Where are the Tech sites (Anandtech & Tomshardware) about the infinte loop problem???

[Karsten]

Hey all,

I have yet to see any major Techsite tackle this issue. It becomes clear that it is not just me but rather a LARGE amount of people that have this problem. The theories range from XP's at fault (after all Microsoft is always the bad guy) to VIA and not to forget NVIDIA.
Playing arround myself it seems clear that it is an NVIDIA issue. I have a GF2 and a GF3 that will cause the same problem. Stick in a trusty Matrox (G400) and all goes away... sadly so does my Game performance. But what good is my Nvidia card if I have to worry that my computer crashes?!
As far as I go I will not purchase a NVIDIA product again until I see some results with this issue.

However... the real issue I have is that nowhere anywhere have I seen anything on the sites that always have reviews on Cards? Would a good techsite (Anandtech?!) not make it an issue and follow up what is going on? Maybe I missed it and you seen something somewhere other then ina newsgroup or a forum discussion?! Enlighten me and show me.... PLEASE!

 

[Zlash]

Well i read about someone having the same problem with an ATI card over on tom's so no need to toss nvidia out the window just yet.

 

[spanky]

<< Well i read about someone having the same problem with an ATI card over on tom's so no need to toss nvidia out the window just yet. >>




who's tossing nvidia cards out the window? and where do u live?!

 

[masterc]

Excuse my ignorance... please update us with this "infinite loop" problem...
I've been caught in the olympic abyss...

GO CANADA GO !!!!

 

[Karsten]

Do a search at Deja and you have results like this

 

[Zlash]

Uh the original poster said he wasn't gonna get another nvidia card because of this, that's who...

 

[BlvdKing]

I've never had this infinite loop problem. I don't use VIA so hopefully I never will. It would be interesting to hear the views of the editors of certain review sites on this problem.

 

[vss1980]

Just to clarify the issue for those who have missed it (dont know how)....

1) It usually effects nvidia based graphics cards using detonator drivers from 22.xx onwards
2) It is not restricted to VIA chipsets and people have had errors with SiS based boards to even the trusty old Intel BX chipset.
3) It has apparently happened to ATI users, although this seems to be a rare occurance for them (possibly a bad driver build from ATI or something)

I personally don't think its a Microsoft problem with XP, and is probably just a conflict of interests between XP and those certain drivers as there are no reports (AFAIK) of this happening in Win2K (or on the scale of how it happens in XP), even though Win2K uses the same nvidia driver sets as XP.

 

[sandorski]

I think it is likely a WinXP problem, I have had the occassional infinite loop with my Voodoo5. Might have something to do with DirectX 8.1 though.

 

[gregor7777]

The guys over at viaarena are saying it's a power supply problem, but I disagree. I get the infinite_loop periodically, and other funny memory issues with both a Enermax 300w and my new Antec 400w.

The problem never happens to any other OS besides XP.

Get this, when I boot up, my memory available is like 132mb, when I run a D3D game, afterwords I have ~198mb mem available.

Funny stuff.

 

[Karsten]

I highly doubt the PSU thing as well. Otherwise driver updates wouldn't make any difference or hardly any.
I also updated to a new case in the meantime with a plenty good PSU. That didn't make any difference!

 

[merlocka]

There have been many threads in various forums saying they have found a fix, but generally, fixes aren't universal.

It has been attributed to everything from WinXP, nVvidia drivers, VIA hardware, VIA 4-in-1's, poor quality RAM, poor quality PS, AGP drive levels... the list is pretty long.

And as VSS1980 mentioned, this error and similar errors have been seen on VIA, SIS, and Intel mobo's and on Win2K and WinXp. I read in VIAarena that someone said they had Win98 do it, but I'm not so sure.

I'm fortunate in that I have never had this problem, I don't predict I will be doing my driver changing on this XP machine until the real porblem is found.

 

[FlamingPanther]

This is what i have found with borrowing a friends GF3 classic

Quote

I'm not sure if it has to do with fast writes or what,
I say that because fast writes bypasses the CPU when the card needs to access main Mem.

strange as it seems, I think the drivers of these cards are trying to make all the timing decicions themselves.
that would be rather bold, the northbridge would be able to time these things a whole lot better
than a piece of software, that is its job anyway.

This would not work very well(if at all) in high speed systems,
especially overclocked systems it seems.
(meaning where the AGP bus would be overclocked as a result of a FSB overclock)

the issue seems to be compounded when a second stick of ram is present,
not sure why just yet, maybe the drivers (if my theory is correct) aren't able to correctly account for
mutiple pieces of ram?

also, large sticks of RAM seem to make it worse as well,
A single 512Mb ECC registered stick would not work long at all, but 2x256Mb sticks (NON ECC or REG)
would work for a longer period of time before crashing.

*please note all sticks are high quality Micron, with 7Ns chips capable of 2-2-2 timings,
timings were set to 3-3-3 for some of these tests though...