Had something weird happened this weekend...was hoping you guys can help.
I built a friend of mine a new PC. Components are as follows:
ECS K7S5A mobo
Athlong TBird 1.4
Micron PC133 256MB SDRAM (salvaged from his old PC)
350W Sparkle power supply (salvaged from his old PC)
Enlight 7237 case (salvaged from his old PC)
40GB Maxtor 7200RPM ATA100 hard drive (salvaged from his old PC)
This is where it gets weird. He bought a Gainward Geforce3 ti200 Golden Sample video card to go in the new machine. So I build it, boot it, go into windows and install everything he needs. Now I install 3DMark2001 just to see how well it does. PC would always lock up at the same point in 3DMark, plus it had random locks up when just in the OS. These problems occurred in both W2K and W98 (dual boot system). So I started playing with the BIOS settings. It would never lock up with the FSB at 100 (200 DDR) and the memory at 100. If I left the FSB at 100 and put the memory at 133 it would lock up. Same with the FSB at 133 (266 DDR) and memory at 133. I'm starting to think memory problems but the memory ran just fine in his old machine at 133 for the last year. Thinking it might be a video issue, I pull my VisionTek Geforce3 ti200 out of my machine and try it in his. I also bump his FSB back up to 133 and memory to 133. Worked fine. No lockups, no problems at all. So I thought I had isolated the problem...bad video card. Just to make sure, I put his new card (the Gainward) in my machine and ran 3DMark2001, expecting it to lock up. Nope. No problems at all. So what gives? This was Saturday. We played Ghost Recon for hours Saturday night and all day yesterday without any problems. Could it be that the Gainward card just doesn't like his PC? We just swapped cards and I can't say I can complain. So far I have pushed this card a lot further with NVMax than I could ever get that VisionTek to go. If anyone has an explanation as to why this may be happening I'd appreciate it.
Tom
I built a friend of mine a new PC. Components are as follows:
ECS K7S5A mobo
Athlong TBird 1.4
Micron PC133 256MB SDRAM (salvaged from his old PC)
350W Sparkle power supply (salvaged from his old PC)
Enlight 7237 case (salvaged from his old PC)
40GB Maxtor 7200RPM ATA100 hard drive (salvaged from his old PC)
This is where it gets weird. He bought a Gainward Geforce3 ti200 Golden Sample video card to go in the new machine. So I build it, boot it, go into windows and install everything he needs. Now I install 3DMark2001 just to see how well it does. PC would always lock up at the same point in 3DMark, plus it had random locks up when just in the OS. These problems occurred in both W2K and W98 (dual boot system). So I started playing with the BIOS settings. It would never lock up with the FSB at 100 (200 DDR) and the memory at 100. If I left the FSB at 100 and put the memory at 133 it would lock up. Same with the FSB at 133 (266 DDR) and memory at 133. I'm starting to think memory problems but the memory ran just fine in his old machine at 133 for the last year. Thinking it might be a video issue, I pull my VisionTek Geforce3 ti200 out of my machine and try it in his. I also bump his FSB back up to 133 and memory to 133. Worked fine. No lockups, no problems at all. So I thought I had isolated the problem...bad video card. Just to make sure, I put his new card (the Gainward) in my machine and ran 3DMark2001, expecting it to lock up. Nope. No problems at all. So what gives? This was Saturday. We played Ghost Recon for hours Saturday night and all day yesterday without any problems. Could it be that the Gainward card just doesn't like his PC? We just swapped cards and I can't say I can complain. So far I have pushed this card a lot further with NVMax than I could ever get that VisionTek to go. If anyone has an explanation as to why this may be happening I'd appreciate it.
Tom
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