I think my video card is crashing my computer

[McManCSU]

I have had this POS Asus AX850 video card for a few years and more often than not, my games will crash. We are talking about Warcraft 3, battlefield 2, halflife 2, etc. I have tried updating all my bios/drivers for mobo and all, and it doesn't seem to help. Anyway, I want to track FOR sure who is causing my computer to crash before I shell out the cash for a new 8800 to replace my suspected culprit. Can you provide some insight on where to start or programs to use? On a side note, I suspect my video card because before I ever updated the driver it would crash and tell me it was the video card. With later versions, it decides to just crash my computer entirely. SO annoying...

I have 3.4GHz 64bit dual core AMD processor and an Gigabye SLI board (I know my SLI wont work with ATI cards, oops) and 2GB RAM. My PSU is 600W.

Thanks for the help; this is really pissing me off (sorry if wrong room)

 

[kmmatney]

Well, the obvious thing to do is try out another video card - maybe you know someone you can swap cards with. Or you can try your video card in another computer. That's the only way to really isolate the problem.

An AMD processor running at 3.4 Ghz is pretty fast. Try lowering the overclock as well. I'm not even sure I've ever heard of an AMD dual core processor running that fast.

 

[McManCSU]

Combined speed is 3.4GHz, not per core (i wish 🙂)

 

[McManCSU]

Any other suggestions?

 

[kylebisme]

Originally posted by: McManCSU
Combined speed is 3.4GHz, not per core (i wish 🙂)

So 1.7Ghz then? I've never heard of a dual core AMD chip that slow.

 

[McManCSU]

Good call, its actually 4.4GHZ so 2.2Ghz per core. It was one of the first ones (its been awhile since I have had to pull up the stats). So is there some program that can tail the error log and give me an idea of what is up? Could Dr Watson work for this (i just thought of this and Ill have to give it a try)? Thanks

 

[betasub]

Why are you adding together the core speeds? It's an X2 processor running at 2.2GHz.

Back to original question, what kind of crash is it? Application dump, blue screen, freeze/lock-up, re-boot etc. Check you error logs for evidence of problems.

 

[McManCSU]

Well it has done all of the above. The stock driver for the video card would occasionally minimize my game and pop up some error (don't remember what it said, but I remember it was related to the video card). Then I updated the driver, and the error changed from the error to a BOS. More time passed and I updated again. This time, the computer would lock up then restart on its own. Now, after more updates and the most current release, it just hangs completely. I have to manually reset it. I am nearly 100% sure it is the video card, but I would like to make sure first. I did a 10 hr long memtest on my RAM, and it didn't error once (relief, sort of 😉). Side note, I contacted Asus multiple times, and every time they either said get newest driver, or ignored me completely. Is this typical for Asus? It has been such a bad experience with them that I doubt I would buy another of their products in the again...

Thanks a lot!

 

[sutahz]

You havent commented on it, so I'll repeat it. Borrow a friends video card and try it out on your system, and if they'll let you, have them try out your card on their system, see what happens. If you have no friends w/ a compatible motherboard, go to the retailer you hate most (best buy for example) and buy a card, test out your system w/ it then return it.

 

[McManCSU]

I guess I could do that (BB is a good target 😉). My only concern is that this problem is not consistently reproducible, so I can't guarantee that I won't see the problem in a 30 day trial. Plus I dont have hours to spend playing games trying to crash my computer haha. I found some other forums that are dedicated to decoding the Windows dump files, so I will have to try to investigate that some more. I will keep this thread up to date if I find some more info on it.