Sub-zero problems

[sjohnson]

I use an attached, unheated "Florida room" for benching and burnin.

Currently I'm running a kx7-333 in that room. We're getting cold temps here so I was happy to see that we'd be getting temps below freezing (sub zero degrees C).

At 9 PM I checked on the system. It was looping Sandra Memory Bandwidth and doing fine. The system temp reported by MBM was 1C. The temperature of the room was dropping, my room thermometer showed -10C at 8:30 and -12C at 9 PM.

At 9:20 I noticed that the screen was dark. I power-cycled the box but it wouldn't boot. I unplugged the box for 10 minutes then plugged it back in but still no boot.

The same thing happened last night. As soon as I bring it into the house and let it warm up it boots fine.

From here, it looks like at some system temperature below 1C, I'm getting a "frozen" system :).

One thought is that the CMOS battery is too cold at low temps to supply any current to the system. But, the system is running when the temp drops and the rig "freezes."

Can anyone give me any clues about what I might do to keep my kx7 running in this cold?

[MuFf|n M@N]

What hard drive do you have?

[sjohnson]

Your choice, either of an old Maxtor 92739U6 (UDMA66/5400 rpm) or either of two WD 200BB's. It fails at the same temp regardless of which of those drives is in the rig.

I even tried running Prime95 and looping 3dMark2002 to keep the NB and SB "heated up" with the same results.

[KnightElite]

Did you disable the overheating protection in the BIOS? It could be that the thermister in the socket can't read below 0ºC, and therefore the board won't post when it can't read the temperature.


As you can see, I've had low case temperatures in the past wiht no ill effects, with the computer actually running and being used like this for several months.http://hjertaas.duncans.ca/idle.jpg

[sjohnson]

All the overheating and halt on fan failure options were disabled in the BIOS. I never use them, they're disabled on all my rigs.

The machine is running when the freeze occurs. It happens when the sys temp approaches zero Celsius on both my KX7-133 and my kr7a-133. The rig is not shut down, but rather the video is lost and the rig is no longer pingable or otherwise recogniseable as running (no disk activity, etc).

Weird, here I was hoping for a poor man's prometia ;)