Hello everybody, I'm writing this as I have to ask your help about a series of problems I started having with my overclock Pentium 3 Tualatin RDD system. Since a month, at least since when I got my new graphics card, a Gecube Radeon X1950 Pro, my computer started exhibiting strange instabilities and blue screens. In the beginning, everything was fine, until I started overclocking the card. At first, the card would let me overclock to very high clocks and would run stable for a couple of 3Dmark03 sessions, until I'd get a BSOD with 0x0000008e as a error code, and after that, the system would either freeze at boot up or just blue screen at any stage of the benchmark.

"Okay", I said to myself, "Maybe it's just the excessive overclock that the card cannot handle.", so I've done a reset of the graphics card back to stock clocks (although the ATI Tray Tools reports that the card is running slightly slower than it should be), and everything has been alright for a while. After some time, I wanted to retry to overclock the graphics card, and I finally got it to run stable and successfully passed several 3DMark03 runs. Until the latest days.

The computer runs stable only once, sometimes. Then, if I try to run 3DMark03 more than one time, I get 0x0000008e BSODs (and no error message pointing to the culprit), even if I revert the graphics card clocks to stock and even if I reduce the overclock on the CPU (currently running at 148,64Mhz, it used to be stable at this frequency). As I thought it could be just a faulty graphics card, I replaced it with my old one, an Inno3D Geforce 6800GT that has been always stable overclocked at 415/1108. So I ran 3DMark03 and it's been stable only once, but if I repeat it twice, it gives me a BSOD but this time with another code, 0x000000D1 DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Forgot to say that on both the cards, the BSODs either happen during the CPU Test 1 or during the Mother Nature demo. So, I've ran Memtest86+ with all the three sticks (3x Infineon PC133 CL2 SDRAM modules) and it passed without any error. I tried to increase the vCore of the CPU from 1.45v to 1.55v, but no dice (with the vCore at 1.55v 3DMark03 wouldn't even complete before giving a blue screen with the 6800GT!).

In the beginning, all I had to do was shuffling the RAM sticks and that would sort the issue out for a while, but now it's no longer working. I also tried other RAM sticks I had that I knew they worked, but I get the same problem with both cards. Also, sometimes when I get the BSOD and reboot, the PC won't POST, giving me the Award beep code of missing graphics card (one long beep, three short beeps).

I'm at a loss, I don't know what to do anymore. My PC used to be fine and rock solid until I decided to try that ill fated overclocking on the X1950 Pro. What in the world could cause this? Could it be my PSU? It's a Corsair CX500M, it has 38A on the 12V rail which should be enough for both the 6800GT and the X1950 Pro. Could it be the RAM? I tested the three sticks together for an entire day and I got no error! Are both graphics cards dying? I have repasted them very recently and cleaned their heatsinks to rule out any possible issue. Could it be the motherboard? I'm quite scared to think about it, especially now that the price of Tualatin motherboards have skyrocketed meaning that I cannot afford one now, let alone in future.

Meanwhile I've bought an Antec High Current Gamer 620W, it has 48A on the 12V rail and 24A on the 5V and 3,3V rails. It's used but it should be sufficient, I hope. And I hope you all can help me, as I've been enjoying this system a lot, and I definitely don't want to scrap it after all the investments I've done on it. And I don't even want to think about a faulty motherboard, as I'm completely unable at any kind of soldering and recapping job, and I know nobody in Europe, let alone in my country, who can perform this job for me. I rely on you, guys, for help.

These are my specifications:

-CPU: Intel Pentium III-S Tualatin 1.4GHz overclocked to 1560MHz at 148.64MHz FSB
-Motherboard: QDI Advance 10T
-RAM: 1.5GB made by x3 Infineon 512MB PC133 CL2
-GFX: Gecube Radeon X1950 Pro with Catalyst 6.12 and ATI Tray Tools (in order to properly support 1024x768 @ 43Hz interlaced)
-Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Value (ISA)
-NIC: D-Link DFE-538TX
-Storage: 1x WD Blue 500GB SSD, 1x WD Velociraptor 300GB
-HDD Controller: Promise SATA300 TX2 Plus
-OS: Windows XP Professional SP3

If needed, I can attach the pictures I took of the blue screens. Unfortunately I have no minidumps as I have the pagefile on the data drive (the WD Velociraptor) and that prevents me to have those. If needed I can enable the pagefile on the SSD and hope the system will make them. Thanks in advance.