Strange instability while gaming... any ideas?

[BigNachos]

I have a pretty common setup: Athlon 900, MSI K7T Pro, ELSA Gladiac GeForce2 GTS, Sparkle 300W PS, Windows 2000 Pro SP-1, etc. I've installed all the latest drivers and bios updates for the mobo and video, but I still get occasional lockups while playing games. The system is rock solid when doing anything else though.

Here's what happens: I start playing any 3-D accelerated game, and sometimes, usually just a couple minutes after I've started playing, the game will freeze. I'll lose mouse control and can't alt-tab or ctrl-alt-del out, but the system doesn't bluescreen. If I'm playing mp3's, they'll keep playing. But, I won't be able to ping the machine from another computer, so it's mostly cooked. This leads me to think it's a video card/driver problem.

I don't think it's a heat problem, as I've played for over 6 hours continuously without problems, and typically the lockups will occur after I've just started playing.

I've tried all different video drivers, including the latest released drivers from ELSA, and several of the 600 and 700 series beta drivers from nvidia, without any different results. I've tinkered with every bios option, including agp 4x/2x, main memory clock (100/133), etc.

I have the VIA 4in1 drivers installed, and just installed the latest version released today. But, I still get lockups.

I've pretty much run out of ideas. I wonder if the video card itself is faulty. Unfortunately, I don't have any similar nvidia cards, and the next best card I have is a voodoo3 which doesn't do agp 4x. I will try testing the system with that card, but it still won't help me if it's a driver or hardware problem with the geforce...

Does anyone have any other ideas of what could be wrong? Is anyone running a similar setup without any problems?

Thanks,
Nelson

 

[captainQR]

i've come across the same issue with my asus v7700.
everything seems fine, but it locks up every once in awhile.
my wiring in my house is not up to par, so i've purchased an apc ups to clean it up a little.
my next move is to format the hard drive and re-install windows.....

 

[MassMhz]

Hey guys, i have found that the bios shadowing, the video and bios cacheable settings in the BIOS of course, can cause what you are experiencing when they are enabled.....try DISABLED.

 

[Bloodybrain]

My friend has the exact same problem on his new T-bird 900 system.

Here are the specs:

Win2000 Professional
Athlon 900 Socket-A
Abit KT7-RAID
256Mb PC-133 CAS-3
Creative GeForce2 GTS 32Mb
SB Live
Maxtor 20Gb 7200rpm HD (on the 1st channel of HPT370 RAID ctrl.)
Asus 50X CD-ROM (on 1st IDE channel of VIA south bridge. 2nd IDE disabled.)
Realtek 8139 10/100 PCI Ethernet
PS/2 KB and mouse
USB is enabled.

All the PCI devices share the same IRQ (11) because of ACPI (is there a way to change that while keeping ACPI functionality?). I don't really like this idea as some PCI cards are prone to problems when sharing IRQs.
I'll try disabling Video and BIOS caching and post results here.

I've also heard of a problem (glitch in the chipset) related to IRQ sharing with the VIA KT133. Is someone aware of this or is it just a hoax?

 

[MassMhz]

You can remove the devices from the device manager, shut the sys down,move the hardware to different slots...put sound card in #2 to allow cooling for agp card ,Skip one slot as you go down, reboot and your drivers will install and new IRQ's will be assigned.If this fails, you can assign them by selecting non-plug n play and manually set them in the bios,but you must set the bios as the steering device in the device manager under system devices/pci bus to allow this.
GLITCH is a short term for I DONT HAVE THE ANSWER!

 

[Mem]

BigNachos,I`m running MSI K7T PRO (1.8 bios),Geforce2 MX(6.31 drivers) on Win98 os1 using latest 4.25a via drivers,anyway my system is rock solid even on gaming,what Bios are you using,if it`s 1.6 or below go into Bios & select normal for ram timings you could try the slower setting(8/10ns),
all video shadowing should be disabled including fastwrites,btw I`m running in AGP4X mode.

If you still cannot get it stable for games then what ram do you have?(I`m using Crucial CAS2 PC133) & I wonder if it could be a Win2000 thing since there are still games that have problems with this OS ,yes there are games that run fine but still a few that don`t.

 

[Lightingguy]

Since you rule out cooling, I think you might look at some of the suggestions which include:

BIOS update
Video driver update
4 in 1 driver update (ver 4.24 or 4.25)

These cleaned up intermittent crashes on my system.

 

[Peter]

Re the IRQ sharing in the KT133 chipset ... consider this a wild guess without any foundation.

Why? Two flavors of interrupt sharing exist. The first, having two PCI devices attach to the same PCI interrupt line, happens on the PCI side of things. The chipset is not involved, this is just an electrical issue - getting that right or screwing it up is up to mainboard design.

The other, which happens by routing several of the four PCI interrupt lines to the same system IRQ line for lack of the latter, takes place in the south bridge chip - which, in case of KT133, is the same VIA 686 that has been around forever, ever since the MVP4 socket-7 chipset surfaced - and you bet this wouldn't have gone unnoticed before.

Regards, Peter