingston ValueRAM (no, it's not the permanent stuff, it's just failsafe stuff). At any rate... issue after issue, after issue.

 

I can set my fsb to 250 and watch it run just fine in memtest (leaving multiplier at stock) which further reinforces my theory that this is not CPU related. Due to the various issues related to the bios, I also want to say it's not VGA related, as it's fairly consistent (I've only seen one of these entries that tend to look garbled NOT look garbled once, and it lasted for roughly a second).

 

Also, CMOS tends to fail a lot. Not really sure what that could mean but it likes to reset to defaults quite a bit.

 

Based on all this, I'm confident it's a mobo issue... but is it a misconfiguration, or is it defective?

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Post your ram in your sig bro.

 

That is either a heat issue as you said, or even worse - video card or power supply issue.

 

I have seen this in people's machines where they forgot to plug the power supply into the video card, or the power supply isnt adequte for the job.

 

I wasnt aware there was a 12-25 bios file...thought the last one was 12-07.

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As I said earlier, just a single stick of Kingston ValueRAM that is known to be good. Also... there is apparently a known problem with teh eVGA cards being released with crappy bios... not sure if that's fact or not but eVGA does have bios posted on thier site... and I assume it's for that reason.

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Well there was a bunch of 7800GT's released by eVGA that ran at too high a clock rate or something. It's all over review sites and eVGA has supposedly responded. It's all hearsay from those that claim to have fallen victim...

 

Here's the wierdness. If I let it sit for a bit, it doesn't artifact, but if I restart it after turning it off... artifact city. So the video artifacting may be the 7800GT, but not being able to do anything but memtest is probably a bad bios on the motherboard.

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Mine will do this when I post at 250 fsb, 240 no issues. The ram isn't being oced to 250 btw. From what I gather from your post this happens even at stock but thought I should mention I have had similar issues.

 

I see the same type of corruption but I also notice red blocks over some of the letters. PCI-E is set at 100mhz.

 

My circumstance could be that I am running the mem controller past its limits while at 250. So we could have completely different issues here but thought I should share since we have the same symptoms.

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Bios change helped the bios entries, but it did not remove the startup artifacts, and as it can memtest all day long, I assume it is not cpu or ram related. I'm going to give reflashing the vga bios a try, possibly with lower clocks.

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