Computer locks up

[Mandin62]

I recently upgraded from a 7900 GT to an 8800 GT and well I am really impressed with the difference. The problem is that it locks up in games after about 30 minutes to an hour, I mean locked up nothing works but manually restarting it. I am water cooling everything in my case mobo chipsets, vregs, cpu, and gfx. Ok so not everything but almost. I am running dual 2x120 rads and have 7 total 120mm so its pretty cool. During gaming the gfx chip never goes above 40 and I mean never. That is the highest temp to date. I don?t have any cooling on the ram though. So I am wondering if that could be the problem. The card is running at all stock clocks. I felt the ram on the card and they are no warmer then my mobo ram. So yeah I don?t know. Any ideas. Drivers are all up to date as well. The main culprit is COD4. Thanks for any input. I would like to get this sorted out as I am really loving COD4 online and it?s a pain when it locks up in the middle of a map.

 

[Tempered81]

is your cpu overclocked?

is your nb/mgch/ram/pci-e/cpu vcore voltage increased?

 

[error8]

Are you using an factory overclocked 8800 GT?

 

[Mandin62]

my cpu is overclocked. but i dont believe that to be the problem. i ran COD4 with my 7900 in the same rig for hours on end. the card is not overclocked. some voltages are increase but have not been increased since the upgrade.

 

[chizow]

Really need more details here. Like Rig specs (CPU, mobo, RAM, PSU etc), OS, etc etc.

Just because an older card ran fine in your rig does NOT mean you should expect a newer, more powerful card to run fine as well, especially if you're overclocking. A faster card will absolutely put more strain on your PCI bus and NB/memory/video/CPU subsystems, not to mention your PSU.

Make sure you're running 169.25 WHQL, try everything stock, non-OC'd, then go from there.

 

[Mandin62]

CPU=e6600 @ 3.5
MOBO=P5B Deluxe
RAM= 4 GB Corsair XMS2 800Mhz
PSU=Corsair 620
GFX= XFX Alpha Dog 8800GT
HDD's=2x500GB WD and 1X320GB WD
DVD's= 2xSony DVD-RW
Vista x64
everything is up to date drivers, games and os

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: Mandin62
CPU=e6600 @ 3.5
MOBO=P5B Deluxe
RAM= 4 GB Corsair XMS2 800Mhz
PSU=Corsair 620
GFX= XFX Alpha Dog 8800GT
HDD's=2x500GB WD and 1X320GB WD
DVD's= 2xSony DVD-RW
Vista x64
everything is up to date drivers, games and os

Hmmm everything looks pretty good from a PSU and driver/OS standpoint. Is the GT watercooled too or still have the stock cooler? I think you said its 40C max which makes me think its watercooled and not an issue. What FSB are you running? I'd still try and run stock for a bit and make sure its not the CPU/FSB OC. You'll still be able to OC but you may have to try a lower FSB or tweak some BIOS settings to get it stable again. It took quite a bit of tweaking to get my Q6600 stable from an E6400 and although the switch isn't entirely the same, just shows swapping an important component can cause some unexpected results.

Edit: The end result of a non-stable OC is the same though, total lock-up/freeze that requires a manual restart.

 

[error8]

I would try to lower the clocks on the video card. The alpha dog edition is an overclocked version of the 8800 gt, so it could have some issues with the clocks being to high even if the temperature is very low. I had some lockups with my 8800 gt when I overclocked it, and even though it was cool, it wasn't stable. I know you haven't OC'ed yours, but sometimes the manufacturers increase the frequencies to high.

 

[Mandin62]

the clocks on the card are core 600mhz and memory 900mhz i lowered the clocks but nothing. the thing that gets me is its only COD4 that locks up. i can run source, crysis, UT3, TimeShift, COD2 just fine with no problems. but yeah i dont know thanks for all the input. im going to keep messing with it. and any input you might have is still very appreciated.

 

[Tempered81]

you can try flashing the bios (as a last resort) over to an ssc or bfg oc, and increase the core voltage via the bios mod. thats probably not your issue with cod4 crashing..

for cod4 - maybe drivers/voltage/hrm i dunno try doing some stress tests, im at a loss here. Crysis should make you crash before cod4 would, but every system is different

 

[error8]

Well if it only happens in COD4 it has to be from drivers or something. I don't think is from your hardware.

 

[dparson]

Mandin62, I might be experiencing the same problem and have the same XFX Alpha Dog Edition video card as you but have it OC'd a bit more than the default overclock. The lockup I've received looks like a typical video card overclock issue where the screen becomes corrupt and freezes, while sound continues to play.

Using ATITool, Crysis, and Fear to test for stability, I OC'd my video card from 640/950 to 675/1000 with no issues. I'm guessing the COD4 engine is more sensitive to OC'ing and am reducing my video card speeds to hunt for stability. I've only had 2 lockups that came hours into playing so I'm not sure if COD4 is happy with my latest video cards speeds of 665/950, but lowering them is the approach I'm taking.

 

[Saiyukimot]

Stress test each part of your pc individually..


so re-test your CPU on Orthos for 8 hours...

Memtest your RAM for an hour or 2.

If both pass then it could be your motherboard thats at fault if you don#t get any artifacts in ATItool with another GPU program in the background, such as OpenGL Fur benchmark. Sometimes I find that I only get artifacts at certian settings if I have both running at the same time, with Fur on stability at lower than max resolution not fullscreened.

 

[Mandin62]

ok so i have set everything in my bios to standard or auto. so its all stock. and still no luck. it has to be something with cod4 because everything else is fine. i guess i will have to wait for the next patch and see if that fixes anything. i also reinstalled the game and video drivers. and nothing. thanks again for the help.

 

[dparson]

Mandin62, just another thought: when you removed the OC settings from your video card, did you also remove the shader overclock? My particular XFX Alpha Dog Edition 8800GT came with core=640, shader=1600, and memory=950 according to NiBiTor. To fully remove the XFX's overclock you'd need to reduce the shader speed to 1500.

 

[bdubyah]

my 8800gt freezes up sometimes as well. i'll either get red or blue ^'s all over the screen, and it will eventually blue screen and restart. thought it was too hot, so i bought a S1 cooler. no luck, still does it. even went back to stock clocks. still did it a few times when i played FEAR. seemed to be frequent there, but i quit playing after the second time. i have played crysis for a while on end before, no problems.

 

[Mandin62]

its all stock. its weird we have the same card yet mine doesnt appear to be overclocked by XFX at all. when i plugged it in it was at 600/900/1500. kinda upsetting but not the end of the world. i just played HL2 for 2 hours and no problems at all. it must just be something with COD4. thanks again. oh and dparson is that the highest overclock you could get on that board? my friend has the same thing and he cant get past 2.65 with his Q6600.

 

[dparson]

bdubyah, I had the same experience too with Fear being far more sensitive to the video card OC than Crysis. You described the exact same lockup I had with Fear and have had with COD4. I dumbed my card down to 600/900 (left shader OC'd to 1600) and for the first time did not have any issue in COD4, so my issue seems to be the video card OC settings.

Mandin62, really interesting that your friend is in a similar boat as me with the Asus MB and low CPU overclock. The fastest I could get mine going was 2.75GHz and it was quite a effort to get even that far. The MB acted very strangly while I was finding stable settings. Sometimes it showed the wrong memory timings during POST. Sometimes 2.8GHz worked fine and the next day only 2.66GHz would work. And sometimes POST would show a corrupt CMOS error message and I'd have to setup the BIOS all over again ... very strange stuff. In despiration I tried an "AI Overclock" setting in the BIOS that takes a percentage value and makes appropriate FSB and memory speed adjustments and that finally made the system stable. Using 15% gave me the 2.75GHz speed but going the next step up to 20% (2.85GHz) would not work. The MB didn't exhibit these unusual effects with my previous CPU, an Intel e4300 @ 3.15GHz. I was thinking I needed to reduce my temps but if you're friend experienced issues like I did, might just be an issue with the MB. I thought I saw that someone was using an older version of the BIOS and was considering looking into that as well ... they made a point to note their BIOS version was 403 in their signature while it's up to 703 at the moment, so maybe there's a reason for that. But anyway, sorry your COD4 issue isn't resolved yet, hope you can figure something out.

 

[Mandin62]

thanks dparson. yeah i think its a weird board thing as far as the motherboard goes. but yeah cod4 is still locking up but its ok i just have to limit myself to about 30 minutes of play at the most. sometimes i dont even get that. but yeah maybe its a good thing that it does that other wise i would spend all day playing. ok so being an optimist isnt really working but it was worth a try. thanks again for all the help.

dparson does that 92C scare you a little under load. that pretty hot. i mean i know these cards run hot but man. that would scare me. but i guess thats why i watercool my system so everything is at a nice cool constant temp.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: dparson
bdubyah, I had the same experience too with Fear being far more sensitive to the video card OC than Crysis. You described the exact same lockup I had with Fear and have had with COD4. I dumbed my card down to 600/900 (left shader OC'd to 1600) and for the first time did not have any issue in COD4, so my issue seems to be the video card OC settings.

Mandin62, really interesting that your friend is in a similar boat as me with the Asus MB and low CPU overclock. The fastest I could get mine going was 2.75GHz and it was quite a effort to get even that far. The MB acted very strangly while I was finding stable settings. Sometimes it showed the wrong memory timings during POST. Sometimes 2.8GHz worked fine and the next day only 2.66GHz would work. And sometimes POST would show a corrupt CMOS error message and I'd have to setup the BIOS all over again ... very strange stuff. In despiration I tried an "AI Overclock" setting in the BIOS that takes a percentage value and makes appropriate FSB and memory speed adjustments and that finally made the system stable. Using 15% gave me the 2.75GHz speed but going the next step up to 20% (2.85GHz) would not work. The MB didn't exhibit these unusual effects with my previous CPU, an Intel e4300 @ 3.15GHz. I was thinking I needed to reduce my temps but if you're friend experienced issues like I did, might just be an issue with the MB. I thought I saw that someone was using an older version of the BIOS and was considering looking into that as well ... they made a point to note their BIOS version was 403 in their signature while it's up to 703 at the moment, so maybe there's a reason for that. But anyway, sorry your COD4 issue isn't resolved yet, hope you can figure something out.

What BIOS are you guys running those Q6600s on? Its well documented that the latest BIOS for that board are poor OC'ers, 07XX and 08XX. 0607 or 0608 both OC well and support newer CPUs though. I couldn't OC the E2140 at all until I flashed down to the 0607s and its running stably now at 2.9GHz.

Mandin62, I'd consider RMA'ing the card if it can't run stock without crashing COD4.

 

[Doglips]

I had some freeze ups but after seting my fan speeds in Rivatuner...no more lock ups.Also OCed the card with no lock ups at all!

 

[Tempered81]

oh yeah, check the fan speed in riva first! duh! hahah.

btw, i dont understand how you guys with awesome sigs - dparson & mandin and others - how you guys have lock-ups in games.

thats so random. I have system comprised of cheapo bargain basement deals and it overclocks very well on stock cooling and never crashes in games (except when i oc very high and try crysis)

i do have problems with hardware compatability - an ieee1394 firewire card, two wifi cards, and a pci ide controller card - none work on my mobo ;( - they all give me code10 device cannot start.

 

[Mandin62]

i wouldnt call my rig awesome but it gets the job done. i could rma it but i dont think its the card. i mean it runs everything else fine. no freezing no artifacts not nothing just smooth game play. it has to be COD4. i dont know what it is too. i had an illegal copy installed and it ran great for hours on end, on lan of course. and then i went out and bought it and now its crashing. i can play one map through and then a couple of minutes into the next bam it bites the dust. i dont know i would like to avoid rmaing it. but i guess if i have to i have to or i could just not play COD4

 

[zeroburrito]

buy another copy of cod 4 and see if it still does it.

 

[dparson]

thanks for the BIOS version hint chizow, I'll definitely see if an older version results in a better OC this weekend.

Mandin62, the 92C did scare me and I immediately had to research it. It turned out that lots of other people had this temperature as well so it seems to be normal. I'm not worrying about it and just put the temp in my sig to spread the info and ease anyone else's concerns.

jaredpace, your computer probably runs games faster than mine and you paid less ... seems like you have the awesome sig