I ordered this barebones system in a new 350w case from mwave.com last week, and added the video and drives Saturday. Used a 20 gig Maxtor drive I had lying around, and a CD-rom and burner from another system. Couldn't get XP CD-ROM to boot for some reason (it said "non-system disk"), so booted to Win 2000 CD, installed that, then did a fresh XP install, and things were hunky-dory. Hooked up a couple of external USB drives and started transferring over all my sw and music, etc, and it was much faster than my old K6-III 450, and I was very happy. After a few hours I started getting a PC Speaker beeping that I thought was a heat alarm (occasional chirps progressing to constant beeps after a couple hours), but I went into CMOS and the CPU was in the mid-40's. This case has 3 fans in addition to the CPU and AGP fans, and when I opened the case everything was cool to the touch, so I Disabled the speaker alarm on the PC Health screen. Things were great Until.... Until I set the CPU FSB speed to 200 MHz the next day. No other changes in CMOS, and I only did this because I had read something online about it. I used to overclock my P-120 to 133 MHz, and it's been that long since I messed with overclocking. As soon as I chose "Save and Exit" in CMOS, the system shut down completely and the front power switch wouldn't respond. Cycled the rear hard switch off and on, then the front power switch turned on all fans and drives, but she wouldn't POST. Turned her off, jumpered to clear CMOS, then tried removing battery for an hour, but couldn't get it to POST. Finally found Jumper 10 that hard-set the FSB to 100 MHz and let me get back into CMOS to set everything back to "Default" (including FSB to 166), then I replaced Jumper 10 to the default position. Things seemed fine until 15 minutes later. Now she crashes. Not blue-screen or software crashes, but complete shut-down. Everything looks fine, then everything dies as if the power strip has been shut off. Eerie. I have to cycle the rear hard power switch before the front switch will respond. It boots easily into XP each time, and stays up anywhere from 5 minutes to 45 minutes. At first I thought it was a heat issue, but I was running PC Alert 4, and the CPU never gets above 48 degrees C, and I've seen it crash when it was as low as 42 degrees. Then I thought it was an issue with the Cooler XP software that is in PC Alert 4, so I stopped using PC Alert 4 completely and downloaded AIDA to help monitor the heat. But that didn't help. It successfully ran VirusScan on 80,000 files, then died while I was in ACDSee looking at some pics. After rebooting, I was listening to a music CD and watching some mpeg movies A-OK for 45 minutes, thinking things had miraculously healed themselves. I changed drive letter assignments on the CD's (I like my reader to be "R" and my writer to be "W"), rebooted normally, walked out of the room as XP finished booting, and came back 10 minutes later to a shutdown system. Aargh!!! I can't find a pattern or a reproducible way of causing a crash. The system ran A-OK for 36 hours straight before I did the FSB change, and I made no physical changes, so I don't think I have a shorted motherboard or something installed incorrectly. I have reseated the video and all IDE connections. I don't see anything physically wrong on the board like a blown cap. I did move the RAM stick just now to another slot to see if that would help, but no go. What can I do to figure out what is crashing? Did I damage my RAM or something when I changed the FSB to 200? Is there some kind of monitoring software that would create a dump file during a crash to help me figure this out? Thanks for any help! -=b.

You'd done everything according to the book. How is the 12+ volt reading, PC4 Alert shows it too? I'd say your PS could be suspect.

The +12V readings are 11.55 to 11.73. I'm seeing the following 4 readings, fluctuating regularly: 11.55 11.61 11.67 11.73 The one I'm seeing most is 11.61. I'm watching it in AIDA32. -=b.

If these are non-overclocked readings, your PS is on the low side in 12 Volt rail. Or, you would have problem when you overclock. You should expect no lower than 11.5 Volt.

Thanks for the feedback. I've continued watching, and haven't seen it go below 11.55 at all, so I'm not sure that's it. This evening, I left it playing a music CD (so I could hear it go silent if it crashed), and it played for 50 minutes a-OK. Then I put the side cover on the case, sat down, and clicked around in Explorer looking for a file, and it died again. The last CPU temp I had seen was 44 degC. So I don't think it's a heat issue, but why would putting the case cover on affect it? So I booted back up, left the case cover on, and played the same music CD all the way through again. No crash. Weird. Just now I downloaded and installed the latest BIOS from MSI, as well as the latest nvidia drivers for the board and video. So far, almost everytime it's crashed has been while I'm sitting there clicking something. Mouse issue? I'm using an old Alps Glidepoint, but it's using it as a regular old PS/2 since I don't have Alps drivers loaded (haven't used them since Win95 days). Nah, can't be that... Just trying everything. Anyone have any other ideas? Is there such a thing as a monitoring utility that writes a frequent or continuous log file that might help sort this out? I was a VMS sysadmin for a few years, and remember my helpful dump files. Thanks in advance for any input!!! -=b.

It sounds to me like ur ram is the prob I have a k7n2 and set my ram to 2.7 v and its never crashed since.

I tried that. Set it to 2.7V, and it still crashed. But now I'm beginning to think it IS a heat issue. I downloaded a utility called "CPU Stability Test", and it has a function to warm the CPU, and I can get it to crash repetitively with this utility when the CPU gets to 55 degC or so. Or do these AMD 2600+ chips always crash at that temp anyway? -=b.