Ok dudes and dudettes, here's my problem: I have an Athlon 2100+ PC (GA-7DXE mobo). Brief specs:
2gb RAM (two 1gb DIMMS)
SCSI card, SATA Raid card (2 HDs), USB2 + Firewire combo card
Network card for my broadband
GeForce 4 MX440 AGP
2 IDE HDs and two CD/DVD drives
Over the past two months I have been getting freezes, mainly when playing Wolfenstein TCE mod. The machine locks up and the screen stays frozen. The same freeze also happened a few times while printing, and a few times while the SETI screensaver was running.
Here is what I tried:
1) Alternate GFX card (older Geforce)
2) Different PSU
3) Uninstalled TCE and reinstalled it on a different drive
4) Tried alternate 1gb sticks of RAM alone
5) Took out the SATA controller and both drives
6) Added another case fan
7) Checked and replaced CPU fan and thermal paste
This hasn't remedied my problem and I supect it is heat-related or similar because I don't get crashes in the first half hour of PC use, even if I launch straight into the game.
Then today I found out two interesting facts:
1) The four capacitors that are found around my CPU have bulged tops and a brown residue ontop. All other caps are okay, just the ones closest to the CPU are affected.
2) Ran 'Everest Home' and checked what voltages it reports, and compared two PSUs. One PSU gives me slightly over 12v and the other slightly less, and both give less than 5v (one is 4.73 and the other is 4.88). Neither one gives me 3.3v: they are both under, the worst being 3.09v and the best being 3.20v.
Sooooo...
Am I being screwed by the PSUs or do I just replace the mobo because of the caps?
Another thing: Everest reports my FSB as being 133.99 but the bios says 133 and that is the minimum value I can set. This is not an overclocked PC.
