Athlon Video Freeze

[lokimelt2]

Hello. I just upgraded my 650 Duron with a 950 Athlon. Everything works fine except that when I play a mpg or avi movie, it plays for a couple seconds and then the system freezes. I need to reboot my computer.

It also freezes other times - usually when I am straining the system somehow... (downloading multiple files, running multiple apps).

My guess is that it is a caching issue. Or some other type of memory problem. Anyone have any experience with the Athlon Thunderbirds?

Cheers,
tom

P.S> I have a Iwill KV200R Motherboard which uses a Via Northbirdge chipset KT8363 and has a 256Mb + 128 MB PC-133 SDRAM. The 950 Athlon Thunderbird has a 200 fsb.

[Jimstep]

With the higher speed cpu's, cheap memory is susceptible to EMI and will cause all kinds of lockups and errors. Try removing all but one memory module and see what happens.

[lokimelt2]

Originally posted by Jimstep
With the higher speed cpu's, cheap memory is susceptible to EMI and will cause all kinds of lockups and errors. Try removing all but one memory module and see what happens.

I tried this... no change.

I also reset my BIOS... even used the "fail-safe default" settings...

same thing happens... random freezes...

:(

[lokimelt2]

I downloaded speedfan to look at my Core voltages and temps.

The temps are below 30 degrees, so that's fine.

And the voltages:

Core = 1.77
3.3 = 3.39
5 = 4.95
12 = 12.11

Do these seem right? I am unsure what the Core voltage is supposed to be...

[Jimstep]

Your voltages look fine. The Vcore can go as high as 1.85v if you are overclocking, but it should be fine where it is.

The only other thing I can think of is that the video drivers might be the problem since your having problems with video playback. Do you have the latest drivers?

[lokimelt2]

I'm about to install the latest drivers for Via and for AMD (but I'm pretty sure they're current).

But since the system freezes at other non-video times (sometimes when I'm just at the "Shutdown" screen), I don't think it's directly related to the video drivers... Also, it used to freeze when I'd run the Norton Utilities Diagnostics on video --> but it hasn't done that lately...

sigh,
tom