Athlon to hot?

[slaine]

Help I can't sort this I've changed everything and still the same problem.

Upon getting a new Atlon 500, AMD approved motherboard, power supply and heatsink I can't play games for very long I will either get kicked back to the desktop or the blue screen of death.
I have all the latest drivers for my components and I know they all work fine because they are now in this machine doing fine.
I also get the blue screen almost everytime I shut down for the day saying something to do with VCACHE.VXD.
My last hope is that someone else has had this problem and sorted it.
Could the athlon be getting to hot as there is no thermal paste or system fan and do I realy need them?

[Axel]

YIKES!! - No system fan!! - Go spend the $14 and a few more for thermal past!!!

You might also want to leave the case off the CPU if you don't have rug-rat/fur-children worries.

Heat could cause the issue you are having - another thing you can check - does your I/O chip have a heat sink on it - if so, probably doesn't have thermal paste - put some there as well if the sink comes off easy enough.

Another thing to check -
what's running when you start the game?
Turn off all screen savers and, unless it's internet gaming, - the anti-virus software. Turn off any scheduler as well - Basically, you don't want anything else out there burning CPU time and interrupts while your game is running. If you have norton crash-guard - remove it - doesn't do anything for you - if you have find-fast - take it out of start-up - doesn't do anything for you. -

Next - add RAM - the fastest you can afford and your mobo can handle. 10ns SDRAM would be best if your board will take it.

In case I'm on a roll here, if you do have low ram (32MB or less), then definitely clean up that hard drive with a thorough scandisk and a complete defrag so that your swap file is all in one place for the game to read/write.

And - just in case, download the latest anti-virus definitions and do a virus sweep - there have been some real nasties out there lately - ya never know.

[Axel]

YIKES!! - No system fan!! - Go spend the $14 and a few more for thermal past!!!

You might also want to leave the case off the CPU if you don't have rug-rat/fur-children worries.

Heat could cause the issue you are having - another thing you can check - does your I/O chip have a heat sink on it - if so, probably doesn't have thermal paste - put some there as well if the sink comes off easy enough.

Another thing to check -
what's running when you start the game?
Turn off all screen savers and, unless it's internet gaming, - the anti-virus software. Turn off any scheduler as well - Basically, you don't want anything else out there burning CPU time and interrupts while your game is running. If you have norton crash-guard - remove it - doesn't do anything for you - if you have find-fast - take it out of start-up - doesn't do anything for you. -

Next - add RAM - the fastest you can afford and your mobo can handle. 10ns SDRAM would be best if your board will take it.

In case I'm on a roll here, if you do have low ram (32MB or less), then definitely clean up that hard drive with a thorough scandisk and a complete defrag so that your swap file is all in one place for the game to read/write.

And - just in case, download the latest anti-virus definitions and do a virus sweep - there have been some real nasties out there lately - ya never know.

[Target]

Axle makes some interesting points, and they are all things to consider.

Most importantly though, you should get some fans to cool that CPU and case down.

Did I mention fans, you might want to think about it <lol>.

Another good thing to try is cooling fans <rofl>!

Sorry buddy, am not picking on ya or anything, just trying to interject a little humor. What you have is a great CPU, we'd hate to see you burn it up........

[jokostel]

no kidding...man.. you probably got what i want for christmas..hehe (i have a pii400) but hell like they said get a cpu fan and a set of case fans one to push the air in thecase and one to remove the hot air from the case...


jokostel

[slaine]

Thanks guys I appreciate all the advice.
So fans and paste it is I will let you know of the outcome.
Thanx again