Need help figuring why my games lock up and blue screen me

Romstar

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Jan 5, 2007
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Everygame I have for some reason locks up on me. Madden 08, Bioshock, Counter strike source, prey, halo 2. I just received my video cards yesterday from an rma from sapphire. I am running windows vista 64 bit ultimate. System specs: q6600 @ 3ghz, 2x2900 xt 512 mb, 2x1gb pny ram ddr2 1066, raptor 150 gb, creative sound blaster elite pro, dell 3007wfp, and silverstone 1 kilowatt psu certified for crossfire with 2900's. Any help is greatly appreciated, but my gut feeling is the cards are what the cause is or could it be the motherboards pci-E slots? ohwell I dont know but any help is very much appreciated thanks.
 

cory1234

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What volts are you running at? Have you stress tested your cpu with your overclock? I would check that first. Are you running the latest drivers?
 

Romstar

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yeah i have stressed my cpu because all of july and june my system ran perfectly and i played games all the time, I just had a really low 3dmark 06 score back then(10000) and yesterday my score was over 14500 so i figured there was something wrong with the original cards i had the whole time but now i just ran 3dmark 06 and i got a score of 11000 http://service.futuremark.com/orb/resultanalyzer.jsp?projectType=14&XLID=0&UID=10686352 . I am running at 1.4 volts and I have the thermalright 120 cooler heatsink with a nice 90 cfm 120 mm fan attached to it.
 

Romstar

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I stressed the cpu with orthos and saw as the temps never rose above 55 in speedfan. Also its kind of funny how 3dmark 06 ran perfectly even though games wont.
 

cory1234

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speedfans temps are usually 15c lower then what they actually are. I have a thermarlright 120 extreme also. Running at 1.312 volts. I get 11000 with one 8800 gts 320mb so maybe it is your graphics card. How long did you run othros x2?
 

rammedstein

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use drivercleaner and try with different drivers, also try re-install windows and check all your power connectors, i havent had any problems like this on my rig but this is what I'd do.
 

Romstar

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well rammedstein i finally figured out what it was this whole time since the entire summer and I have no clue how it got by me..... it was an unstable overclock lol. i could have sworn orthos ran perfect for 2 hours atleast and here i just ran it and after 9 minutes bam I get an error so i went back to stock and played bioshock for liek 5 hours straight now! and it crashed... but 5 hours!
 

Romstar

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but for some reason my 3dmark 06 score dropped to 10500 so lame....is it possible for the cpu to somehow kill video cards if unstable? lol.
 

systemlord

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Only two hours of testing using Orthos are you kidding? :pfff: You should have run Orthos for at least 24 hours. My PC became unstable lastnight (games keep crashing) and I took off my side panel, boy was it hot in my case.

Summer is the key word here.