Problems with new system

Lude2Envy

Distinguished
Jan 7, 2006
76
0
18,630
Hey all. I'm in the process of upgrading a computer for my uncle. I ordered him a new barebone system and video card off ebay. The barebone system came with a 450watt PSU, a Foxconn Winfast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS motherboard, and a AMD Athlon 64 3500 CPU socket 939. I also got a Gigabyte Geforce 7200GS PCI-E video card. I carried over to the new system 2 gigs of corsair xms pc3200 ram, sound blaster audio card, linksys ethernet card, his WD hard drive, and 2 burners and a floppy drive.

I've built several systems in the past including my own and have never had any problems with any of them. I got this computer to boot up and install XP Pro no problem. I got all of the drivers installed as well. Now the computer is freezing randomly. Somtimes when I reboot it won't boot at all and other times when i reboot it says the cpu was overclocked and to reset it to default settings and sometimes it boots into windows just fine. I have no idea what is going on. I've reinstalled windows 3 times already and have experienced the same problem 3 times. It just randomly locks up. I was able to get SP3 installed but now it freezes while i'm downloading additional updates. I am at a total loss. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
 
I hope you got a great deal, those parts are all very old and probably used. Certainly the PSU is junk.

The first thing to do is manually set the RAM timings and voltage.

Then if there is still problems look for BIOS updates for the board.

After that swap out the PSU.

If none of that works I would probably just chuck the whole thing and write it off to experience, honestly.



 
I would say the first possible culprit would be the RAM followed by the PSU. After you manually set the RAM speed/timings/voltage to the manufacturer's specs like Proximon said, I would run memtest86+ for a few hours to test for RAM errors.