I recently built a Windows Server 2003 (SP1) machine with:
Supermicro X6DA8-G2 motherboard
2 Xeon 3.6GHz 800MHz FSB Hyperthreading CPUs (4 logical CPUs)
1GB RAM
NVidia G-Force 6600GT video card with NVidia 77.77 reference drivers.
Adaptec 2010S ZCR card controlling a U320 SCSI RAID-5

I installed BOINC on this PC, and in less than half an hour, the PC rebooted itself. I tried disabling BOINC, and the PC would then run indefinitely, but as soon as I started BOINC, the PC would spontaneously reboot within half an hour, usually in the middle of downloading work.

What might be causing this, and how can I fix it?

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What's in Windows' event log?

Besides that you could test your RAM with memtest86 - Let it run for 24 hours and check its diagnostics. I guess it's a RAM problem ...

Hi Monty,

I have had this happen to a couple of my machines too. I found that when running Boinc with 2k3 Server SP1, I would get the occational lockup/reboot. I didn't notice if it was having issues during download or not but did find that by setting the maximum number of CPUs to 1 solved most of my problems. This, of course, set the work load to approx 25%. By doing this it eased the workload and thus reduced the temperature of the processors. Hope this helps.

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Boinc Wiki




"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -Albert Einstein

What's in Windows' event log?

Besides that you could test your RAM with memtest86 - Let it run for 24 hours and check its diagnostics. I guess it's a RAM problem ...

The event log only shows that the previous shutdown was unexpected.

Memtest86 didn't find any RAM faults after having run for a much longer period than BOINC would have run before crashing the machine.

As for CPU overheating, both CPUs are running at around 30-35°C, which considering that another of my PCs' CPU runs at 60-70°C and runs BOINC just fine, means that CPU overheating seems unlikely to be the problem.

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