Sound the alarm! Should I be worried?

Primus462

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Dec 19, 2005
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My PC has been working flawlessly for a couple of years now. I always have PCProbe II running to monitor my voltages, fan speeds, temps, etc. Recently, since Fallout 3 was released, I have noticed some crashes. A few times Fallout 3 has closed while I was playing. Most recently, I installed COD:WAW and it too has crashed a couple of times while playing and I even got the BSOD last night. Also, a few times this week, the alarm has gone off giving me a warning about the Vcore Voltage. Currently it is at 1.34v and the threshold is at 10%. Should I be concerned about a problem with my PSU or mobo?

ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe mobo
Antec NeoPower 500 PSU
300GB Velciraptor
Visiontek 4870 512Mb DDR5
Vista Ultimate SP1
2x1GB Corsair PC2-6400
2x1GB Kingston PC2-5300

Here are the rest of the specs:



Your thoughts?

The 4870 was the most reason hardware upgrade. But, that was a couple of months ago and I have had encountered no problems playing Crysis, Bioshock, Spore, Mass Effect, Dead Space, COD4, and more.
 

Belinda

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Mismatched RAM ain't going to help nor the OC.
First thing i'd try is going back to no OC. If your system was 100% stable but close to the edge, newer more demanding games could push it over at times.
 

Primus462

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Hmm, the guy at my hometown PC store (whom I trust and is a big OCer himself) said the mismatched RAM wouldn't matter as long as I paired up the like sticks up. I will try with no OC and see what happens.

I just received the warning about +12 Voltage again. I wasn't even at the PC. I just had Firefox and MediaPlayer running.

Thanks!
 

squatchman

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Are your stop errors all being caused by the same thing? Next time your machine crashes make sure to check and see what caused the failure. Sometimes you can trace it back to a specific driver or component.

Did your problems start after installing new display drivers?

Also, a reason you don't mismatch ram is because they're generally rated to run at different voltages across different stock speeds and you can't normally individually configure you ram slots to run at separate voltages. So your Kingston ram is probably rated to run at 1.8v stock, but your Corsair memory could be anywhere from 1.9v to 2.4v. I'm not saying that this is the problem, just that you shouldn't believe hearsay from the guy working a retail counter.
 

Primus462

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I want to clarify that the only time I have received the PC Probe warnings are while running Firefox or other low resource demanding apps. I have never received the PC Probe warnings while in a game. Also, the only time I have encountered a crash is while in Fallout 3 or COD5. Just in case I wasn't clear in the original post. :D



I removed the OC last night. I played COD5 for an hour with no issues. I will try to play for a few more hours and see if I encounter any crashes.



I guess I don't know if they are all caused by the same thing. The PC Probe warnings don't occur while I am gaming. The crashes only occur while I am gaming. I did install the most recent Radeon drivers this week, but the Fallout 3 crashes were happening before that. Of course, I don't know if the COD5 crashes would have happened on the previous driver version because the game hadn't been release yet.

How do I know specifically what voltage the RAM requires? I'm looking on Kingston's website, but haven't found anything. I will try Corsair's website next.

Thanks for the help!