I've got a perplexing PC problem, and I'm about to just part out my system and go Intel now...

[dotnetguy]

Just wanted to give you guys an update on this issue --

Friday I received my new PSU - the Silverstone SST-ST50EF 500w.

The first thing I did was:

1. Take apart my entire system
2. Spray/vacuum out dust and lint (fans, cards, surfaces, slots, etc.)
3. Inspect everything for anything that might be out of the ordinary (passed)
4. Replace PSU (no issues)
5. Let run for 48 hours (passed)

Next:

1. I updated my Audigy2 ZS Platinum drivers (apparently they fixed some AMD64 issues)
2. Updated to latest Nvidia Forceware drivers
3. Cleaned/inspected OS and all drivers
4. Updated ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe BIOS to 1017.004 beta (figured I'd give it a try)
5. Defragged HDD using latest Diskeeper Enterprise

It appears my system can now stay running for more than 48hrs without WindowsXP locking or crashing or any program/OS instability, however the problem that is persisting is that games such as BF2, CS:S, CoD2, etc, appear to run fine for a time but then slowly the FPS gets worse and worse until the game is unplayable and I must reboot. Basically when I start the game i have 100fps shown in the upper right (I run FRAPS which shows FPS in any game- see fraps.com), then a half hour later it is 70fps, then 50, then about 40 the game starts to crash or kick me out of multiplayer.

I've watched temperatures and voltages and nothing is out of the ordinary. AMD Cool&Quiet is disabled. Motherboard chipset fan works fine and is running at 5443rpm. This new PSU is SLI certified, so i find it hard to believe i am maxing it out or anything during gameplay.

These are my temps:

Video Card (peak): 72c during hardcore gaming
Motherboard (peak): 42c
System: 30-34c ambient
CPU (peak): 50c
CPU (idle): 38c

Next up: going to yank half my ram and start playing around with memory.


I'll update this thread as I keep troubleshooting.

- dotnetguy

 

[JSFLY]

your video card temps seem really high. 60C is what I get at load. 40 c idle.

Also you do have amd dual core drivers installed right?

you can also run memtest to see if your ram is good. Or switch out your ram for some other type and try gaming for an hour. Might be a memory leak maybe?

 

[dotnetguy]

The display settings shows the temp one bar in the yellow at the peak, but most of the time it's in the green.

I do have the AMD dual core patch.

- dotnetguy

Originally posted by: JSFLY
your video card temps seem really high. 60C is what I get at load. 40 c idle.

Also you do have amd dual core drivers installed right?

you can also run memtest to see if your ram is good. Or switch out your ram for some other type and try gaming for an hour. Might be a memory leak maybe?

 

[evilsaint]

Y'know, this almost sounds like some sort of slow memory leak or something... or again, possibly something to do with the A64 memory controller not liking the four sticks altogether. Also, have you been monitoring the temperature of the memory? Or, on the temperature front, regardless of your (very thorough, I might add ) monitoring and everything, have you tried opening up your case and playing any of the games with a large household fan blowing on the MoBo to keep it even cooler? I doesn't seem like it'd be a temperature issue, but you never know, maybe one of your main components is starting to crack up just a little bit and the temps which would normally be acceptable to it are killing it off...

Last comment on the temperature front: try taking the cover off the fan on top of the HSU of your video card and looking for a pelt of dust and/or pet hair over the the openings to the heatsink that would normally be funnelling hot air off the GPU HSU. I found an issue on a different forum (can't remember which) about the 6XXX nVidia's and x8XX ATi's when I was having a problem similar to yours (gradual slowdown, but without the crashing), and I found what looked like a small furry rodent stuck in a place that you couldn't see no matter how hard you tried with the cover over the VCard HSU/fan. That "small, furry rodent" was blocking pretty much all proper airflow over the internals of the card itself, and raising the temps enough to slow things down, but not enough to shut the card down or crash.

Another troubleshooting tip: try some memory running at PC3200, or if anything, slow down the clock speed of your FSB to match the memory's FSB speed. I was running my PC3200 memory @ it's native 400Mhz next to my 333Mhz FSB for a while, but eventually I put the memory's FSB @ 1:1 with the CPU/FSB, and despite the slower speed of the memory overall, it eliminated a bunch of jitters that I had in games (especially memory intensive ones, like BF2 and to a lesser extent, CoD2), seemed to add to the general "quickness" of everything in WinXP, and raised my benchmark scores by a significant margin too.

Umm, yeah, that's about all I can think of... new MoBo and all, but try replacing the CMOS battery? /shrug Good luck

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: evilsaint
Y'know, this almost sounds like some sort of slow memory leak or something... or again, possibly something to do with the A64 memory controller not liking the four sticks altogether. Also, have you been monitoring the temperature of the memory? Or, on the temperature front, regardless of your (very thorough, I might add ) monitoring and everything, have you tried opening up your case and playing any of the games with a large household fan blowing on the MoBo to keep it even cooler? I doesn't seem like it'd be a temperature issue, but you never know, maybe one of your main components is starting to crack up just a little bit and the temps which would normally be acceptable to it are killing it off...

Last comment on the temperature front: try taking the cover off the fan on top of the HSU of your video card and looking for a pelt of dust and/or pet hair over the the openings to the heatsink that would normally be funnelling hot air off the GPU HSU. I found an issue on a different forum (can't remember which) about the 6XXX nVidia's and x8XX ATi's when I was having a problem similar to yours (gradual slowdown, but without the crashing), and I found what looked like a small furry rodent stuck in a place that you couldn't see no matter how hard you tried with the cover over the VCard HSU/fan. That "small, furry rodent" was blocking pretty much all proper airflow over the internals of the card itself, and raising the temps enough to slow things down, but not enough to shut the card down or crash.

Another troubleshooting tip: try some memory running at PC3200, or if anything, slow down the clock speed of your FSB to match the memory's FSB speed. I was running my PC3200 memory @ it's native 400Mhz next to my 333Mhz FSB for a while, but eventually I put the memory's FSB @ 1:1 with the CPU/FSB, and despite the slower speed of the memory overall, it eliminated a bunch of jitters that I had in games (especially memory intensive ones, like BF2 and to a lesser extent, CoD2), seemed to add to the general "quickness" of everything in WinXP, and raised my benchmark scores by a significant margin too.

Umm, yeah, that's about all I can think of... new MoBo and all, but try replacing the CMOS battery? /shrug Good luck

have you checked your peak commit charge at the beginning of a game and then one later when your fps slows down?

 

[Lasthitlarry]

I would try another PSU, Antec hasn't been too great lately, plus a lot of companies have been using bad capacitors for some reason. If it is not the PSU, I would think the video card temperature would be it, if not that, the RAM is having issues, download uptimer or just check the free memory to see if you indeed have a memory leak.

I almost want to say reformat.

Haha, you are going to choose Intel over AMD for games?

 

[sourceninja]

I dont feel like reading the entire thread. But make sure you have the AMD cpu drivers installed and the windows xp dual core hotfix installed. If you dont, you will get weird problems when gaming. You can test this by setting the affinity of a game to a single core. If it works, y ou need the hotfix.

Sorry if it was touched on our all ready ruled out. I dont have time to read the thread.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Lasthitlarry
I would try another PSU, Antec hasn't been too great lately, plus a lot of companies have been using bad capacitors for some reason. If it is not the PSU, I would think the video card temperature would be it, if not that, the RAM is having issues, download uptimer or just check the free memory to see if you indeed have a memory leak.

I almost want to say reformat.

Haha, you are going to choose Intel over AMD for games?

he already put in another psu, and he is not choosing intel over amd for games but looking for reliabilty, which is not a funny situation.

 

[MrUniq]

Your system performance is degrading....sounds like a hardware failure on some level. That is alot of hardware to run on 430W. I'm not experienced but check your event viewer. Maybe you are having disk access errors and as you game they multiply. When u do a power cycle it seems like it'd make sense that once reinitialzed your PSU provides plenty off power to run your system smoothly until the next session of heavy use slows it down again.

Personnally i'd unhook/strip all non essential devices to reduce power load and run the game again.

Also sometimes driver installs get corrupted, a complete driver uninstall/reinstall may help, i had to do that last night myself.

 

[NuroMancer]

So, after reading the thread, a memory of an issue just like this one jumped into my head. The issues were the same, after a while the PC rebooted, things slowed down, etc. The culprit? Motherboard, there was a hairline (or so ASUS said afterwards) fracture in part of the motherboard and as the system heated and with fans etc running the crack opened up more and caused the system to die.

#2 - Asus probe or whatever software you are using to moniter Temps can be wrong.
Personally I would take the cooler off the cpu, clean it, and remount it using artic silver.
This can fix alot of issues.

#3 - As others have suggested, try removing sticks of ram from the system so that you are only running 2 sticks. See if this runs more stable.

#4 - A good way to check for heat issues but not always correct, is to plug a house fan in, open up the case and blow air on it.

#5 Test Vid card in another system or friends system

Personally, I'd be very tempted to RMA the motherboard back to the manufacturer
I know I know, a pain but it seems like the next most likely culprit. But reseat the processor and check the vid card first.

P.S. I don't recommend taking the Heatsync fan combo off the northbridge to see if it crashes sooner. But do you get a temperature reading of the chipset in your onboard utilities?

 

[IdaGno]

dotnetguy, http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1835303&enterthread=y

as others have pointed out - sounds like, maybe could be...

do what the poster above did to determine it was just a heat issue & if that's the case, take it from there

GL!

 

[dotnetguy]

PROBLEM IS FIXED

Solution:

1. New PSU
2. Taking out half my RAM (using only 2 sticks instead of 4)

I downloaded the certified ram PDF from Asus for this motherboard and it states that my ram will cause instability if all 4 slots are used. Now that I have removed 2 and gone down to a gig, my framerate is solid and does not drop at all. So, as it turns out the PSU was the culprit for system instability within 24 hrs and the RAM was the culprit for not being able to overclock and also the FPS dropping in games after a while.

I've now been able to run CoD2 and BF2 for several hours with no drop in FPS !!!

Whew... I'm glad the troubleshooting is over and I can finally enjoy this PC. BTW, was able to overclock now and even bring up my FPS in some games.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions guys. There's definitely a lot of knowledgable people here.


- dotnetguy

 

[MrUniq]

good thing...the thing about systems is that people just assemble parts and expect them to work. Not exactly you have to research and follow suggested specifications. And now more than ever a quality PSU is needed because parts draw more and more power. The days of the sub 450W source is nearly over unless you don't game. Very few motherboards like 4 full slots...manufacturers should just use 2 slots really. I used to think that was stupid but it makes sense now.

 

[dotnetguy]

I would have never guessed my issue would be PSU related, considering the specs of the Antec TPII-430, and also having purchased it at the same time as the rest of these parts. I even ran only 2 HDD"s and still had the same issues. I just think it was a poor quality PSU, the specs just didn't matter.

It's actually a tough call considering that games demand more ram now, like BF2 for example. It's not playable on high settings with only 1gb, there is a lot of stuttering until the map is cached, and even still there is a lot of stuttering in really busy battles.

If you populate 4 slots you lose some speed, then if you populate 2 slots with 1gb modules you lose some speed there as well, but there are finally some 1gb sticks coming out that are a lot faster than what has been offered.

Now I've just got to find a good pair of 1gb modules that work well with this board, and also sell off the memory I'm currently using.


- dotnetguy

 

[MrUniq]

lots of people are using corsair...twinx i believe..but with the asus boards people have had setup issues at bootup that required them to go into bios.

 

[jamesbond007]

Originally posted by: CVSiN

Originally posted by: spikespiegal
I'm still trying to figure out what this has to do with AMD -vs- Intel.

OP cant figure out his problem so it has to be an "AMD THING"
thing is OP is low on power...
dont ever skimp on power... it is the heart and soul of your PC...

and hes runnign 4 sticks of ram which 939 A64s dont much like..
if you want 2 gigs buy 2 1 GB sticks not 4 512s...
system slows down and can be buggy with 4 sticks.. DC works best with 2 sticks.

Ok, I know the situation is fixed, but how is that not a CPU-specific issue, if it is true? If there's 4 slots, why is it a limitation of the CPU to be able to use only 2 of them? Is that NOT a CPU issue?

The last two systems I've built were gaming/business rigs for clients, both AMD-based, so no hating. I do like both companies. It's not what's inside that counts so much, but more so the care and heart that is put into creating and building any rig.

OP, congrats on the fix! :thumbsup:

 

[pacho108]

Originally posted by: jamesbond007
Ok, I know the situation is fixed, but how is that not a CPU-specific issue, if it is true? If there's 4 slots, why is it a limitation of the CPU to be able to use only 2 of them? Is that NOT a CPU issue?

The last two systems I've built were gaming/business rigs for clients, both AMD-based, so no hating. I do like both companies. It's not what's inside that counts so much, but more so the care and heart that is put into creating and building any rig.

OP, congrats on the fix! :thumbsup:

Thats why doing research before building a rig is essential, if he hadnt done it for the intel rig he was about to get he could have ended up with cpu-chipset compatibility problems which IMO is a CPU issue as well.