Unexplained freezes

[Creston]

Hi everyone,

This is my first post here, a good friend of mine recommended this forum as a great place to get good technical opinions.

I recently put together a new system, consisting of :

Athlon64 3500 90nm.
Thermaltake Silentboost K8 A1838 RT, connected with Arctic Silver 5.
Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9 nForce 4 Ultra chipset.
2x512MB DDR PC3200XLPT CORSAIR RT

(I've got my Dimms in slot 1 and 3, they wouldn't actually fit in slot 1 and 2
because of the heatspreaders.)

Seagate Barracuda 120GB Serial ATA
Samsung DVD-Rom (IDE)
Plextor DVD-RW (Serial ATA)
Aspire XNavigator case (this one http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=11-144-089&depa=1)
500W PSU (came with the case).

I'm at work, so I don't have the version numbers, but apart from the Catalyst, I've got the latest updated drivers and the newest version of my motherboard BIOS.

I've been having some issues, however.

Recently, while playing the game Act of War, my VPU would freeze up, always during the video. Act of War has a ton of FMV in it, not just cutscenes, but also during missions while you are actually playing (which, quite frankly, is pretty annoying). Pretty randomly, the video would freeze for about ten seconds, and then about 80% of the time, VPU recover would pop up and tell me that it had recovered my graphics card. It would then let me back into the game (in windowed mode, for some reason).
The other 20% it would just hang, and require a hard reboot.

I tried with different Catalyst versions, 4.11, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and it was the same with all of them, although it happened least with the 5.2.

I figured it was just one game, my other games were running fine (Doom3, Half Life 2, Farcry, Dawn of War, X2 were the ones that I've played on this system so far), so I struggled through the game, finished it, and uninstalled it.

Now, however, I seem to be getting the same issues with other games too. Doom 3 has hung on me twice, once with a VPU recover, and once with a hard crash. The VPU recover one actually happened after Act of War had crashed, and I hadn't rebooted my PC before I started playing Doom 3 (and it happened pretty quickly). The hard crash was after several hours of playing. Yet other times I can play it fine without any problem whatsoever.

Yesterday I played Sims 2 for a long time (please don't laugh at me ), mostly had it running while doing something else, and after about 8 hours it froze on me. The mouse was still moving (until I clicked 8 times and filled the buffer, apparently), the sound was still playing, but the game was frozen. I needed to hard reboot to get out. Just to test, I rebooted and went back into the game, played for awhile, and it hung again after about 15 minutes, exact same way.

Now, it being freezes, I would think overheating, right? Yet my CPU sensor shows 27C (which should actually be about 35-38C or so, I had no heat resistant tape, so I taped the sensor to the outside of the metal part on the cooler), my case shows 29C (the sensor hangs in the case). While the game was frozen, I opened up my case, decharged myself statically, and just touched all the components. My memory was cool, so was my CPU cooler, my graphics card was only slightly warmer, and the air it was blowing out of the heatsink was slightly warm (probably not even over 40C). My HD was lukewarm.

I checked through Sisoft Sandra, and it stated that while my CPU was 35C and my mainboard was 31C, my PSU was actually 72C (150+F). Confused, I turned the PSU fan to full, and felt the air that was coming out of it, and it didn't even feel warm. If that PSU was really that warm, you'd think I could at least FEEL it, right?


I've run Memtest+ last night, no errors after running for 7+ hours, I ran Prime95 the night before, no errors on two tests (the FPU one and the heavy memory one).
3dMark03 and 05 ran seemingly fine, pretty decent scores too, although I got 1fps in the CPU tests in 3dMark05, which seemed rather low for a 3500?

One other thing I noticed has happened is that in the past two weeks, I've had three boot ups where my Bios has emitted Bios beeps. However, they have been different beeps every time ( I think I've had an eight beep and some one beep boots), and I can't find out what it might be beeping about. My system boots up fine every time despite the beeps, and I've noticed no correlation between the beeps and games hanging or anything.

I'm stumped as to what might be causing this?

I've gone back to Catalyst 5.1 based on several threads I've seen that say that the 5.2 and the 5.3 Catalysts are pretty crappy

I'm worried that it's my graphics card, and that it might be hardware related. However, I have no real way of stress testing my graphics card? I've submitted a ticket with ATI to see if they have a tool that can stress test a graphics card, but ofcourse I got a standard reply that basically told me to "defrag your harddisk and try some new drivers".
Gee, thanks ATI.

Can anyone offer any insights or clues as to what might possibly be the cause of this behavior? I still need to get in touch with Gigabyte and see if this is a motherboard issue, because of the BIOS beeps.
I'm kinda hesitant to call it a hardware issue, though, because it doesn't happen all the time. There are times when I'll boot up, play a game for four hours or so, turn off, and there's no problem.
But if I wanted a PC that I didn't mind if it crashed every now and then, I would have bought a local piece of junk for 800 dollars, rather than spend 1600+ dollars on a near top of the line system.

Thanks very much for reading this, and I'm sorry that my first post has been such a long one and on such a vague issue. I appreciate your time and any advice you can give me.

Thanks again.

Creston

 

[amdskip]

I would run memtest86 on your memory to see if you have a bad stick for starters.

 

[Creston]

Yeah I did that.

"I've run Memtest+ last night, no errors after running for 7+ hours, I ran Prime95 the night before, no errors on two tests (the FPU one and the heavy memory one). "

Thanks though amdskip, I appreciate it.

Creston

 

[Valheruxx]

I've never used ATI cards before, here is my suggestion though.
I'd think maybe (obviously) something is wrong with the graphics card, maybe overheating. Does it lock up more often on games that are more GPU intense? Also, it MIGHT be the ram even though you had no errors with the memtest. Try removing the dimm from slot 3 and running with just one stick. If that locks up, replace the stick with the other one and see if that works.

 

[Creston]

Originally posted by: Valheruxx
I've never used ATI cards before, here is my suggestion though.
I'd think maybe (obviously) something is wrong with the graphics card, maybe overheating. Does it lock up more often on games that are more GPU intense? Also, it MIGHT be the ram even though you had no errors with the memtest. Try removing the dimm from slot 3 and running with just one stick. If that locks up, replace the stick with the other one and see if that works.

Not sure if it locks up more often on more GPU intense games. I've run Farcry and Half Life 2 for quite awhile on what basically amounts to absurd settings, and they've run fine (although I haven't played them for 9 hours straight). I also can't think of anything that stresses the GPU more than Doom 3 does, and it will run fine for hours straight. I'm running it at 1024x768, High Detail, 2xFSAA and 8xAF, which I would think should kill the GPU pretty quickly if it was flaky.

The fact that it takes long to set in, and does not always happen would lead me to believe it may be more of a heat issue or a memory issue. Perhaps one memory chip on my graphics card is busted. Anyone know of any way to test those?

The memory suggestion is a good one, but I probably won't get to try it until this weekend. Thanks for the suggestions Valheruxx, I do appreciate it.

Creston

 

[Creston]

I've been reading the thread on power supplies in the general forum, and have been learning a lot of stuff that I really should have known already before I bought a case with a power supply included. While it is 500W, I'm beginning to suspect it may not have a lot of amps on the 12v line.
Is there anyway I can check that, besides taking a multimeter and jabbing it into various sockets? I'm about as anti-electrical as they come, so the odds of me being able to do that correctly are pretty much nil.

I've scoured Aspire's website, but can't find much info. Yet I'm hesitant to just splurge 80-100 dollars on a new PSU if that's not causing the issue. But through all the articles I'm reading today, it seems as if it's a probable scenario...

Anybody know how to figure out how much Amps the 12v line has? Does the little sticker on the PSU say so?

Thanks again.

Creston

 

[amdskip]

Sorry, didn't see that you had ran memtest in your long post

The picture on newegg says you have a 34a rating on the +12 line of your power supply. Personally I'd replace it but thats just me. You would think they would use a quality power supply in an expensive case. Did you happen to notice the weight of the power supply? Heavy = good!

 

[Creston]

Originally posted by: amdskip
Sorry, didn't see that you had ran memtest in your long post

The picture on newegg says you have a 34a rating on the +12 line of your power supply. Personally I'd replace it but thats just me. You would think they would use a quality power supply in an expensive case. Did you happen to notice the weight of the power supply? Heavy = good!

That's alright

Duh, I completely missed that picture, thanks for pointing that out to me amdskip.
The power supply was already installed in the case. In total it doesn't feel that heavy, but the PSU plus case is a more difficult judgment than just the PSU.
Actually, I'm beginning to become convinced that I have a RAM issue on my graphics card. To test, I just played Doom 3 in Ultra Quality mode a couple of times, and every time I get a crash within several minutes of playing. Doom3 UQ = 500+ MB of textures, and none of them are compressed.
In other games, and Doom 3 in HQ mode, it would make sense that it would take awhile for it to crash, since few of them will actually use 256 MB of memory.

Sigh :|

At least I should be able to get it RMA'ed, as long as ATI ever gets back to me.

Thanks for the help.

Creston

 

[Creston]

Does anyone have any experience with RMA'ing anything through CompUSA? I bought the card at my local store (as they seemed to be the ONLY one in the US that was selling the X800XL for the MSRP of 299), I'm wondering if I should wait for ATI to ever get their behinds in motion, or if I should take it back to CompUSA.

Any advice?

Creston

 

[Fern]

Before I RMA'd, I'd check out the PSU etc. I use a (free) program called Motherboard Monitor 5. When you install it, you can select to have it read your voltages (the rails on your psu and vcore etc) and temperatures very second and then record those readings to a text.doc.

When your PC freezes or crashes, you can go back in and look at the text.doc to see if there were any flucutations etc that caused the crash.

I'm still on older hardware, so MBM5 works easily for me. I don't know if MBM5 will work on nForce4 mobo's. And if not, what new proggie you guys are using for such diagnostic purposes?


Fern