Dear all,
I'm here in need of a bit of help - I'm all right with computers as a user but I'm a little skint on the technical side, unfortunately. I am a forum newbie, so please excuse my incompetence, but I'm an ok user and will do my best to make myself look quasi-intelligent.
I built a system three to five years ago that consisted of the following:
- Pentium 4 2.53GHz (not overclocked, and has a huge Zalman copper butterfly fan on it)
- ASUS P4PE Motherboard (845PE Chipset)
- 1024MB Kingston DDR-SDRAM (2x 167MHz = 334MHz)
- GeForce 4 Ti4600
- Sound Blaster Audigy with Live!Drive
- ASUS DVD Drive
- ASUS CDRW
Recently, the graphics have been acting up on the computer and it was becoming painfully obvious (screens going wonky very often) that the Ti4600 was nearing the end of its life - I promptly replaced it with a XFX 6800XT, one of the better AGP graphics card I could find and afford (just).
However, recently when I play games, most notable Battlefield 2 and Warcraft 3, some time into the game (usually between 10 and 30 minutes) I would freeze up, and stay for about 20 seconds, occasionally still hearing sound as if the game were still being played.
Following this, the entire computer would reset (80% of the time) or would simply crash to desktop (20% of the time).
To date, I have tried:
- Updating all drivers
- Trying 5 different drivers for the 6800XT (using DriveCleaner to get me to where I am now, Forceware 96.89)
- Virus scanning and Spyware/Adware/Malware, the usual
- Updated DirectX and visited WindowsUpdate
- Flashed my BIOS to the newest version
- Removed all unused programs on my computer, almost stripping it to bare bones in terms of installed programs, then running registry cleanups
- Removed sides of the tower case to allow better cooling while playing games
- Disabled FastWrite
- Disabled WriteCombining
- Changed Advanced-->PCI Configuration BIOS setting to AGP VGA Card (before it was PCI)
- Ran Prime95 for a while (a few hours) without any errors.
- Attempted (and reverted, due to no performance increase, in fact a decrease, in 3DMark06 [from 1350ish to 1200ish]) to enable the extra pipelines and vertex shaders using Rivatuner
- For reference, the system scores about 2500 on 3DMark05.
It's worth noting that I very recently (in the last 2 months) upgraded my power supply when the old one went bust (just a month before my Ti4600 died), from an old 350W one to a new Q-Tec (yes, I know, I hear the groans, I was ignorant at the time) 550W supply. There are two 12V rails that claim to put out 16A each though, and although Q-Tec aren't the best power suppliers around, I assume that means I have roughly 32A to play with, and surely that's way more than enough for my power supply?
Power supply is connected to: Live!Drive, 7200rpm Hard Disk, CDRW drive, DVD drive, Graphics card, floppy.
Since the other things I tried didn't work, I've switched FastWrite and WriteCombining back on as having them on or off didn't seem to make a difference, and whereas I don't know entirely what they do, I do know that in theory they COULD make an improvement if switched on.
Lastly, is it just me or are the 3DMark scores lower than I would have expected for a system like this (even though it's old?) - this may be a stupid question so if the answer is simply "No, that's about right" then fair enough.
Many thanks in advance for your patience, hopefully I've provided enough information and if I haven't, feel free to ask me, and I'll post ASAP.
I'm here in need of a bit of help - I'm all right with computers as a user but I'm a little skint on the technical side, unfortunately. I am a forum newbie, so please excuse my incompetence, but I'm an ok user and will do my best to make myself look quasi-intelligent.
I built a system three to five years ago that consisted of the following:
- Pentium 4 2.53GHz (not overclocked, and has a huge Zalman copper butterfly fan on it)
- ASUS P4PE Motherboard (845PE Chipset)
- 1024MB Kingston DDR-SDRAM (2x 167MHz = 334MHz)
- GeForce 4 Ti4600
- Sound Blaster Audigy with Live!Drive
- ASUS DVD Drive
- ASUS CDRW
Recently, the graphics have been acting up on the computer and it was becoming painfully obvious (screens going wonky very often) that the Ti4600 was nearing the end of its life - I promptly replaced it with a XFX 6800XT, one of the better AGP graphics card I could find and afford (just).
However, recently when I play games, most notable Battlefield 2 and Warcraft 3, some time into the game (usually between 10 and 30 minutes) I would freeze up, and stay for about 20 seconds, occasionally still hearing sound as if the game were still being played.
Following this, the entire computer would reset (80% of the time) or would simply crash to desktop (20% of the time).
To date, I have tried:
- Updating all drivers
- Trying 5 different drivers for the 6800XT (using DriveCleaner to get me to where I am now, Forceware 96.89)
- Virus scanning and Spyware/Adware/Malware, the usual
- Updated DirectX and visited WindowsUpdate
- Flashed my BIOS to the newest version
- Removed all unused programs on my computer, almost stripping it to bare bones in terms of installed programs, then running registry cleanups
- Removed sides of the tower case to allow better cooling while playing games
- Disabled FastWrite
- Disabled WriteCombining
- Changed Advanced-->PCI Configuration BIOS setting to AGP VGA Card (before it was PCI)
- Ran Prime95 for a while (a few hours) without any errors.
- Attempted (and reverted, due to no performance increase, in fact a decrease, in 3DMark06 [from 1350ish to 1200ish]) to enable the extra pipelines and vertex shaders using Rivatuner
- For reference, the system scores about 2500 on 3DMark05.
It's worth noting that I very recently (in the last 2 months) upgraded my power supply when the old one went bust (just a month before my Ti4600 died), from an old 350W one to a new Q-Tec (yes, I know, I hear the groans, I was ignorant at the time) 550W supply. There are two 12V rails that claim to put out 16A each though, and although Q-Tec aren't the best power suppliers around, I assume that means I have roughly 32A to play with, and surely that's way more than enough for my power supply?
Power supply is connected to: Live!Drive, 7200rpm Hard Disk, CDRW drive, DVD drive, Graphics card, floppy.
Since the other things I tried didn't work, I've switched FastWrite and WriteCombining back on as having them on or off didn't seem to make a difference, and whereas I don't know entirely what they do, I do know that in theory they COULD make an improvement if switched on.
Lastly, is it just me or are the 3DMark scores lower than I would have expected for a system like this (even though it's old?) - this may be a stupid question so if the answer is simply "No, that's about right" then fair enough.
Many thanks in advance for your patience, hopefully I've provided enough information and if I haven't, feel free to ask me, and I'll post ASAP.
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