Irritating Graphics Card Problem

I have a particularly infuriating problem with my graphics card. During gameplay (Half Life 2, Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow, Silent Storm and even google earth!) my machine locks up temporarily (usually for about 15 secs) and the sound becomes corrupted. Sometimes it even happens consecutively.

I have a Geforce 7600GT OC from bfgtech. Their support people initially told me the problem was related to an insufficient power supply. I have since upgraded the system to a 600W unit which has two 12v rails, each supplying 19A. The problem has persisted. Any thoughts?

The rest of my system is as follows:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+

Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 Socket 939 Motherboard

Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm, SATA 150 120Gb Harddrive

DVD Drive

1GB (2x 512mb Corasir PC3200) RAM

USB driven wirelss dongle and mouse.

Two case fans.

Try using just 512 ram and see if problems persist.

I tried removing one RAM chip and the problem has continued.

Any other ideas?

Sorry, yeah this a new PC I built myself. I have not had any problesms like this myself. I have been having this problem since I first started using it.

Would the addition of a soundcard potentially resolve the issue? I think I might have a old one knocking around somewhere.

Did you try both RAM chips on their own? It may (is unlikely admittedly) be a faulty ram chip. Can you run memtest (google it!) and see what it show you?

most likely not the problem but what psu do you have.

also have you defragged your hard drive and done a disk check. it could be that it is having to access the hard drive often.

hmm, that might be your problem. maybe not but jean tech i think are the lowest of the low. thats the sort of thing you find sold in pc world over here in the uk.

if i am thinking of the same company those are the psu's sold with cases which should be avoided at all times.

My CPU is not overclocked. My graphics card is sold as 'overclocked' if that makes any sense. I have not done anything to it myself. See

http://www.bfgtech.com/7600GT_256_PCIX.html

for the details.

I am in the UK too and I did admittedly buy the PSU from PC world after a bout of frustration with the two others that I tried. Would this really be the difference? Any suggestions be looking to get instead?

it shouldn't be but you never know. pcworld are just pathetic and should i think be shut down for fraudulent advertising about their products capabilites. no joke.

still it should be good enough but i wouldn't rule it out.

BFG finally came back to me (after a number of emails regarding my uprated PSU) and said that the problem might be related to the IRQ assignment of my graphics card.

My Graphics card is currently assigned to IRQ PCI 18 as is a ' Texas instruments OHCI compliant IEEE 1394 Host controller'. Could this be causing a conflict and the problem?

yeah give underclocking a go, my gainward 6800GT is meant to be able to run 400mhz stable but it locks up after an hour or two of gaming and i have to reset.

what are the temps of the room your pc is in? the overclock on your gfx card maybe stable in the airconditioned test labs back at BFG but your room might be a different story.

I have tried disabling the 1394 controller from the BIOS which did not solve the problem.

How do I go about underclocking my GPU?

That it maybe but this one is cheaper and has given me no problems whatsoever http://www.aria.co.uk/productinfocomm.asp?id=19862

8)

IIRC an IRQ is an interrupt request. a device uses this to send a signal to the cpu saying it needs its attention. if 2 devices share an irq then it can cause conflicts as the cpu is receiving 2 different requests from the same IRQ which obviously cannot be handled at the same time. afaik that is what it is.

the firewire is only a communication port and will communicate through the mobo using the pci-e bus which is also used by the gfx card so maybe that is why. i ain't too sure though although assigning another IRQ might help.

I suggest trying to run one of your games that locks up in a reduced window and run the task managerat the same time, if you can see what process is hogging your resources enough to cause you system to stall then you should be able to track down the problem driver or hardware.

Or you can start underclocking or removing things or buying new hardware....or using your fancy new CPU as a lawn dart.