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System crashes during gameplay

bamacre

bamacre

Lifer
Ok, I once owned a GeForce4 ti4200 and never had these problems. I play a game like Half Life, never crashes. If I play a game that uses more resources, like GTA or Far Cry, I get crashes. The whole computer just reboots itself, and I have "auto restart" disbled, so I tend to believe it may be a hardware issue. I have a 400w Allied (crappy off-brand) power supply, and I think that's the problem. Anyone agree? Or disagree?
 
Have you installed:
the AGP miniport, or drivers or whatever they are called for your mainboard
the latest video card drivers
?
Not having the AGP drivers might create this problem... For Intel they are called "chipset inf ...", for VIA there is the 4-in-1..., for SIS it was something like AGP miniport (I think)

Hope it helps

Calin
 
Thanks for the ideas, guys.

Overheating was my first guess, but everything seems to be fine. I'm not doing any OC'ing, and the air coming from the fans seem fairly cool when this happens.

I did find a SiS agp driver that I didn't have installed, although it wasn't called "miniport" or anything like that, just called SiS AGP driver, in fact it didn't even have a chipset name that it was for.

I also noticed this morning that the "agp aperature" in my bios was set to 128MB, and I changed it to 256MB (don't know if this makes a difference). Well, I did all of this during the AM, and I will just have to play some games tonight after work to see if this fixed anything.

If this doesn't work, anything else? Does this sound like it could be a psu problem? I went through a few reviews on this Allied 400w psu, and a few people found the same problem.

I'd love to get an Antec, but funds have been tight, since some crackhead managed to blast out my car window and steal my mp3 cd player last weekend, plus I just moved and had to go to a wireless network, which was not cheap, either.
 
Also, I forgot to mention, I am running the latest drivers from ATI, actually I am running the latest drivers for everything. This happened to me under catalyst 4.6 and now 4.7, too.
 
I understand you can setup MBM5 to keep a log (just leave it running in the background when you play). May wanna try that and look at your power rails after shutdown.
 
Thanks, I'll try that if the problem still persists.

In case I end up buying a new PSU, what do you all recommend? I am thinking an Antec 400w would suffice. I really hate to spend more than I need to at this point.
 
After about 15 minutes of GTA3, I got another reboot.

I installed MBM, and when I double-clicked on the icon to start it, my whole system became unresponsive. I ran it in debug mode, same thing.

🙁
 
Is your sig the system you're having problems on? Running Server 2003?

Was the Nvidia card in this same system beforehand?
 
Yes, and yes. Never had problems playing games on 2003 Server, until I upgraded from a ti4200 to the x800pro card.
 
Yes, I went through that process. I read up on switching over to ATI from Nvidia when I bought the card.

Well, does anyone think this could be a PSU problem?
 
Anyone? Hello?

Bueller?

Ok, well, I ordered an Antec True430 last night. I really hope this solves my problem. If not, I'll never buy an ATI card again, that's for sure.
 
Originally posted by: bamacre
Thanks, I'll try that if the problem still persists.

In case I end up buying a new PSU, what do you all recommend? I am thinking an Antec 400w would suffice. I really hate to spend more than I need to at this point.
Click to expand...

You have very lightweight equipment in that machine; a 250 watt to 300 watt PSU would be fine. I've got 4 HDDs and 2 CDRWs in a Dell 4550 with stock PSU - 270w or so. Plus an AGP graphics card, another NIC, a sound card, and a TV tuner card. And a modem. Plus a few USB devices. Works great.

I've also got a Compaq S6000z (AMD 3000) with MegaRAID 1500 Elite RAID controller (a big, i960-based full-size RAID card), 2 10,000 RPM Fuji SCSI disks, a 7200 RPM IDE disk, a Radeon 9700 Pro, 2 DVD burners, and various USB devices plugged in - with a 250watt or so power supply.

IMHO, psu issues are massively overblown. That said, if Windows is rebooting in gameplay, and you can force a dump manually, then you know your system is capable of doing a dump and for whatever reason Windows can't get control of the hardware. If that's correct, it really sounds like a hardware issue. Plug in your old GF4/Ti4200 and test with that in there.
 
Well, Allied PSUs are junk, pretty-much. So that could well be the issue. Another could be the motherboard, if it is suffering from the "bad cap" problem, then major components on the board (or the AGP video card), might not get enough power when they need it. (Those can be similar to PSU issues, in a way.) You might want to visually inspect the caps on the board, for any discoloration, strange smells, bulging tops, etc.

I would think that if it were a software fault, and you had auto-reboot disabled, then it should at least show a BSOD. The fact that it is not doing that, seems to indicate some sort of flaky hardware/power problem.

Might also consider increasing the AGP or memory DIMM voltages, and/or check if your chipset cooling is good enough. Sometimes that can overheat too, during heavy system activity.

I don't think that you've mentioned what motherboard you have in that system, that might be helpful.
 
I also found out that the GF4 ti4200 only used 35w of power, where as the x800pro uses 93w.

I found out HERE that I am recommended to have 321w, and this Allied 400w may not be sufficient, since it is a cheap brand and may not live up to it's stated performance.

Well, like I said earlier, I ordered an Antec True430, and that should far suffice my needs, and hopefully solve my problem. I'll definitely post my results when I get it in.
 
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