Please help! Screen goes blank while gaming!

[mattdude]

Hi,

I have a Sparkle Geforce 6800 card, with the latest drivers installed, and sometimes when playing 3D games (Doom 3 and Far Cry in particular) the card seems to suddenly just stop working in the middle of a game. The sound stops, the screen goes blank, and it stays blank until I cut off the power to the computer and turn it back on (the ordinary power switch doesn't work). Pressing the reset button causes something to happen, the HDD light starts blinking a little, but the screen remains blank and the computer doesn't actually seem to completely restart. I cannot control the computer in any way by entering
windows or anything, the screen is blank and the computer seems totally dead.

Any ideas on what may be causing this and how to fix it? My power supply is a 450 watt Cooler Master so I don't think that's the problem. I recently upgraded my CPU from 2.4 GHz to 3GHz P4 and also my ram from DDR333 to DDR400 because of that (old ram wasn't compatible with with the new CPU, as you folks here taught me at the CPU forum, thanks again for that). I also have less ram now as a result, from 1GB to 512MB. This problem didn't happen before the upgrade. So has my graphics card suddenly gone faulty, or is my graphics card not compatible with 3GHz either? Anyone have any clues?

Thanks for any help!

 

[priyajeet]

First

old ram wasn't compatible with with the new CPU

I m not sure but that shld not be true, my 3.2G P4 runs DDR 266, 333, 400 all memories. So should urs unless ur mobo specs specifically say for some wierd reason that 333 cannot work. What i mean to say it might be compatible, but OC/underOC might occur.

ur card shld be compatible. no reason y its shndt be unless its possessed, in which case take it to an exorcist . Else, its generally a driver issue or PSU issue. Now as u say u have a cooler master psu, which is branded, drivers might be the likely cause. clean system from all drivers and reinstall them.

:tongue: <A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/priyajeet/fing.jpg" target="_new"><i><font color=red>Very funny, Scotty.</font color=red><font color=blue> Now beam down my clothes.</font color=blue></i></A> :tongue:

 

[mattdude]

Well I don't know about the ram, but I had 333 originally and had nothing but problems, random reboots, strange error messages and crashes etc. Changed it to 400 and everything worked fine again! My 333 were being overclocked which apparently caused the trouble.

I will try reinstalling the drivers tomorrow, maybe get an older version too. I do have another, weaker, PSU so I guess it can't hurt trying that one out as well. I shall return with an update on how that went! Thanks.

Anyone else got any other ideas?