Built my sytem in late fall last year. Everything was Rock Solid. Now, the machine will lock occassionally while running a graphics app. CPU has never locked running MS office or other 2D application and runs at 46 C under max load (32 C system temp). I have run CPU tests and even artificially heated the case temps to get the CPU up around 50C and cannot get it to fail. lockups generally occur at about 45-47 C. If I get any error messages, it will usually be in reference to the GF3 causing some sort of error.
I'm pursuing two possibilities for the lockups:
1.) HEAT. Since I built the machine, summer has rolled around and the temp in the house is 74 deg F which is 6 deg warmer than what it was when I built the machine last fall. Based on the info above, I'm almost positive that the CPU is not causing the lockups and that they are related to the video card only.
Most of my graphics intessive apps like flight simulators will crash after about 2 hours of running. I ran 3DMark2001 for about 4 hours last night before it crashed. The craziest thing here is that I was using a space heater to pump heat right into the computer case near the video card on my CPU "heat" test and could not make the video card fail at that point (CPU waas reading 50 deg C and the System temp was at 36 deg C)
I'm going to underclock my card to 215/445 and see how long I can run 3DMark2001.
2.) SOFTWARE/DRIVERS. Drivers could be the issue as I've updated my flight sims with new patches, etc that may be unstable with my original driver? Also, can drivers "corrupt"? It would seem odd that all worked just fine and that if I never touched my video driver that it would suddenly get "buggy". Can someone comment on this?
What's going on here?
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