techrecovery | Nov. 7th, 2004

Something is up with my computer.

Either it's the PSU, CPU or the graphics card. Whatever it is, it is NOT drivers, because I'm having the exact same issues in both Linux and Windows. Whenever my CPU usage jumps up to more than 30%, my monitor clicks and goes blank (like a mode change) for a fraction of a second then comes back on, and sometimes my computer will simply restart.

Just to say again, this is not a driver issue. Problems occur in both Windows and Linux. I've run Memtest on my memory just on the offchance it was that, but my memory is fine.

Now I've been monitoring my voltage coming from my PSU and there doesn't appear to by any major drops there. It could be the CPU, but I don't see how that would be drawing enough power to cut out the graphics card... Shit, it could be my motherboard. It seems to be intermittent, though. Because generally whatever OS I'm booting to will manage to get up and running without any issues, and occasionally I can work with 100% CPU with no trouble, and others it'll just die.

Heating issues.... Well, I've never had this problem before, and I've check that the fans are working without issues. CPU temp never seems to get over 50'C and is generally between 35'C-45'C when idle. Motherboard temp is less and doesn't rise above 40'C for sure. I don't think it's heating because I've had this machine compiling KDE for 16 hours straight (100% CPU usage) without any issues whatsoever quite recently.

I haven't added any new hardware for ages, either.

Specs:

2.53GHz Pentium 4
1024MB RAM
GeForce 4 Ti4600
Primary OS is Gentoo Linux, but I dual boot to WindowsXP too.
One 250G HDD, one 80G HDD.
450W PSU.

Any advice?

X-Posted.