Help me determine what FRIED!!!

Rayder

OK, here's the deal. My friend's PC is constantly crashing on him in games. It hard-locks with a high-pitched tone (total screen freeze) during almost ALL games (he seems to be able to play his Nascar Thunder 2004 game just fine ). It used to run fine. Here's the specs:

Abit KT7A-RAID (RAID disabled)
AMD Athlon T-Bird 1.33ghz
BB ATI 9600SE
768megs PC133 RAM
SB Live! 5.1 Platinum
WD 30gig HD
Liteon 52x CDRW
DVD-ROM
WinXP Home
500watt PSU (unsure of brand)
No overclocking....ever.

Everything is fully updated, including BIOS and chipset drivers.

Some of you may remember the thread I started awhile back about him going from an AIW 32 to the 9600SE, this is the same dude.

The problem started when he still had the AIW installed. It just started hard-locking on him with a high pitched tone, forcing him to hit the reset button. This is a system that used to run perfectly stable. He got the 9600se hoping that would fix it, it didn't (but when it DOES run, it is MUCH improved over his old AIW32 ). I completely reformatted his system (ripping everything out and starting from scratch)....no luck. Then I started swapping out his RAM (3-256meg sticks. I'd take one stick out of the line-up and test, alternating which was removed) to see if THAT would fix it...nope. I played with just about every tweakable BIOS setting in the motherboard...nada. I pulled the sound card....still locks, just no tone. Put in the PCI latency patch for those older M/B's...zilch.

All his voltages read well. All are at .xx OVER the normal voltage. Amperage is strong, so I doubt it's a PSU problem. It can't be a Catalyst issue, because it ran for months just fine with the set he was using (don't rem which set that was though). Besides, I totally reformatted, changing a video card in the process and the problem persists.

Ooops...one thing I forgot to mention is that when I changed his video card, I noticed his CPU's heat sinc was in dire need of a cleaning....I cleaned it. It was running at 60c at idle before the cleaning and 52c idle after the cleaning. As we all know, T-Bird's did tend to run pretty hot.

Now, this guy is pretty poor. He has two kids that he's paying child-support on and his job doesn't pay much. His life pretty much consists of work, sleep, PC gaming and watching Nascar on TV.

At this point, I figure his CPU fried on him. But I wonder if it COULD be the northbridge chip on the motherboard, or the RAM, since the PC otherwise boots up and runs fine, except it locks in games....but they used to run fine. He can browse the web all day long. The best advice I can think to give him now is practically out of his reach: Buy a new Motherboard, CPU and RAM.

Main Problem: If it's the CPU, I can't find another Athlon T-bird in the 1.33 OR 1.4ghz range to replace it locally. Online purchasing not an option.

If it's the Northbridge chip: Can't find another motherboard locally that supports the old PC133 RAM.

If it's the RAM: Well, I COULD find that locally, but my tests didn't seem to support the RAM being bad, although I never took it down to just one stick at any time.

Question: How can I determine EXACTLY what fried?

Please offer any insight you can. Maybe some trick I might be able to pull just to get it running for him until he can upgrade. ANYTHING. This guy is my best friend and I want to help him out for the least expense. He's a sort of a noob when it comes to PC setup and I'm the only tech-wise buddy he has (I'm self-taught, so obviously I don't know EVERYTHING). Has anyone else had the "hard-lock with high-pitched tone" and determined what the exact problem was? What does it SEEM like it could be?

Probably the CPU, right?

Vampyromaniac

Try running with different RAM arrangements (one stick in slot 1, then move to slot 2, then do same for the other stick)

Try updating sound card drivers, or running with sound card uninstalled...

Try removing all boards (PCI, AGP, RAM) and re-inserting. If you do, might want to give the innards a thorough cleaning while you do this.

Have you tried the video card in another computer?

The_Neon_Cowboy

early tbirds 1.2 ghz and below used to give massive issues lock frezes reboots in the shop when thier temps were that hot as in 50C ... thats way to hot! I'm seen them pop and literally explode @ 60C core shatterd like glass, i seen them burnt you name it....

amd's with proper cooling should be at lest around 40C all of them...

sometimes cpus that came back in and people had ran them @ 55+C sometimes came back in with hosed L2 cache

I'd fix the cpu cooling first man I don't care what others say their is reason to be running any amd that hot. ams's run much cooler then intels (its a fact) contary to coman belife

DarkFoss

Have you tried running the latest Memtest you can check the lvl 1 and 2 cache as well as each stick of mem. It was updated on the 17th of this month. Supose to work well even with the 64 bit cpu's.
http://www.memtest.org/

Rayder

Um....heh... .... this paragraph pretty much says I already tried that....with the exception of going down to ONE stick of RAM, which is something I was thinking of doing though.

Hmm....maybe he can get away with a new heatsinc then. Possibly he may just need me to re-apply the heatsinc compound. That would certainly be a less expensive alternative to replacing M/B, CPU and RAM. Would the ones made for an AthlonXP work on and older T-Bird? I mean would they fit?

I was also thinking that maybe his IDE cables may be flaking out on him. That's the only other time I've seen hard-locks like this....another cheap alternative.

As a temporary measure, I had him underclock the CPU to 1.2ghz (from the 1.33ghz that it is) to see if that would help him. He was playing Zero Hour (one of the many games that would 'lock with tone' on him) when I hung up with him, he didn't call back, so I'm assuming that may have worked for him. I tried to call him back just now, but his GF said he's napping. Figures.

Thanks for the responses, they give me some ideas to work with, which is what I wanted. Keep 'em coming.

I have to head off to work soon, but I will keep an eye on this thread for more ideas.

BTW, this job I'm going to.....it will FINALLY allow me to make a donation to DH soon. It's a crap job (want fries with that) but it's better than the NOTHING I've had for the last 8 months. I've wanted to donate for many months now as this is the best tech-site on the net.

Rayder

Now there's a good idea! I'll try that as soon I get over to his house. At the time of this post, I got like 20 minutes before I have to head out to work. But that will definitely be the order of the day tomorrow.

Thanks!

Vampyromaniac

Sorry, I was skimming. Yes, maybe try running with the case open and a fan blowing in (a normal size fan for rooms.)

Rayder

Well, I ran the MemTest 1.11 program and it passed. I only let it do one loop though(took over a half hour to do one test).

I believe now that it is one of two things. Either the heatsinc is inefficient (may need thermal paste re-applied), or he has IDE cables flaking on him (they are the round kind). I DO remember a PC acting like this when the IDE's were bad, but overheating can do the same thing.

When I had him underclock the CPU to 1.2ghz, he didn't have any crashes in Zero Hour or CoD.

Probably the heatsinc is inefficient. Even with all fans completely cleaned out, he's idling at 52c.