Maxpi doesn't know anyone who uses AMD? I built 16 networked workstations for a very large and computation intensive government body because of the extreme high performance at one tenth the cost of cray, one eighth the cost of ibm, and one fifth the cost of intel (which you should be thanking me for Joe tax payer) with pi calculated out to 10,000 places exact. The validation process is a third party computer program hooked up to optical trace route lances that even you could buy (for a few hundred thousand). You also may want to talk to the Microsoft engineers working of the "Longhorn" operating system as they use AMD (couldn't help the plug for Texas). Sorry for being long winded but my tolerance for ignorance is very small.
Let me ask you this richtrader, is your memory hole 15-16 enabled on you mb bios? That is an old motherboard solution to conflicting cards. This is no longer needed now except for sound blaster.When the IRQ gets to sound blaster , the card bumps what ever is in that memory seat out to take it's place and now you have a divide by zero .... crash.
Im no hardware expert either but the 100% cpu usage caught my eye especially since I've had some dealings with an underpowered computer which has long been replaced. If you are running ordinary trading software (esignal TWS, two screens), I see no reason that you should go above 15% cpu usage with todays hardware. In any case if your cpu gets anywhere above 60% usage, you are taxing it. It should never get above 80% and certainly not 100%. That seems like a possible source of your problems. Has your CPU load increased in the past 8 months to account for the crashes when 8 months ago there wasnt such a great load?
For one. Stop blasting AMD! You need to stop talking out of your ASS! Both AMD and Intel make good products there is no sense blaming a PC issue on a processor that fuctions. If it was a chip problem it would not boot up. If it was heat related he would see the high temps on MBM. Its a process of elimination with PC problems and its not solved by choosing one processor over another. I have the same chip as Chisel has and its even overclocked with no issues at all. I have another system with a XP1600 that runs flawless. My older system is a Athlon 500 that runs great. Surely if AMD's products are less than satisfactory i would notice it. Chisel you may have an issue with the powersupply. What size powersupply and what type case. Another thing to check is all connections to the board from the powersupply since you built the machine you may want to try that.
If you are really running your CPU at 100% for a few hours, you may have heat buildup. So your CPU tries to reduce its clock rate to cool off and suddendly you are out of resouces and the computer locks up.
I've never had any problems when running the cpu at 100% for a few hours. Just opening a huge text file will peg the cpu at 100% for a few minutes. I keep the temp below 50C and have good cooling. Just during ordinary usage the thing locks up at random.
I have the adjustable fan Enermax 350w power supply. The case is a basic steel Enlight tower. Not huge, but it has 4 big bays (cd-rom size) if that tells you anything about it's size. Very basic case. Now, let's talk about my 2nd case. It's a blue aluminum Chieftec tower with an acrylic side panel. I LOVE IT! I'm leaving town for a week, but I'll give this thing a good going over on President's weekend.
On the off chance these settings somehow got changed, you may want to see if your network card settings are Connection Type = Auto Detect Transmit Threshold = Store And Forward
Forgot to answer this.... No, the load hasn't increased. I'd say the cpu runs at 100% for 5 hours/week. An hour or two here and there.