stability help needed

[Cecil Thornhill]

Andy, et al,

Well, I got the system back and had quite a surprise. I don't know if I
explained that I was looking at the video card when I had a problem with a
heatsink. The pin holding the sink for the Northbridge chip poped off and
flew out of the case while I was looking. I guess it is good that it
happened the way it did, otherwise my first indication of problems might
have been the MB frying itself up...

Anyway, of course the system was shut down while I had it open, and I
immediatly took it by my local dealer (where it came from) since I could not
get the pin back in - and of course the heatsink flopped off as I watched in
dismay...I asked them to give it a once over and get the pins back on, or
let me know what was up with this board.

It turned out they were able to get a new set of fasteners onto the heatsink
and they had no issues with it after that. I picked the system up today, and
fired it up, so I could re-test my seg fault issue in X. Low and behold,
nothing is wrong now. Yeah, that is right, with the new and improved
heatsinnk I am not getting any issues running yum or any other thing so far.

I can only assume that this means that I did not in fact have a software
issue, but a heat issue. I have seen lots of postings about overheated AMD
MB's having seg faults, and now I guess I am one too. This was not a CPU
issue as far as I can see, but had to do with the northbridge. That sort of
makes sense to me given the twitchy memory and IO issues on the Asus A7V600.
Yes I am also running a SATA drive in this box, and all the other bells and
whistles (fast RAM etc...).

OK...I have to admit that so far both the security and the features of FC4
are looking pretty good. If this resolves itself into a hardware issue (as
it appears to be now) then compatibility is going to get good marks too.
This is good news for me, and I hope things stay this nice. I am going to
run the system for a while and see if things stay all happy/shiny...

I just wanted to follow up in case anyone else may see something similar. I
am guessing a lot of these MB's are running on the ragged edge in the race
to pick up specs on the next guy. Not my favorite way to see hardware built,
but that is just not the sort of thing the OS can do a lot about....Great to
see a problem go away for a reason. I hope it proves out to be just a
hardware thing.

Cecil

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andy Green" <andy at warmcat.com>
To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 3:38 PM
Subject: Re: stability help needed


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