Torture Test ALWAYS fails on 896K FFT

[johnny o]

Torture Test ALWAYS fails on 896K FFT and gives a rounding error expecting under 0.4 and getting 0.499XXX. CPU temp hits 63degC and system temp hits 26degC. A tad high but still normal. Voltages all seem to be fine. System is an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ w/512mb ram and an ATI Radeon 9200 128mb. 450W power supply. MSI mb. I was having problems with WinXP just closing programs saying they had errors so I decided to run Prime95 and this is the only part of the test it fails on and it will do so within 5 minutes on only 896K FFT in custom mode. If anyone has any idea what peice of hardware I should be suspecting please let me know. On a side note this MB/CPU/ATI9200/CDROM/HDD ran fine for 3 months in another system running Win2k. I switched Power Supplys, RAM and flashed to the newest Bios. The Ram and PS are new. I suspect it could be a BIOS problem/setting. I also ran Memtest86 for 40 hours with no RAM problems. I did however run QuickTech Pro and got a Timer Error "System Timer Unit Channel 1 Coundown" failed but according to that program that could be normal as some systems speed up timing to increase performance and this shouldn't be an issue if the system is running fine. So I give that a 50/50 of being a problem. Any ideas would be great as I've been throwing tests at this thing for a week. I also have the newest ATI drivers and believe I have the newest MB/VIA chipset stuff installed. Any ideas would be great.

[dsouza123]

Easy things
Try underclocking the CPU,
check for dust in the CPU heatsink, CPU fan.

63 C seems high for the CPU temp, by about 13 C.

Maybe some parts ( programs ) of Windows XP on your PC are corrupt,
try running the test in Windows safe mode.

Hard things
Maybe there is a thermal problem, CPU to heatsink.

Does it fail on any other FFT sizes ?

[johnny o]

There is no dust in the heatsink or fan. I already cleaned all that out. I am going to put new thermal grease on the heatsink as when I took it off to clean it I never put new thermal grease on. I am actually going to get a better heatsink and fan. I will try under clocking the CPU and will also try safe mode. Thanks for the tips! I haven't had it fail on any other FFT sizes.. atleast not yet..

I just changed my bios settings to the fail safe ones and put my ram settings to auto. Prime95 seems to be running a lot longer now, I think I am at 6-8 hours on the blend test. However system temps have reached all time highs of 66degC for CPU and 29degC system temp and this is with an open case in a room that doesn't go above much above 20C. If/when Prime95 fails again I will try the other good ideas you've given me. thnx

[Reboot It]

Originally Posted by johnny o

... and this is with an open case in a room that doesn't go above much above 20C.

As has been mentioned before, sometimes cooling is worse with an open case, because cooling airflows are no longer constrained by the case to go where they are intended. Closing the case properly actually might help you.