Blue Reboots

[nevermore84]

Greetings,

I've got an old system that has been running perfectly stable with an fx5200 (woo hoo!) for years. I finally ponied up to put a decent AGP video card in it so I could play games like Oblivion again. I bought a refurbished card from E-bay, and I think I got a dud, but it may not be the card.

Before installing the new x800pro I ran 3dmark01, 03, 05, and 06 on my fx5200 and it ran all four tests (didn't score too much, but it ran). With the new card, 3dmark03 bluescreens as soon as it loads the second graphics test. 3dmark01 bluescreens somewhere in the middle of the nature test each time. 3dmark05 and 06, however, run perfectly fine and give me a pretty nice score.

When it "bluescreens" there is no test on the screen, just a pure blue screen for 2-3 seconds and then the system reboots. Each time I get back into windows I get a "System has recovered from a serious error" message.

So, I'm at a loss. Also, I can play Morrowind for an hour with no problems. If I try to play Oblivion, though, it runs for 1 second to 1 minute before I get another bluescreen/reboot.

Here's what I've done:

-Tried different power connector and even unhooked extra hard drive, cd drive, fans, etc., from my PSU.

-Removed two PCI cards.

-uninstalled all drivers from ATI and Nvidia, re-installed ATI drivers only.

-tried older version of ATI drivers.

-run a memory test on the video card ram (it passed)

-maxed out the GPU using Atitool. The card gets up to 70C but it runs stable. I used this to log the GPU temp and when it is bluescreening it can be as low as 45C.

Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!


AMD Athlon XP 3000+
512MBx2 Mushkin DDR Dual-Channel RAM
Asus A7n8x-e Deluxe mobo
Sata 1.5m/b Seagate 300GB HDD
Dvd-rw drive
Antec True Power 480w PSU

 

[nevermore84]

I have also run memtest to confirm my system RAM is still good.
Tried underclocking the card.
Disabled automatic restart on System Failure in WinXP. Now I just get a solid blue screen with no text and no reboot.

Thanks again for any input.

 

[paperfox]

Did you also run Driversweeper to remove all of the potential remaining Nvidia drivers before installing the ATI drivers?

 

[nevermore84]

I have now. Thanks for a good idea, but nothing changed.

 

[nevermore84]

Well, since I had used three different versions of ATI's driver and used driver sweeper between installing each of them, I didn't expect the drivers to be the problem. However, I installed some older Omega drivers for the card and this solved the problem. I can run Oblivion, 3dmark03, etc. I think the problem with ATI's drivers ahd something to do with lighting effects. Every time it crashed, it was trying to render light falling on something.