First Time Build-- Big Time Problems AT

[S.S.Swedish]

Hello all. Thank you so much for your forums. I'll get right down to business.

 

I bought all of the parts for my new PC from new egg at one time. I eagerly opened the packages, labled and kept all wires in their sorted areas. And step by step, I used (build your own pc) and others directions, put the beast together. First I prepared the case and installed the heatsink. Then prepared the mobo-- by which i installed the CPU/Heatsink and ram. After I made sure no wires were in the way, I gently placed it over the spacers and screwed the board in snuggly. I then proceeded to put in drive after drive and connect wires to wires.. This is where I think I got confused. I put all wires together. First to power the mobo, then to the disk drives and then the roms. After placing in the video card and sound card I was all set. I sat it up.. Plugged it all in. And.

 

nothing.

 

It took me a couple hours to re-arrange some of the cords. I replaced the 12v connector next to the 20 pins. And ultimately, after much toil, I got it to boot to BIO.

 

here is where the true problems began.

 

I, frankly, no nothing about the BIOS. I dare say i can navigate it but I learned too late this board was for not the weak minded. So I kept the settings to normal and used my XP pro Disk. After deleting the partitions on the drives (at this time I had my raptor and another 80 gb that had a previous OS on it (which I deleted)), I began to install XP onto the raptor. However, the process stopped about halfway, then 1/3 the way, then 3/5 the way with the installation of windows. So, I thought, maybe it was the power supply? I disconnected one of my disk drives and the 80 gb and let 'er rip again. This time I got windows to install.... Or so I thought. To make a longer story short. I installed windows with many blue screens on the way. After getting the system sorta stable I went ahead to install the sound card drivers.. again with more errors. I had to download at least 3 different .dll or .sys files that wouldnt copy from my windows disk. After doing that manually I got the thing to install. The same process happend with my video card.

 

Main Problem:

 

When I try to install a game, it goes to the blue screen of death, and then 'dumps memory cache' or something to that effect after 30-59 seconds?.. Then it reboots and second verse same as the first. My computer is also locking up a bit at times while i'm typing this. I'm not sure what to do, and I don't know where to turn. I also have no idea how to diagnose this but maybe you guys do.

 

Points:

Don't know bios -- still at original settings

Formatted disk repeatedly-- XP Pro installed (a few times over)

According to windows registry repair (pro) am constantly having to fix registry

Cant install game "world of warcraft"-- Installs to 3 percent- 5 percent then Get blue Screen and dumps cache

Can't click more than a few programs online at a few time without locking up or blue screen.

 

Please help me.

 

Thank you,

 

Swedish

[Pah Jongg]

...I don't see that you ran memtest before you installed the OS...

[S.S.Swedish]

ah i didnt. Can i run it afterward?

[Pah Jongg]

ah i didnt. Can i run it afterward?

 

...sure...if you get errors that would explain the problems you have with Windows...if you've installed Windows with memory problems, the installation is borked...

 

...if you pass memtest, you'll have to keep looking...

[S.S.Swedish]

I'm running the test and so far so good. No errors at 39 percent Pass1 and Test 5 at 95%. Im going to leave it on for the rest of the night. If this passes what else could I do?

 

Also, Memtest is reading my system ( i think this is a read)

 

AMD Athlon 64 2411 MHZ

L1 Cache 128K 19763 mb/s

L2 Cache: 1024K 4910 mb/s

Memory 2047M 1121 mb/s

Chipset: nVidia nForce4 (ECC: Disabled)

Settings: RAM: 160 MHz (DDR321)/ CAS 2.5-3-3-6-7 / Single Channel (64 bits)

 

Does this mean my computer is running my ram too slow??? Im so confused.

[Pah Jongg]

...memory should be in the orange slots...

[S.S.Swedish]

i placed them and ran the mem test.. Everything came out ok. I finally got the game to install but about 20 mins into it I went to a blue screen again. It said 'dumping memory cache etc etc'. What should I do?

[red930]

Settings: RAM: 160 MHz (DDR321)/ CAS 2.5-3-3-6-7 / Single Channel (64 bits)

 

Did you put the memory into like-colored slots or just put them next to each other? You should be running both in orange (or yellow, but orange is usually better) slots and it'll show dual channel instead of single channel.

[red930]

The short list to computing happiness.

 

There are no shortcuts. If you get errors at any point in testing you will need to tweak your system to resolve the error and repeat the test.

 

If you find you're getting stability problems in prime95 or 3DMark01, you will need to step all the way back to qualifying your RAM with memtest again.

 

You need to qualify your RAM one stick at a time with a full 8 hours of memtest. Run the full suite of tests.

 

Once each stick will pass 8 hours of full tests in each slot you should test them as a pair swapping the sticks in the slots and testing again.

 

Once you get ZERO errors you can consider the RAM qualified.

 

Now you'll need to install your OS. A clean install will insure there is no corruption of the system files.

 

Run a full 24 hours of prime95 with zero errors.

 

Run the full 3DMark01 suite with zero errors.

 

Once you're sure your rig is stable you will need to perform a clean OS install if you got even a single OS crash during stability testing.

 

It's the only way to insure there is no corruption of the system files now that you know the hardware is stable.

 

Anything less and you're just wasting your time.

[S.S.Swedish]

thank you so much guys. I'll set to work on this and i'll update this to see if anything else arises.. Thank thanks! And i'm always up to suggestions/comments for this new process