Some help pls :)

[Nullvoid]

Hey guys. If someone came to you and said their system was freezing periodically, without throwing any error messages up and without system temps ever going above 32degrees C, would it be right to assume it's a power supply problem?

The important parts of the system are roughly as so:

QX6700
Asus Striker Extreme 680i
2x 8800 GTX (running in sli)
2x 1Gb XMS2 Dominator PC8500
2x WD 150 GB raptors (raid 0)

And he has tried running it with both a 1kw bfg and a 900w tagan, with the same freezes occurring in each case. What would you consider as a bare minimum supply to be able to run a system like this in a stable manner? Has the nvidia certified list expanded much beyond the one you have stickied here on this forum? Any advice would be appreciated!

edit - hmm I see that the 900w tagan has actually made it onto nvidia's certified list...what could be wrong then I wonder :/

[Bbq]

I'd guess it would be a driver conflict or a ram issue. run memtest86+

[Tazz]

< Agrees with Bbq, with no more info than whats posted its really hard to say.

[Fireside]

Judging by the hardware, I'd say he's a heavy overclocker. My biggest guess what's wrong with his computer is an unstable overclock.

There's a chance it's the psu, but if you already put in 2 power supplies, chances are low that's the problem.

But that's not much info to go on. It would help if there were more details, such as when freezing occured.

[madmat]

I have an AN8 Fatal1ty that's doing the same thing and I've come to the conclusion that it's a mobo issue. I've tried everything from different ram to relaxed timings on both sets of ram to a bare board with just a vid card and it keeps up. I know the PSU isn't the issue as it's sound as a pound on a fairly identical build as are the rest of the parts.

[Nullvoid]

He has run memtest with no errors so it doesn't seem like faulty hardware is to blame. I'm asking him to go through his bios and manually set/check the more obvious items, just to make sure he isn't unintentionally running his system out of spec (he hasn't overclocked anything himself). Any other ideas?

[madmat]

Could it just be the curse of the 680i?

[Oklahoma Wolf]

I was having a similar problem with my Asrock 939Dual-VSTA and X2 3800+... turned out to be the AMD dual core optimizer. I still get the occasional lockup, but it's far more stable now than it was with the optimizer installed.

[jonnyGURU]

Could it just be the curse of the 680i?

Nope.

My eVGA 680i is rock solid w/ two 8800GTX's overclocked and an overclocked QX6700. :D

[madmat]

Did you use the new bios from nV? I've heard varying reports on the 680i curse though, one guy has zero issues while the next has all kinds of problems, it's only consistent in its inconsistency. I hope it all gets squared away.

OW, my A8N32-SLI Deluxe has hitching issues with my X2 3800+. I've tried the optimizer and it didn't make any difference. In games it'll just do a hitch where the game glitches like a shot repeats rapidly and the screen freezes then it keeps going or in video playback it'll be jerky or my cursor skips across the screen when I'm on my desktop or web browsing. It's very annoying. I'm about to the point of ditching the DC altogether and going single core and calling it a day.

[Oklahoma Wolf]

What worked for me was the MS optimizer and the dual core driver from AMD by themselves... sped up the system by quite a bit. With the AMD optimizer on there too, it would initially be ok but it would start randomly locking up with more and more frequency.

The only lockup I've had since I pulled the AMD optimizer happened when I was extracting a huge 8gb RAR file and tried to fire up Trillian at the same time.

[burebista]

Agree. MS hotfix (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256) and AMD driver is enough for X2's.
I use RMClock's Syncronizer instead AMD Optimizer and it's flawless.