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#1
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Opinions - nVidia drivers kept crashing/rebooting this PC or is it bad RAM..???
Here's the scenario....
First - My PC is... Gigabyte 7N400 m/b AMD XP3000 1 Gb PC3200 RAM (read on) FX5700 card SB Live value Win XP Pro SP1 The first drivers I used on this system with the FX5700 were the 53.06 drivers. All seemed to go well and no real problems with any games. I install Far Cry and play it virtually all the way through. It crashed back to the desktop just once. Hey, ok that's not too bad is it..??? I finshed the game but I decided to play it again on a harder level. No big deal, only I try to move to a newer set of drivers as 53.06 is painfully slow in this game. All goes well for a day or two with the 56.72 drivers,, then out of the blue, the game locks up. I have to press reset to get it going again. Ok, I restart Far Cry and pick up from where I left off.. No hassles, as all goes well for the rest of the evening. Next day I play it again, only this time it locks up 4 or 5 times like the day before... OK, 56.72 must be a bad driver for my PC so I went back to 53.06. All is fine again,, but slow... I tried 53.04 drivers and these go better than 53.06 but they too start locking up. Back to 53.06... Now all of a sudden the 53.06 drivers lock up too in Far Cry.. Strange...!!! They also locked up at the desktop a few times too and on the internet too... I use Ghost backup to restore an older backup and all seems to go well for a week or so, then I decided to try yet another set of newer drivers.. Guess what... Yes, it locks up in Far Cry again... Only now, not only is it locking up but sometimes the PC switches itself off or reboots by itelf and even worse, it tries to reboot but hangs during bootup... Things are looking quite bad, but worse is to come... I restores the same Ghost backup and things go well again. I decided upon two actions... 1).. No nVidia updates 2).. No Far Cry One or both of them "must" be the cause of this chaos... OK 2 weeks go by and I buy Thief 3... By now I have played no games for a few weeks and all seems to go well. I installed Thief 3 and played for 3 days and nights and the lockups came back only this time around it comes back with a vengance... It got so bad that I decided to reinstall Windows... This I did and made several backups at various stages before I bothered to install any nVidia drivers. I finally installed 61.21 drivers and almost instantly the lockups began again and real bad too. Now the PC is having troubles even starting, once even refusing to go through the pre-boot hardware check. It stopped at 780mb of my 1Gb of RAM and froze... There was someting massively wrong here. I had 2x 512mb of matched RAM in Dual Channel mode and I began to suspect this may well be a problem as it never really impressed me, as it seemed to run quite slowly for 1Gb... I switched the PC off and pulled out both sticks of RAM and put only one back into slot 1 and now my PC seems to run well. I played Thief 3 for just on 6 straight hours without a single incident... Maybe, just maybe, it has cured it. Maybe I had a bad stick of RAM.. I now only run 512mb and it seems to run faster than the Dual Channel 1Gb that I had.... I can't figure it out... Can you..??? Here's hoping I have fixed it... Anyone had similar problems....??? |
#2
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"Bruce Tyler" wrote in message ... Here's the scenario.... First - My PC is... Gigabyte 7N400 m/b AMD XP3000 1 Gb PC3200 RAM (read on) FX5700 card SB Live value Win XP Pro SP1 The first drivers I used on this system with the FX5700 were the 53.06 drivers. All seemed to go well and no real problems with any games. I install Far Cry and play it virtually all the way through. It crashed back to the desktop just once. Hey, ok that's not too bad is it..??? I finshed the game but I decided to play it again on a harder level. No big deal, only I try to move to a newer set of drivers as 53.06 is painfully slow in this game. All goes well for a day or two with the 56.72 drivers,, then out of the blue, the game locks up. I have to press reset to get it going again. Ok, I restart Far Cry and pick up from where I left off.. No hassles, as all goes well for the rest of the evening. Next day I play it again, only this time it locks up 4 or 5 times like the day before... OK, 56.72 must be a bad driver for my PC so I went back to 53.06. All is fine again,, but slow... I tried 53.04 drivers and these go better than 53.06 but they too start locking up. Back to 53.06... Now all of a sudden the 53.06 drivers lock up too in Far Cry.. Strange...!!! They also locked up at the desktop a few times too and on the internet too... I use Ghost backup to restore an older backup and all seems to go well for a week or so, then I decided to try yet another set of newer drivers.. Guess what... Yes, it locks up in Far Cry again... Only now, not only is it locking up but sometimes the PC switches itself off or reboots by itelf and even worse, it tries to reboot but hangs during bootup... Things are looking quite bad, but worse is to come... I restores the same Ghost backup and things go well again. I decided upon two actions... 1).. No nVidia updates 2).. No Far Cry One or both of them "must" be the cause of this chaos... OK 2 weeks go by and I buy Thief 3... By now I have played no games for a few weeks and all seems to go well. I installed Thief 3 and played for 3 days and nights and the lockups came back only this time around it comes back with a vengance... It got so bad that I decided to reinstall Windows... This I did and made several backups at various stages before I bothered to install any nVidia drivers. I finally installed 61.21 drivers and almost instantly the lockups began again and real bad too. Now the PC is having troubles even starting, once even refusing to go through the pre-boot hardware check. It stopped at 780mb of my 1Gb of RAM and froze... There was someting massively wrong here. I had 2x 512mb of matched RAM in Dual Channel mode and I began to suspect this may well be a problem as it never really impressed me, as it seemed to run quite slowly for 1Gb... I switched the PC off and pulled out both sticks of RAM and put only one back into slot 1 and now my PC seems to run well. I played Thief 3 for just on 6 straight hours without a single incident... Maybe, just maybe, it has cured it. Maybe I had a bad stick of RAM.. I now only run 512mb and it seems to run faster than the Dual Channel 1Gb that I had.... I can't figure it out... Can you..??? Here's hoping I have fixed it... Anyone had similar problems....??? I'm having similar problems except for my video card doesn't display video anymore. When I remove it and enable the on-board video, it just displays a black screen the whole time it is in Windows. The only way I can get any video on my screen now is to use an old 3DFX Voodoo3 3000. Talk 'bout retro. I hope I find a solution to this soon |
#3
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Bruce Tyler wrote:
Here's the scenario.... First - My PC is... Gigabyte 7N400 m/b AMD XP3000 1 Gb PC3200 RAM (read on) FX5700 card SB Live value Win XP Pro SP1 The first drivers I used on this system with the FX5700 were the 53.06 drivers. All seemed to go well and no real problems with any games. I install Far Cry and play it virtually all the way through. It crashed back to the desktop just once. Hey, ok that's not too bad is it..??? I finshed the game but I decided to play it again on a harder level. No big deal, only I try to move to a newer set of drivers as 53.06 is painfully slow in this game. All goes well for a day or two with the 56.72 drivers,, then out of the blue, the game locks up. I have to press reset to get it going again. Ok, I restart Far Cry and pick up from where I left off.. No hassles, as all goes well for the rest of the evening. Next day I play it again, only this time it locks up 4 or 5 times like the day before... OK, 56.72 must be a bad driver for my PC so I went back to 53.06. All is fine again,, but slow... I tried 53.04 drivers and these go better than 53.06 but they too start locking up. Back to 53.06... Now all of a sudden the 53.06 drivers lock up too in Far Cry.. Strange...!!! They also locked up at the desktop a few times too and on the internet too... I use Ghost backup to restore an older backup and all seems to go well for a week or so, then I decided to try yet another set of newer drivers.. Guess what... Yes, it locks up in Far Cry again... Only now, not only is it locking up but sometimes the PC switches itself off or reboots by itelf and even worse, it tries to reboot but hangs during bootup... Things are looking quite bad, but worse is to come... I restores the same Ghost backup and things go well again. I decided upon two actions... 1).. No nVidia updates 2).. No Far Cry One or both of them "must" be the cause of this chaos... OK 2 weeks go by and I buy Thief 3... By now I have played no games for a few weeks and all seems to go well. I installed Thief 3 and played for 3 days and nights and the lockups came back only this time around it comes back with a vengance... It got so bad that I decided to reinstall Windows... This I did and made several backups at various stages before I bothered to install any nVidia drivers. I finally installed 61.21 drivers and almost instantly the lockups began again and real bad too. Now the PC is having troubles even starting, once even refusing to go through the pre-boot hardware check. It stopped at 780mb of my 1Gb of RAM and froze... There was someting massively wrong here. I had 2x 512mb of matched RAM in Dual Channel mode and I began to suspect this may well be a problem as it never really impressed me, as it seemed to run quite slowly for 1Gb... I switched the PC off and pulled out both sticks of RAM and put only one back into slot 1 and now my PC seems to run well. I played Thief 3 for just on 6 straight hours without a single incident... Maybe, just maybe, it has cured it. Maybe I had a bad stick of RAM.. I now only run 512mb and it seems to run faster than the Dual Channel 1Gb that I had.... I can't figure it out... Can you..??? Here's hoping I have fixed it... Anyone had similar problems....??? When diagnosing, always go from the lowest level to the most complicated and abstract. In this case it would be (power -- operating system). Make a bootdisk and download Memtest (http://www.memtest86.com/). This runs in real mode DOS, so you'll have to boot from it. Test all your memory. Cheap DDR tends to have single bit or pattern errors. I've found this myself in my brother's old RAM. You'll know you've got a bad stick if you can repeat it and get the same results or the same results in sequence over and over. Next clear your BIOS; this may be as simple as pulling a jumper and resetting it, or popping the battery and waiting a few hours. Check your mobo documentation for specifics. Other things to think about: bios revision, power supply, overclocking may have damaged components, shorting out to ground, chipset incompatibilities, etc. |
#4
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"deimos" wrote in message
.... Other things to think about: bios revision, power supply, overclocking may have damaged components, shorting out to ground, chipset incompatibilities, etc. Yes, he did not tell whether he has overclocked any part of the system or video card - another source could be a temperature problem...simply getting to hot inside. |
#5
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"Steven K" wrote in message ... Yes, he did not tell whether he has overclocked any part of the system or video card - another source could be a temperature problem...simply getting to hot inside. My guess would be a temperature problem or weak PSU. CapFusion,... |
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