Hi, everyone, new here, and I've already got a problem!
I'll start with my specs, so I don't forget to add them later:
Quote:
OS: Windows XP SP2
MB: Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI (nForce 4)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 not o/c
GPU: GALAXY 7900GT (RMAd, now old, crappy 6600GT) not o/c
PSU: Antec 480W
RAM: 1GB generic
HDD: 100GB forget brand
1 x CD-RW/DVD drive (had a DVD-RW drive as well, but disabled it to test PSU)
1 x PCI Gigabyte Wireless LAN card
Okay, so here's the problem. Whenever I'm playing a game, or benchmarking my graphics card - or anything other than staring at the desktop, browsing the internet, or using Word, actually - after a while, everything freezes, seemingly at random. I usually get about 20 minutes, give or take, and then I'm forced to reboot. What happens? Well, the video just stops at a certain frame - no artifacts or anything - and the sound starts looping. That's it. Can't kill the process; the entire OS is frozen, not just the game.
Things I've noticed: I think the sound crackles a little bit (just a few almost inaudible crackles) just before the crash. I've checked the 7900GT, and it doesn't overheat while in a game (no artifacts and the temp's fine). That said, it may get really hot at the last second and freeze everything, but I doubt it.
What I've done to try to fix the problem:
First, I did the obvious - check for viruses, system restore back a week, then two weeks. Restoring didn't work, and there were no detected viruses.
Next, I did a full HD scan, fixing bad sectors and so on, but it didn't solve the problem. After that, I tested the RAM overnight, and there were no issues with that.
Went a little deeper, and read online about nVIDIA's ForceWare Network Access Manager causing similar problems for some reason, and seeing as I never really needed it anyway and it
did sometimes corrupt my downloads, I deleted it. Man, that took a while; it just kept coming back.
In the process of deleting the NAM, I updated my chipset drivers cleanly. CAB and drivers were cleaned beforehand, obviously. Then I cleaned the registry for the heck of it, thinking it couldn't hurt.
After all that, I decided to test the PSU by turning off the DVD drive to see if that would help. Nope.
I figured it must be the card. I've had graphics issues before with different cards, so I assumed it was just my bad luck, and I RMAd the 7900GT. I should be getting it back/getting a new one next week, but now I have a sneaking suspicion that they're going to tell me there was nothing wrong with it.
Why? Well, I tested a different card (the crappy 6600GT), and got the same problem after a while. Obviously, drivers were reinstalled for both cards.
So there you have it. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be very grateful to hear them. I really don't want to have to reinstall Windows, but if it is a software issue, that may be the only way. What bugs me is that this only started happening recently, and I've had this setup for a while. The freezing happened infrequently at first, and I thought nothing of it - you know how Windows can be :wink: - but now it happens all the time, and I'm losing my mind!
One more thing I should point out - when I say the 6600GT I'm using is crap, I really mean it. This will make me sound very silly, but here we go: it's practically unusable; it overheats quickly, and everything freezes. So, yeah, it's obviously not the best card to use to test this issue, but it's the only other one I have.
Now you're probably thinking it must be the graphics card that's the problem, and it may well be, but the thing is, the freezing issue I've described and the overheating problems with the 6600GT I'm using are different. For one, there's no artifacting with the other card, but it still happens. I know when the 6600GT is about to fry, as everything gets distorted, so I alt-tab out of the game. But while using this card, the freezing issue I've been describing can happen even when it's not artifacting, so I think the issues are separate. I might be wrong, though.