Low temperature crash

[Donalhugh]

Late in life, maybe too late, I've put together my first PC. MechBgon's guide and posts were invaluable. It's based on an AMD 64 3200 (939) and an ASUS A8V Deluxe Revision 2 mobo. Bios is 1008 and other details below.
The machine is all I wanted: quiet, fast enough and reliable except for one thing. If the room temperature is below 15 C, within 30 min or so the display freezes and the message comes up: VPU Recover has reset your graphics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver commands. The next message suggests restarting Windows. If I don't, another more drastic crash soon follows and the BIOS settings may have to be redone.
Now I have no intention of working in a room below 15. But clearly something is wrong. The VPU message suggested a faulty graphics card so I replaced it twice, once with an Nvidia 5200 and then with an ATI Radeon 9600. No change. Next I checked memory by using one stick or the other alone. No change. Having read posts about micro-cracks, I replaced the MOBO this morning. No difference.
1. Has anyone seen anything like this?
2 What should I do next? New hard drive?

Donalhugh

Antec P160 case
Samsung Spinpoint P80 160 GB SATA HDD
Plextor 712A DVD RW
Tagan TG420 PS
Crucial memory 2 x 512 CT6464240B DDR 3200 CL=3
Radeon ATI 9600 graphics card
Windows XP Professional, SP2

 

[S0Y73NTGR33N]

I'd say it's either hard drive or power supply. What kind of power supply do you have?

-green

 

[Donalhugh]

Thanks. It's a Tagan TG420-U01, bought in November last year.

 

[Donalhugh]

Low temperature crash problem fixed!!

I'd replaced the PSU with no change. Breakthrough was to run Windows in Safe mode - the PC didn?t crash even when room and PC were cold (starting at 12 C). Should have tried this earlier.

This suggested that a driver associated with some temperature dependent hardware was the problem. The blue screens seen when I had disabled VPU Recover mentioned the file ati2dvag and said that an infinite loop had been set up. This info allowed a narrower web search. Some of the results suggested things that didn't help, e.g. reducing AGP from 8x to 4x, and disabling Fast Write. But then I came across a post by 'cobrakaun' in a TECHSPOT forum. He?d found that changing the driver found in System Devices (in Device Manager) under CPU to AGP controller to PCI Standard PCI-to-PCI Bridge had solved his 'infinite loop' problem. So I followed his keystroke-by keystroke instructions and rebooted. No cold crash! Nor have seen one since. It?s early days but looks really promising. I don't game so that reduced graphics speed shouldn?t be a problem. DVDs play well as do PowerPoint animations.

Question remains as to what it is that's temperature sensitive. Because I have tried three graphics boards and a second MOBO, it looks at though the problem has to do with either the AGP section of the MOBO or the processor (AMD 64 3200 939 90 nm). I don't know enough to take this further and would appreciate any suggestions.