my pc keeps crashing, HELP ME!

[TrevL63]

my pc crashes whenever its running 3d games, movies and basicly anything that uses the video card (except 2d)

my pc sucks, but i got no money to upgrade right now. here are the specs
Athlon 950
384mb
gf3ti550
winxp
soundblaster live
everything updated,including via 4in1's

 

[mchammer187]

make sure PCI slot 1 is empty

could be an ACPI problem (live is supposed to have problems with that) but i never had

latest bios?

 

[TrevL63]

yea i think i got the latest bios... im not sure. this motherboard is a gcm something or whatever.

all pci's are filled, cant remove any of em. this problem has been going on for 6 months and i just dealt with it, but now i cant take it anymore! btw when it crashes it makes a squealing noise(from the soundcard/speakers)

 

[Bleep]

The MB is probably a BCM does that sound right? These are good motherboards. Take out the soundcard and leave the slot next to the agp slot empty. It may well be a conflict with the soundcard.
The best way to find the problem is remove all the cards except the video card and boot the machine, try the game that is causing the crash without sound and see if it crashes. It might be a heat problem also, get a can of air and clean out the HSF and the power supply, check the volume and temp of the air coming from the PS fan. It could be memory related if you have 2 sticks of memory remove one of them. A process of elimination is the only way to find things like this.
Bleep

 

[tsnyder]

your symptoms sound like an IRQ conflict if i ever heard of anything. Video cards and sound cards are the least willing to share resources with other devices. Like the others said, you should take out all your PCI cards and start from there. Add one at a time, starting with your sound card. If you had a PCI video card than you would use it in the first PCI slot otherwise when using an AGP card you should not use the 1st PCI slot. It's kind of stupid that boards come with 5 and even 6 PCI slots when many times you end up getting conflicts if you populate all of them. I don't believe this is much of an issue though with Win2k/XP since the OS assigns something like 255 virtual IRQ's to the devices installed with IRQ 9 being listed in device manager as the IRQ for each device. This I believe is an extension of ACPI PCI compliant devices. I wish I knew more about this, but what I do know is that I have almost no issue with this since I started using WinXP. I'm suprised you're having a problem. Personally I think it's your sound card, SB can be pretty crappy ... I mean buggy sometimes.

 

[Ausm]

<< The MB is probably a BCM does that sound right? These are good motherboards. Take out the soundcard and leave the slot next to the agp slot empty. It may well be a conflict with the soundcard. The best way to find the problem is remove all the cards except the video card and boot the machine, try the game that is causing the crash without sound and see if it crashes. It might be a heat problem also, get a can of air and clean out the HSF and the power supply, check the volume and temp of the air coming from the PS fan. It could be memory related if you have 2 sticks of memory remove one of them. A process of elimination is the only way to find things like this. Bleep >>



BCM Make good boards? Last I looked at I nearly lost my Lunch

Ausm