Little help please.

[Jojo7]

I posted this on the amd forums, but this place gets more views so I'll post here too.

My specs are as follows:
Asus A8V with 1006 bios
FX-53 cpu (not oc'd)
1gb Corsair TwinX 3200LL
Antec Trupower 480
Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
Radeon AIW 9700 pro, then GF4 4400, then GF4 4600

Here's what's going on. The system will randomly (it's hard to reproduce) kinda freeze up in games. It's like the games loses all the textures (I can still see the ground texture, but everything else disappears) then they come back, or sometimes it will just lock and repeat the same 10 or so frames of motion in the game where it locks.

I ran 3dmark in a loop last night and when I woke up this morning, 3dmark had crashed to the desktop and the monitor would show the desktop (the taskbar looked almost completely black) for about 5 seconds, then loose signal, then display the desktop again. Very odd.

At first, I was thinking it was temps. I was getting 59c under load and 45c idle. I took the side of the case off and now I'm seeing about 51 load and 38c idle. I've successfully gotten it to freeze up one time without the side of the case on, so I don't think it's heat related. *Note: it runs PERFECTLY stable in windows, but when I try to run games, I get lockups.

Also, as shown above, this same problem has happened on 9700 pro, ti4400 and ti4600. I even reinstalled windows between installing the 9700 pro and the 4400.

I was having these problems with the bios that came with the board so I flashed it and it's still having problems.

I'm pretty much blaming it on the motherboard. When I first started having these problems I ran memtest and it was ok. I haven't run it recently. I've had this ram for a while but I just purchased the other components about a month ago.

Should I RMA this board to newegg?

 

[blodhi74]

bad AGP slot on the mobo .... rma it

 

[Paperlantern]

Originally posted by: blodhi74
bad AGP slot on the mobo .... rma it

bingo

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

have you tried different AGP settings in the bios? maybe its undervolting the cards? graphics isn't my specialty since i don't game,but it could very well be a setting like fast write that could be flawed in the bios. try disabling everything AGP related, maybe the "fail safe defaults" for the entire bios to try and rule out settings. it sounds like it could be a cache/ram issue, it gets overflowed,stalls,then kicks over again.

close all background running processes and programs that could cause issues. i've seen programs like zone alarm mess up games and 3D all the time.

lastly,i'd try other games, maybe its a flaw in that game, and per chance a flaw in 3dmark. did you BUY this game?

if you've ruled out video card(using those 4 cards also ruled out software), and tried the ram in another PC and can rule that out, CPUs either work or they don't, so that'd bring it down to the motherboard.

best of luck.

 

[mikecel79]

Have you tried loading the latest drivers for this motherboard? I'm not real familiar with Via boards but I've read on here people with similiar problems fixed it by reinstalling the Via 4 in 1 drivers.

 

[Jojo7]

Originally posted by: AWhackWhiteBoy
have you tried different AGP settings in the bios? maybe its undervolting the cards? graphics isn't my specialty since i don't game,but it could very well be a setting like fast write that could be flawed in the bios.

Yea. Last night I disabled fast writes (from suggestions from other people with the same board) and I upped the voltage on the ram to 2.7 (from suggestion from mechBgon). It ran stable for about 1300 runs of 3dmark. I'm going to let it continue to run, but even so, like the other 2 in the thread said, I think it comes down to a defective agp slot. I shouldn't have to make these tweaks for my board to run right.

Also, I've already played around with closing all programs, antivirus, etc while running games. It LOOKS like it doesn't play a part in it, but I'm still looking at this.

As far as the games go, 3dmark is the free version, I bought ut2004 a while back and I bought farcry just recently. I've had problems in all of those. They are really the only programs/games I have installed on this new pc.

 

[Jojo7]

Originally posted by: mikecel79
Have you tried loading the latest drivers for this motherboard? I'm not real familiar with Via boards but I've read on here people with similiar problems fixed it by reinstalling the Via 4 in 1 drivers.

I installed the newest 4-in-1's from the via website. That's kind of a joke since they were released in Dec of '03.

I installed stuff in this order:
OS
4-in-1
Service pack
Nic driver
Windows updates
Dx9b
Sound
video

I haven't tried a reinstall of the 4-in-1's, no.

 

[Jojo7]

Well, I rma'd the board to newegg this morning. My gut feeling is that it has something to do with a bad agp slot or something similar.

I had to pull the trigger on the rma now because if I had waited any longer, I would have had to rma through asus and I probably would have gotten a refurb in return. This way, I'm guaranteed a new board and if it gives me more problems, I'll know it's not the board.