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| Thread ID: 52723 | 2004-12-28 04:42:00 | Graphics Problems | craig.b (6571) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 308135 | 2004-12-28 04:42:00 | Lately I have been getting some bad crashes occuring when playing a variety of games, both new and old, that in most cases have worked successfully on my machine in the past. At random times during gameplay the computer will either spontaneously reset, or drop back into windows, and never displays any kind of error message (either from the game, or windows itself). The time before crashing varies, and can be several hours. The crashing now occurs in all 3d based games I have, new and old. battlefield 1942, and vietnam, doom3, colin mcrae rally 2004, and my latest aquisition NFS underground2. All of these crash, and all apart from underground used to run very well on my system. In each of the games, I have lowered the graphics settings to the lowest res (640x480) and lowest quality, and have not got anti-aliasing, or anisotropic filtering on either. This has not helped in any of the games. My hardware is more than adequate. AthlonXP 3200+ (barton core) 1024Mb Dual Channel DDR400 RAM Geforce FX 5600 w/ 128Mb Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard More than 40Gb hdd space free on c: 32x CD player (but games are all full installs - only uses cd for check at start) My motherboard temp sits around 30-35 deg C and the cpu around 58-65 deg C. Things I have tried: (all of these things have been suggested in a number of troubleshooters or forums i have read) - turning off AGP fastwrites in the bios - disabling any unused hardware, and removing their drivers - decreasing graphics settings - setting high performace/low quality options in the gfx card setup panel - installed latest nvidia drivers - installed DirectX 9.0c - reinstalling the games after driver updates I have also run MemTest-86 for nearly two hours testing my RAM, and that found no errors at all. None of this has helped, and I have no idea what else to do. Can anyone suggest other things to try? Cheers, Craig. |
craig.b (6571) | ||
| 308136 | 2004-12-28 05:00:00 | What version of Windows? If XP go to control panel/admin tools/ run event viewer. Look in event viewer. Tell us what the errors say here under system. | Speedy Gonzales (78) | ||
| 308137 | 2004-12-28 05:12:00 | what drivers are you using? update them or try the omega drivers, or reinstall the card. | Prescott (11) | ||
| 308138 | 2004-12-28 06:21:00 | It's hard to diagnose! Some more trial and error may be needed. Have you run dxdiag to see if there're any hiccups there? I'd suspect either a PSU problem or hard drive issue. Have you got a second PSU to try, and/or a second drive you could install the games onto and run from? |
Greg (193) | ||
| 308139 | 2004-12-28 07:42:00 | Thanks, Yes the OS is XP Pro, SP1. (Please don't suggest SP2 as I am not having that on my system due to other software issues.) The PSU is a 420W Thermaltake unit. It is powering 2 seagate Hdd's and the cd writer, the graphics card and a tv card (normally, but I have removed this while testing, as it is not really xp compatible - didn't help though) and the motherboard and cpu obviously. I have run dxdiag, no problems there, and the event viewer shows nothing but information tags relating to the boot process. I can see nothing unusual there, excpet a database manager keeps starting and stopping. This is the message: "wuauclt (848) The database engine 5.01.2600.0000 started.", then a minute later: "wuauclt (848) The database engine stopped." Unfortunately I haven't got any other hardware to test with that is good enough to bother putting in this machine, but I can say I have made no major changes to the hardware for a long time, and the only software changes have been game installs and driver changes. By the way, what are omega drivers? I grabbed the highest driver set I could find on the nvidia ftp site, which is not WHQL signed, and isn't listed on their web site yet. The version is 67.03 I am going on holiday tomorrow, but if people could add more suggestions, I will try them when I get back, but I am leaning pretty heavily to a clean install, as it has been a year or so since I last did one... Thanks, Craig. |
craig.b (6571) | ||
| 308140 | 2004-12-28 08:37:00 | Something else to add. I just ran one of the games now, while also running my motherboards temperature monitoring app. The temp at the time on the crash was 65 degC. Case temp is 29. When I get back from my holiday I think I will get a thermocouple device from work and check on the graphics card temps to see if that is showing anything odd. I have a feeling it may be temp related as the crashes come more often and earlier now it is getting warmer. Maybe someone knows of some test like memtest-86, but for graphics card ram, and GPU's?? Cheers, Craig. |
craig.b (6571) | ||
| 308141 | 2004-12-28 20:11:00 | omega drivers are a seperate set of drivers for your graphics card, they are way better IMO and they are "tweaked" and enhanced for gaming, check it out here (http://www.omegadrivers.net) | Prescott (11) | ||
| 308142 | 2004-12-28 20:14:00 | but the problem _seems_ to be a hardware related one, im thinking the ram?? i see you have 1024mb ram, try to take a stick out and see if that one is a dodgie one and do the same with the other | Prescott (11) | ||
| 308143 | 2004-12-28 20:53:00 | Yeah, i thought it was the ram too at first, as I have had a dodgy stick of ram before (in a different pc), but when that died it crashed with a hard reset - this is crashing back to the desktop every time now, and i can continue to use it just fine - I can even start the game again straight away, and it will run OK for a few minutes. Also, I ran it all last night with memtest again, and it completed all 10 of the standard tests with no errors at all, so I am pretty certain that the ram is not the source of the problem. Cheers, Craig. |
craig.b (6571) | ||
| 308144 | 2004-12-29 02:01:00 | graphics card then, is it over heating? have you tried it in a different system? | Prescott (11) | ||
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