Strange CRC/BIOS ISSUES

[Unregistered]

Ok, heres the skinny:

History: For about the last 2 months i've had freezes at boot up occasionally, these happened intermitantly right afte windows was completely loaded, this happened every 1 in 5 times or so and if it got past that point I had no further problems.

Today: Since yesterday I have been having programs crash out on me once every five minutes, now whenever I try to download a decently long program it of course fails CRC, but get this, if i run something that fails the CRC check over and over sometimes it eventually works (So it must not be the written file that corrupted?).

Anways, frustrated I decided to format and reinstall my OS. The OS install went fine although it had one unreadable file that when I retried copied fine. The whole OS installed. Next I boot up the computer and try to download ATI video drivers. CRC error warnings after file download.

I started swapping out the ram chips I have changing slots and doing each chip seperately (I have 2 512MB DDR2700 chips) each time I swapped a chip I tried to download the video drivers again, each time reguardless of what slot or what chip the drivers had CRC errors.

While I was messing with the ram I was rebooting alot and during one reboot windows informed me that my BIOS was not ACPI compatible. Knowing this was not true I reset and the problem went away. However later while downloading more files I went to click on 'My computer'. This immediately rebooted the machine and when it came back up it was telling me my BIOS crc was corrupted and it wanted my to restore the defaults by inserting the supprt CD that came with it. I did as it ask and it froze up. I turned the computer off and on again twice and on the 3rd time the BIOS were working again.

I should also mention that I had flashed the bios previously after recieving the ACPI warning. What happened was on the first attempt to flash the bios the crc check failed. I ran it again and it worked fine.

So here is my view: Im leaning towards a motherboard problem (Its an ASUSp4p-800Deluxe), I know ram is a typical source of CRC errors but the bios errors seem to point to something more, could it be the ram controller?

It doesnt seem to be the ram beacause the likelyhood of 2 chips going bad at about the same time is astronomical. Also I suppose it could be a new CPU I installed 2 weeks prior to this, but windows fine and basic operations (except for long file transfers) seem to work fine.

PLEASE HELP. Im an experienced PC builder / troubleshooter but i've never encountered such a strange issue before. Any comments are welcome and appreciated.

Here are the system specs:

P4 3.2 800Mhz FSB
2 512MB DDR2700 chips
1 Asus P4P800-Deluxe MB
1 Ati Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
1 SB Audigy 2 Platinum Ed.
1 3com NIC

 

[Wargasm]

hmm tough one .
the cooling pasta wouldn't be vaporised ?
seen that happen with weird errors.

tho i think it is the mobo itself

did u remove all cards like sounds, nic, modem etc etc cept the vidcard ofcourse.

the PSU is still reliable (often a source of weird errors) ?

 

[Unregistered]

The only thing I didnt remove was the sound board. The sound board did function properly while installed.

The PSU should be fine its not that old and its a Antec Tru430W.

I also dont think it could be the HD beacuse it managed to do a full XP install.

Im gonna try to get a replacement motherboard and cross my fingers.

Other thoughts are appreciated, I will post and let everyone know the results.

 

[Unregistered]

Update...

Turns out it was a bad Cache on the processor. Oh well that headache is over.

Thanks to those that helped!