random restart... can't figure it out

[AMD6415]

so me and a few friends put together a puter from some old parts we had layin around and it will randomly restart itself. For the most part it seems to do it when you have a load on it such as a game, watching a movie, or sometimes when you try to transfer a large file from HDD - Flash drive. We started thinking the GPU was overheating so we threw a fan on it... no luck, so we then thought the CPU might have been overheating from bad thermal paste so we got some new and put it on... again no luck, so we then looked into power thinking it wasn't getting enough so we threw in a 420W PSU.... yet again no luck. We are completely out of idea on whats going wrong the last thing I can think of is the GPU is bad, if it was would it cause it to randomly reboot?, any help would be great. Its got AMD Opteron 2.6GHz Socket 939 CPU, 2 one GB sticks of RAM, ATI X300 GPU and its running XP.

 

[InsaneJester17]

Maybe the memory is bad? Try running MEMTEST

 

[joelm3103]

What he said ^. Also have you had any errors or BSODs?

 

[yzmxer608]

What kind of motherboard is it? This happened to my Biostar TA790gxe, I had to turn off the G.P.U power saving option in the BIOS to solve it.

 

[Slaymate]

Thermal Paste is not a cure-all for overheating problems. Post a screenshot of Hardware Monitor running.
HW Monitor

What is the make of that 420w power supply?

 

[AMD6415]

after putting on the thermal paste we haven't seen the CPU go above 40-43C so I don't think thats the problem, I will have someone run the MEMTEST and back to you on that. No errors or BSOD, I'll have to get the exact model of the MOBO cause I can't remember and I don't have it right here. I don't know what kinda of PSU it is either but I don't think that is the issue since it did it with both PSUs that we had in there (250W - 420W)

 

[AMD6415]

ok I think we may have it narrowed down to the 1st RAM slot... not totally sure though, gonna run over there now so I'll let you guys know if we have anymore issues. There probably isn't any fix for a bad slot is there lol

 

[nOcLuE98]

There is not a fix for that, but you don't have to use it.

 

[AMD6415]

well after taking out one stick and switching back and forth between the 2 we finally narrowed it down to be a bad stick of RAM and not the slot so yea good deal... wish we would have started there so we didn't have to go through all the other stuff lol but oh well finally got it

 

[InsaneJester17]

Glad to hear you have it sorted out!