Help! Is this the problem of my motherboard?

[Jiayu]

Recently I experienced frequent crashes in 3D games. Any games, if it's 3D, freeze 5 mins into the game. 2-D games such as Civilization/Bauder's Gate run fine. All normal windows program run great... I can write a report 10 hours without any problem.

I have
Ep8k7A+ mb,
Athlon 1.2G,
Winfast 250 LE TD Ti4200 128M,
Santa cruz,
512M Crucial memory.
No overclocking.

I tried to locate the problem.

Reformat/reinstall WindowsXP with SP1 and all updates. Installed most recent Santacruz driver, Ep8k7A AMD driver, also I updated to the most recent BIOS for both Mb and videocard. I tried Nividia driver from 38.xx to 41.09, also I tried winfast driver from their website.

I used 3DMark2001 to check. The system fleezes 100% times during the 4th benchmark(the one with high resolusion flying dragon). Changing resolusion from 1024x768 to 800x600 doesn't help.

I pulled the Winfast Ti4200 card out and installed it into another Athlon 600 with FD11 mb . It runs 3Dmark2001 slowingly but without any crashes/freezes. I put the video card back into my 1.2G machine which freezes again.

It seems to be something is wrong in my Epox8k7A. I am wondering if I could RMA this mb? (I bought it a year and half ago). And even I could, how long would it take? Besides, it might be easier just getting another mb/cpu combo......

But all in all, is it a motherboard problem? It's wierd that the system keeps freezing at almost the same place. (It runs fine in the first three but always fails at the 4th benchmark).

Any help is greatly appreciated.


Jiayu

 

[Adul]

well i dont think your 600 mhz cpu could push the graphics card hard enough. Mayb you should try it in a similiar or faster system. Or try another video card. It doesnt sound like the MB to me.

 

[Jiayu]

If I put Radeon 7500 in Epox8k7A + 1.2G, it runs fine.
If I put Winfast Ti4200 in FD11 + 600M, it runs fine.
If I put Radeon 7500 in FD11+600M, it runs fine.

But if I put the Ti4200 in the Epox8k7A 1.2G, it inevitably freezes in 3DMark2001.

Unfortunately I don't have other video card/Mb to do further test. So could it be the problem of Ti4200, or Epox8k7A, or the interface between the two, or the power unit(Enlight 7237 300W)? I am really reluctant to buy a new mb to test it since it's not easy to install/reinstall CPU/fan/mbs.

I tried different CMOS setup but didn't get any better results.

Any further suggestions ?

 

[scorpioLP]

this is just a shot in the dark... but thought it may apply to your situation.... TID

 

[xSauronx]

did you do anything (upgrades and such) before this happened? or the same setup since youve had it and it just came outta nowhere?