Video Card

[Burtie21]

Hey, I've been talking to a friend of mine who keeps having the same problem that you guys are explaining, he'll be playing a game, and his system will freeze, it starts with video stopping, followed by loss of sound, and finally, the num lock key won't go on and off anymore which is the indicator that the system is completely frozen.

He has to reboot the system, and then there's no telling how long it will last until it freezes up again. The key indicator that it's probably GPU overheating is that it only happens when playing games like Doom 3 and America's Army, which tend to be pretty graphics intensive. It has not ever happened without being in-game.

Here are his system specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Abit KV8 Pro VIA K8T800 Mobo
1 GB Geil Value Ram
120 GB Western Digital SE hard drive (ATA)
XFX nVidia GeForce 6800 GT 256 DDR3
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Combo 52x DVD CD-RW Drive
Aspire X-SuperAlien Case with 420W PSU

You guys have any ideas on this problem yet? We're thinking this particular case is GPU overheating, but there really isn't much way to prove it.

Here's a link to a side picture of his computer, he's since moved the sound card down two slots to give some room to the video card, and switched the side fan to outtake rather than intake. The wires are a bit more cleaned up now too to improve airflow.

Click Here

Ps. If you've seen this in the tech support thread then please delete it mods, i wasn't thinking and didn't realize that it would get more exposure here

 

[wraith3k]

Has this problem always happened or did it just start recently? Either way, disable fastwrites in your bios if you have that enabled. Had a similar problem with the GT and this fixed it.

 

[BFG10K]

Any overclocks?
Do you have the latest BIOS and chipset drivers for the system?

 

[Burtie21]

so far so good, and yes he has the newest drivers etc......thanks slug

 

[Creig]

Originally posted by: Burtie21
and switched the side fan to outtake rather than intake.

I would put the side window fan back to intake. I see a blowhole fan on top and am guessing there's an intake fan in the front of the case. You want to have a balanced in/out airflow, otherwise the fans are fighting to move air.

Air in - front fan, side window fan
Air out - blowhole fan, PSU fan



Besides that, I don't think case temps are going to be an issue. There's a healthy amount of airflow through the case interior. Have you checked your chipset/CPU temps?

 

[Rage187]

Sounds like your PSU is a POS.

Make sure the vid card is the only thing on the power line. Do not make it share a power line w/ anything else.

 

[Burtie21]

Hey this is the owner of the comp on Burt's account.
Well I switched one of the fans on the back to intake, there is no fan in the front, but with all of the wires and hdd cables air wouldn't move through there very well anyway. I haven't oc'ed it at all, completely stock clocks all around. I'm starting to lean with you guys about the psu, it's obviously not drivers because the games run for sometimes hours without locking up, and the case temps are never high at all, always below or around 40C on the display on the case, which has one censor on the hdd and i stuck the other one way down under the heatsink of the video card.

The psu is a Turbolink 420W, anybody know anything about them or how well they hold up? It would be nice if I could just replace that and not have to worry about a bad video card or cpu. Any more advice that you guys could give would be great, I'm a pretty seasoned pro as far as the simple stuff goes , but when it comes to changing things in the BIOS and such I'm pretty n00btastic. Thanks for the advice on disabling Fast Writes, I thought that worked, but it froze up tonight. And the thing about today was that I was playing Tiger Woods 2004, not even a graphics intensive game, another indicator that this isn't a gpu problem. Thanks for all of your help guys.

 

[Burtie21]

Can anybody at least tell me if it makes sense that the computer would freeze up only in games and it be a psu problem? It just seems like if it was the psu, then it would freeze up at other times too, but it has never acted up at all outside of gaming. Even having 8 or 9 windows of IE open and uploading stuff through WS FTP all at the same time, it has no trouble at all.

I just want to make sure that if I'm gonna focus on the psu here that it at least makes sense that that's what could be causing it to lock up. Thanks.