Strange (to me) Shutdown Problem

[BillP2]

I'm using a MachSpeed Venom V6DP main board with an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ cpu and 512 meg of memory.

Several days ago, I was rendering a video (a multi hour process on this machine) in Premire Elements when the screen went black and the only sign of life was a French Police siren (but lower pitched) type of sound coming from the machine's speaker (not the sound card's speakers).

Several additional attempts produced the same results, but at different lengths of time into the process.

Thinking it might be a software problem, I tried the same operation in Studip 9 ver 9.4 several times with the same results.

Now thinking it may be a hardware problem, I dug up a monitoring program that put the CPU temp, system temp, fan speeds and the voltages into an on-screen display and then repeated the process with both software packages.

In every run, the shutdown occurred when the CPU temperature reached 56 degrees C.

I checked my setup and found that the high temperature shut down was set for 70 degrees C.

I disabled the high temperature shutdown feature and tried again, only to find the shutdown happening at 56 degrees C.

I opened the machine up and confirmed that there was no unusual dust accumulation and that everything looks fine.

Any thoughts as to what is happening here would be appreciated.

------------------- Bill

[hellbringer]

if your using avast antivirus it makes a weird siren sound when it detects a virus, maybe run a scan with whatever anti virus u got, then run adware or the like, just to rule them things out.

next i read someone had a prob with over heating problems and someone suggested opening your case to let more air in, run your program and see if it runs longer...then use some compressed air clean out the case and seal it back up. oh and clean out any fans with that air too before runnin proggy.(video and proc
expec.)

if this problem is only accuring with that program and not any other intense programs consider reinstalling and or finding a different program. try a demo of something see if it does it with that.

and i would suggest putting your temp shutdown back on...wether thats causing the shutdowns or not you don't want your parts overheating and breaking then u left with nothing.

these might not solve your prob but its a good start

[hellbringer]

ooooo and another thing, rendering video relies alot on your video card...maybe some new drivers for it might help i dunno

[BillP2]

I had re-enabled the high temp shutdown.

I've also vacuumed out the interior of the machine, giving extra attention to the heat sinks for the CPU and chipset.

The problem does show up with more than one program.

I'm using the video that's built onto the main board.

It's been a while since I had previously rendered video for a DVD burn, but the problem didn't show up back then.

It seems that something is changing in my machine. I believe that it is a thermal problem, since the only constant is that it always happens at the same reported temperature. What is puzzling is that it is a relatively low CPU temperature and I don't think there is any shutdown mechanism based upon the system temperature (usually 34 degrees C when the shut down happens).

---------------- Bill

[hellbringer]

well maybe your power supply is overheating(bad supply maybe) or your video card is overheating at lest them are my guesses.

have you added any new devices since the last time it was working ok? i would think about anything u have done including software changes since last time it worked(drivers ext.)

[pfh]

Maybe the North bridge is overheating. Does your mainboard have heat sinks or fan on the north bridge chip?

[BillP2]

Heat sink but no fan.

I've been thinking that the least expensive thing to try would be to add a case fan to increase airflow.

[hellbringer]

save yourself some money and do as i suggested in an earlier post and take the panels off your case this should increase air enough to determine if fans are going to solve anything

[BillP2]

Will do.

[BillP2]

After taking off the cover (it's a desktop, not a tower), I set it to rendering the video and monitored the CPU and system temperatures..

This time, the CPU temperature stabilized flipping between 54 and 55 degrees C (1 degree below the level at which it had been shutting down) and the system temperature stabilized flipping between 34 and 35 degrees C (about 0.5 degrees above the level at which it had been shutting down).

This time, the process ran thru to completion and I got the DVD of my camcorder tape! I still don't know for sure just what component is causing the shut down, but it seems that If I can keep the temerature down, I can get my projects done.

I plan to go ahead and get a fan, but my case seems to be set up for two small fans with 2" mounting hole centers and with just 1 3/16" between the mounting holes for the adjacent fans. I don't know if such a small fan will do the job.

--------------------- Bill