Need help with crashing/flakiness - UPDATED 7/8 - HELP MEEE

[indd]

So sick of dealing with PC flakiness!

Hardware:
Antec SLK3700
Antec TruePower 480 P/S (just upgraded)
Asus A7N8X Deluxe MB
XFX 6600GT (AGP)
Few PATA HD's
DVD-ROM + DVDRW
120mm in and outtake fans
using onboard sound

Latest nvidia video/nforce2 drivers installed.

I play counterstrike source mainly when gaming.. A few symptoms of the flakiness:

I'll be playing, and the screen will blank out. Of course it's conveniently when I'm in the middle of a firefight -- ie when the processor is probably churning away. The blanking will last about 1.5 seconds, and come back.

Another sign is when it actually crashes in game. There's no pattern to when it happens.. but it will just freeze.. I see the image on the screen last rendered, and the sound plays over and over and over.

It USED to do this with the stock Antec SL350 power supply, so I thought maybe the upgraded 6600GT was killing it. No, because it does almost the same with the TP480. Sometimes it actually gets a GPF and goes back to windows, but for the most part it locks up hard.

The computer crashes at the desktop as well sometimes. It's usually when some sound is playing -- and the PC hard crashes with the sound playing over and over and over. So it sounds like it's possibley the soundstorm crap, but I'm not sure how to troubleshoot something like this.

On a possibly related note I also noticed the northbridge is FREAKING HOT to the touch, anyone else notice this about nforce2 systems? Pretty sure it's not a CPU temp related problem as they look ok during the crashes (mid 50's)..

Please help! I'm about to go mac

 

[indd]

Well, still crashing -- am trying XFX's drivers ( which is nvidia's version 66.93 ).

Another question - what version of the nforce drivers do you A7N8X Deluxe owners have running stable on your systems?

 

[cholley]

i was gonna tell you to try vendors video drivers, i had some issues with the 6600 and nvidia drivers, go to guru3d.com for the answer to the nforce driver question

 

[imported_fatal]

Originally posted by: indd
Well, still crashing -- am trying XFX's drivers ( which is nvidia's version 66.93 ).

Another question - what version of the nforce drivers do you A7N8X Deluxe owners have running stable on your systems?

I'm running the most current Nforce drivers with no stability issues. Is you card getting too hot?

 

[indd]

Thanks!

No crashes yet using old nforce and XFX's drivers -- did get one black out though.

Not sure if the card is getting hot -- how do you tell? Is there some kind of temperature monitoring for video cards nowadays?

 

[foofoo]

have you tested your ram?
try memtest.
http://www.memtest86.com/
use the bootable iso cd image and go for it. if it passes that, start checking other things.
are there any helpful messages in the event viewer?

 

[indd]

Coming back atcha 3 months later. It has run ok for the past few months. I got nvtuner, and it worked out well for me.

More problems going on than earlier though--they've come up in the past few weeks. Lately all I've gotten is lots of crashing, sound flakiness, slowdowns (when lots of i/o is going on), hard drive problems (ie windows can't find a drive, but sees it after a reboot), and it keeps on losing the network connection. All this is much worse during games. Ie in counterstrike I'll use push to talk, and then I'll lose the network connection. It's pretty similar when using prime95 to test the system (no errors there however).

I measured the molex connectors on the mobo, and the 12V is fine. The 5V however goes down to as low as 4.55V when doing a lot of I/O. Originally I thought the problem might be the onboard stuff, so I added an Intel 10/100 NIC and a CMI8378 sound card. Same BS. Loses network connection, and the sound is flakey. Upgraded all drivers, and same crap happens so it's definitely hardware.

I know I'm getting some heat issues.. that northbridge gets really really really hot. So I took the case cover off and have a fan blowing in, with same (but less) problems. Now if I remember right, the 5V connection powers the peripherals of the system. So is this 4.55V a sign to replace the power supply? I have a feeling I'm going to need to replace both the PSU and the MB, but thought I'd see if anyone else had any other thoughts.