unstable athlon system after a video/sound change

[rustbucket]

I recently bought a great Athlon system and it was running incredibly stable until I pulled the Voodoo 3/3500TV it came with and replaced it with a Geforce MX. At the same time I also replaced the Sound Blaster Live! with an old A3D sound card from my previous system. (don't ask...) About 1 week after making those changes the system started to get incredibly unstable and would blue screen constantly or get those nasty white box errors. It got so bad that it would only boot 1 out of every 4 times, the rest of the time it would blue screen. After many reinstalls of win98se it still wasn't stable so I pulled the sound card and installed winME. Now the system posts and runs with reasonable, mostly usable stability but still blue screen more then I'm used to and gets odd explorer.exe type crashes. I have yet to put in a new sound card (still waiting for a replacement Sound Blaster Live!) and I'm running the latest Detonator 6.xx drivers.

Interestingly I figured the residue of whatever I'd done had screwed up the windows directory so badly that I went ahead and reinstalled winME again last night in a different directory. (c:\winme instead of c:\windows) About 15 minutes after a fresh & clean install it started acting up again and getting the same errors as before.

So does anyone have any guess as to what might be causing the instability? And do you think one or any of the following would bring it back to it's original stability?

1) Install win2000
2) Replace the Geforce with either a Voodoo 3 or a new Voodoo 4000/5000 series card?


Any and all help would be appreciated, hopefully I haven't left any major facts out o fthis post.

Thanks!!!!

 

[Petro89]

Hmmmmm. Not sure, but it could be a power issue. What wattage is your power supply? Is it Athlon approved? It should be 300+ W, and you can check AMD's site to check if its approved.

Geforces use a lot of power, and although the MX uses less than the original SDR/DDR or the GF2 GTS, it still may be the culprit.

Some motherboards simply will not work with any kind of geforce card. Check the website of the manufacturer of your motherboard to see if anyone else has similar problems.

Try a different detonator driver, possibly the official det 2 release.

Check out these two websites www.geforcefaq.com and www.3dgpu.com, and configure your MX using their advice.

Try a different video card altogether. I had a hell of a time when I had a geforce, and now that I have a V3, I haven't ahd a single bluescreen or other problem in 3 or 4 months.

Make sure there aren't any IRQ conflicts in the device manager.

Make sure the processor isn't overclocked.

Try swapping out your memory sticks with a friend's. The memory probably isn't the problem if it was working before you switched the other items, but the symptoms you describe are similar to those occuring due to defective memory.

If these problems continue after trying this stuff, reformat and repartition the hard drive, and set its parameters in the BIOS instead of using the "auto" or "auto detect" setting.

Good luck!

 

[rustbucket]

Yeah, I'm starting to suspect the generic geforce card myself. especially since the system was stable when it had a voodoo 3 in it. I'm going to try detonator 2 drivers first and then if it's still wacky I'll pop my old TNT2 in there.

If that doesn't work I'll try a new voodoo, at least I'll get a good framerate in Deus Ex! ;-)

 

[zogg]

which driver are using for the gefrorce? Original or the latest detonator 3 divers. What about the sound card? Did you make sure that you installed the standard vga driver before you put in the geforce driver? If not you could get corrupt video drivers by not first going to standard vga/reboot then install the detonator 3 drivers 6.34 I think is the latest.

 

[rustbucket]

Yes, I've made sure I had a clean install of the latest detonator 3 drivers and even went so far as to delete the original nvdia drivers I'd been using. Still very random crashes, some blue screens, occasional white screens and a mess of .exe and .dll crashes that don't kill the system but make life uncomfortable.

i'm going to track down another voodoo 3 card and see if they helps, i'm still thinking this mobo is very sensitive to power hungry or new design video cards.

 

[Petro89]

Yep, that's a good idea, and should narrow the problem down a lot. Voodoo 3s are extremely trouble-free and will work with just about any configuration. My guess is it should eliminate almost all of your problems. After installing the V3, I'd download Registry Cleaner to get rid of any garbage, or use Morton Systemworks if you happen to have that.

Got my fingers crossed for you!

 

[rustbucket]

Phew, what a night!
Grabbed an old 15 gig drive from another machine, fdisked it, popped it into the Athlon loaded up winME. Things were going well for awhile. Loaded in the detonator 2 drivers - about 5 minutes later I started getting the usual system errors. Used the winME system restore option and took it back to 1st boot state. Tried the same thing with detonator 3 drivers. Same deal. Restored again. Tried a Radeon board. Much worse, some nice blue screens and garbled text. Restored and left it as standard VGA. Took a lot longer but eventually it started to give a crash. Nothing major but the usual .exe crash type things. (ie: iexplorer.exe has crashed)

The one thing (and don't shoot me) I forgot to mention is that the Athlon in this system is overclocked, from 700 to 950mhz, but not by raising the FSB. My guess at this point is that the overclocked CPU has made the system very sensitive to the cards placed in it. Voodoo 3's are solid and I guess that's why it was in there in the first place. I'm putting v3 back in there and hopefully it'll return to normal.

More info when I track down a used v3!
Thanks to all that replied!

 

[AMDfreak]

One other thing that may have been overlooked is your IRQ settings. Some PCI cards, especially sound cards, just don't want to play nice with each other. Try the cards in different slots, and if your A3D board has any kind of SB16 emulation, disable that in your device manager. Good luck!

 

[Petro89]

Yeah, the overclocking is the culprit. Either your processor can't handle the extra 250 Mhz, or it can, but it's using too much power to do so, and you don't have enough juice.
Athlons are great processors, and great overclockers, but 250 gain is quite a lot, even if your core is an 850 or a 900. I'd set it back to 900 or 850. A 50 or 100 Mhz gain isn't worth system instability, especially when you probably only get an extra 2-5 FPS in games.
Take it from me, I have a 700 that I had overclocked to 900, and it worked for a month or so before I'd get blue screens every day, and Windows Registry Checker messing up my registry upon startup. It drove me nuts.
What voltage do you have the processor set at?
Remember,
1. System Stability
2. System Speed

I'd try 850-900 at no higher than 1.9 volts, and a Voodoo 3. It should be fine.

Regards!

Alex

 

[stockjock]

My question to you is what motherboard are you using...is it based on a Via chip, if so have you loaded up the Via 4 in 1 drivers if your using Win 98 and AGP mini port drivers if your using Win 98SE or later??? Also try moving your sound card to a different slot...I have heard many people tell of sound card problems and have fixed that by moving to a different slot...just my .02 worth.

 

[rustbucket]

Ah the continuing saga....
Got the voodoo 3an dinstalled it but it dodn't help with stability. I have tried every part combination withe the exception of the harddrive, which is an overclocked and soldered 600 to 950mhz athlon. Guess I'm looking for a new CPU, if anyon ehas any leads on non-o'clocked AThlon slot A's that would be great.

Actually, quick question..Is there a a slotkit converter for slot A mobos so I can put in a Duron?

thnaks to all for the help thus far!