Help with a freezing video card

[Ashkael]

Hi all,

I understand that there is an ongoing topic about RAM and video card upgrades. I really thought about posting this under that topic but then it occurred to me that my problem was a little bit more specific. If the moderator feels like it, we can close this topic and I will move the discussion to the other topic.

Well, I have been out of the gaming scene for quite some time, and WoW managed to renew my interest. I had some money to spare, so I went ahead and built my own gaming system (which, btw, marks the first time I've ever put a system together). After consulting with a couple friends, I settled for the following:

- Intel "BOXD915PBLL" 915P Chipset Motherboard For Intel LGA 775 CPU
- Intel LGA 775 Pentium 4 530J 3.0 GHz, 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache, Hyper Threading Technology
- 1x Crucial DDR2 240-Pin 512MB DDR2 PC2-4200 (planning to add another stick as money becomes available)
- HD 80GB | Western Digital 7200RPM 8MB
- ASUS nVIDIA GeForce 6800 Video Card, 256MB DDR, 256-Bit, TV-Out/DVI,
PCI-Express, Model "EN6800/TD/256"

The case I bought came with a 350W power supply, but I replaced it with a SurePower 450W power supply, which has its own dedicated line to feed the video card. I also installed two extra fans inside the case to keep the processor cool.

Here’s the deal: the system works like a charm, until I try to play anything. So far I’ve tried to play Neverwinter Nights, Unreal Tournament 2004, and World of Warcraft. All three games run perfectly fine and smooth at full settings for about 5 to 25 minutes, and then everything freezes and I’m forced to restart the PC. I’ve been trying to solve this problem with a couple friends and I’ve posted on several nVIDIA-related forums but nothing good has come so far.

Things I’ve tried:

- Updating the video card drivers. I’ve tried the following official nVIDIA drivers: 71.84, 66.93, 61.77 and 61.76, plus a whole bunch of BETA and unofficial drivers.
- Flashing the BIOS.
- Updating sound drivers (I’m using the motherboard’s default sound chip).
- Installing/uninstalling service pack 2.
- Changing power supplies (from 350W to 450W).

I’ve already ruled out overheating as a possibility. Speedfan and Intel’s own monitoring software report my CPU temperature to be around 45 degrees under normal circumstances, and peaking at about 60 under heavy gaming (that is, before everything locks up). I went further ahead and with the aid of a friend moved the system to my balcony at night (it was pretty cold outside), opened the case and let the system cool down to about 30 degrees. We then launched WoW and the temp never went over 45, and it still froze after about 15 minutes of play!

Now, when the system freezes in any of the three games mentioned above, the freezing comes accompanied by some distortion in sound and a reboot. Sometimes, though (100% of the time in UT2004, about 50% of the time in WoW), I would get a blue screen with a message indicating that the display driver for the nVIDIA card got stuck in an infinite loop.

I did some research on this infinite loop problem, and found this:

http://members.home.nl/marf/Infinite%20Loop.html

The nature of the problem can be summarized as follows:

It appears that this is all due to a BIOS setting which basically has to do with the way that the CPU and RAM communicate with XP and DirectX 8.1. Basically, PC components compete for system resources and the Video drivers give too much ram to the video card which is the root cause of this problem. Specific drivers have agrivated the problem for some (Such as NVidia's 23.11 Dets)

This seems to be a very old problem that is supposed to be solved by now. The thing is, since it’s an old problem, most of the information I’ve found on the web applies only to AGP video cards.

I bought most of the pieces from NewEgg, and I’ve already talked to them about returning my video card and changing it for an ATI, which seems not to be suffering from this problem (after all, part of the reason I’m having the problem is because of nVIDIA’s inability to write a good driver for their own card, which has resulted in a HUGELY unsatisfied customer… I’m ripping my hair out in frustration by this point). However, before I do that, I still got the whole weekend to try and fix this problem for good. If any lurkers have any clue about how to solve this problem, it would be most appreciated. Alternatively, suggestions for a good ATI card would also be appreciated. I’m fed up with nVIDIA.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that the temperature of the video card itself, as reported by nVIDIA's own monitoring utility, never goes above 52 under heavy gaming, which is pretty cold for a video card.

EDIT: Well, I ended up returning the card. As soon as Newegg processes my refund, I will be ordering this baby: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....-102-483&depa=0

Hopefully everything will go smooth with that one.

[Yrrek]

Alternatively, suggestions for a good ATI card would also be appreciated. I’m fed up with nVIDIA.
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Well, I can't really help you with your problem, I have never had that sort of thing happen, and you have already listed everything I would have thought to check.

If you are looking for a very nice Ati card that you won't have to upgrade for a good while, and have the money, I recently purchased this card, and I am very pleased with it. Newegg seems to be out of those, but any of the X600 series on up should be plenty.

[DeeBye]

Well, I can't really help you with your problem, I have never had that sort of thing happen, and you have already listed everything I would have thought to check.

If you are looking for a very nice Ati card that you won't have to upgrade for a good while, and have the money, I recently purchased this card, and I am very pleased with it. Newegg seems to be out of those, but any of the X600 series on up should be plenty.
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And thus, the ATI versus nVidia debate begins...


My thought? Pull out the 6800 and stick in any card you might have lying around (or even run off the onboard video) and play some graphically intensive games. Rule out the 6800 as the source of the overheating problem before you do anything drastic.

edit: I'm an idiot and I should read the whole thread before I post.

[Kevin]

Just some suggestions, they are not in any particular order.

I don't suppose that there is another motherboard (a friends maybe) that you can put the video card in to make sure that it doesn't have an issue? You can get an infinite loop type error when the card hits a bad patch of video RAM. You won't see this in anything but games, CAD programs, and maybe large photo editing, because you won't be slapping things around in the video RAM as much. It's not likely, but you could still have bad hardware on the video card, testing on that would be worth it if you can.

I also noticed that Intel has an updated chipset driver listed on driver page which is worth looking at. You already grabbed the newest BIOS so that clears that.

I can be system RAM hardware as well. Run memtest86 just to be safe. Even one error indicates a problem (though not necessarily with the memory, it could still be a the mem controller or another board component, but generally not). Again normal usage generally doesn't tax all the memory, a game will.

I ran into a fun one with an HP scanner the other day and trying to get a new driver installed for it. Appearently XP can have too many .inf files in the directory and this can break installs (with the scanner it was screwing with the WIA drivers not working correctly). Uninstall the driver (the card should still run in VGA mode) then go to C:\WINDOWS\inf sort by size and delete any 0 length files in there. Rename your nv4_disp.inf to nv4_disp.old (or whatever). You may have to change your view settings to show file extensions and unhide protected system files. Killing the HKLM\Software\NVidia key before a re-install of the drivers won't hurt either. Re-install the latest release drivers after that. Probably won't help but it will help insure a clean driver install, which with me and the HP scanner did work.

You've ruled out my first thought which was the Power Supply.

SP2 is mostly a red herring with hardware problems (working IT at a university I've installed it on several hundred hardware configurations now).

Least likely is spyware. I did fixed this same problem on a students system after clearing 200 spyware/malware/trackers/etc from his system. AdAware and Spybot in conjunction with each other (just one doesn't cut it, Spysweeper has proven to ber pretty crappy and I haven't really worked with the others because) or, surprisingly, the Microsoft Beta checker are worth spending the 15 - 20 minutes to run. Again, I doubt this is it, but I have seen clearing spy fix a nv4_disp blue screen on a system before. Please don't use the immunize or auto protect features of either of them. They are usuaully more trouble than they are worth.

I've also seen a re-install of the OS fix the problem, but I'm not an advocate of reinstall to fix something like this, because usually it doesn't help and now you've wasted more time and probably lost some data that you thought you had backed up but didn't.

I've also seen disabling Virus Scanning before playing the game fix a blue screen issue. Don't recall what the blue screen was, but it's another simple check.

I hope one of those helps.

[Ashkael]

If you are looking for a very nice Ati card that you won't have to upgrade for a good while, and have the money, I recently purchased this card, and I am very pleased with it. Newegg seems to be out of those, but any of the X600 series on up should be plenty.
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I do have my eye on the X800 series of ATI cards. The problem is I built my system around PCI-Express sockets, so I have no available AGP sockets and Newegg's selection of PCI-E X800 cards is not very nice.

In particular, I would go for this one: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....-121-530&depa=0

I'm not very familiar with ATI videocards though, so I don't know if that would be a good choice. Any more suggestions would be welcome.

EDIT: This card also caught my attention: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....121-521R&depa=0

I already spent about $400 on the nVIDIA card, so I wouldn't hesitate to spend an addtional 100 to get that card if it means my freezing problems will go away. Only thing that bothers me is that "refurbished" tag. Correct me if I am wrong, but does that mean that the card was returned?

[Ashkael]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I missed the motherboard chipset update. Unfortunately, that didn't fix the problem. I also went to ASUS' website looking for an update for my videocard BIOS, but they don't have any available for my specific model. They did have some drivers I hadn't tested before, the 71.81 drivers. I did a clean install and managed to play WoW for 3 hours straight with no problems whatsoever. I thought the problem was solved, but this morning I tried playing again and the freezing issues went back. I also managed to play through a UT2004 deathmatch, but shortly after that it froze on me again.

Regarding memtest, I've never used the program before, but from the readme file it seems I need to have a floppy disk drive to properly run it. I don't have a floppy disk drive on this computer though. I thought I wouldn't have any use for it :o .

EDIT: Incorrect driver numbers.

[Ashkael]

And thus, the ATI versus nVidia debate begins...
My thought?  Pull out the 6800 and stick in any card you might have lying around (or even run off the onboard video) and play some graphically intensive games.  Rule out the 6800 as the source of the overheating problem before you do anything drastic.

edit: I'm an idiot and I should read the whole thread before I post.
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I don't have any extra video cards lying around, but now that you mention taking the card out, I think it would be nice to test the video card on another motherboard. I think I'm gonna try plugging it on my friend's computer and see if the freezing carries over to his system. If the problem turns out to be motherboard incompatibility, I think I'm going to shoot myself.

[kandrathe]

The kind of freezing you are experiencing my gut tells me is memory related. Find any old video card, or buy a cheapo $25 dollar one. Test the system, using something like Sisoft Sandra. http://www.sisoftware.net/

Another good memory shakedown, as well as to determine if your processor is not the culprit would be to use a compression program to zip a very large file (bigger than your memory anyways). This is very intense on the processor. Once you have proven to yourself that the system is robust without the video card, then you can turn to the video card.

If it is your video card, then you might try to upgrade the GPU cooler, and add heatsinks to the memory on the GPU (usually 8).

If it is your mobo/processor/ram you need to figure out if it is ram alone, or the mobo/processor. If it is the ram, all I can suggest is to get more but better quality. If it is the mobo/processor then it could be that the tuning has been set too aggressivly, or that some critical componets are overheating. Again, you might try heat sinks on any hot exposed chips without heatsinks.

[Kevin]

Regarding memtest, I've never used the program before, but from the readme file it seems I need to have a floppy disk drive to properly run it. I don't have a floppy disk drive on this computer though. I thought I wouldn't have any use for it  :o .
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There is an iso image on the site that you can burn to make a bootable CD with the program on it as well.

Bolding is mine

Windows Installation

For windows installation begin by downloading either the Pre-Compiled Windows package to build a boot-able floppy disk or an ISO (zip version) to create a boot-able CDROM. After the file is downloaded an extract must be done to uncompress the file(s). To extract right click on the downloaded file and select the "Extract All" option. The extract option will let you choose where the files will be extracted to. To build a bootable floppy go the the folder where the files were extracted and click on the Install icon. The floppy disk will appear to be unformatted by Windows after the install is complete.

To build a boot-able CDROM use your CD burning software to create an image from the un-zipped ISO file.

Since Memtest86 is a standalone program it does not require any operating system support for execution. It can be used with any PC regardless of what operating system, if any, is installed. The test image may be loaded from a floppy disk or may be loaded via LILO on Linux systems. Any Unix, Windows or DOS system may be used to create a boot floppy or bootable CDROM.

I hope that helps. Like Kandrathe says later I look at memory very early when dealing with odd hardware lock-ups. I hope you can find something to get it working. I'd hate for you to have a system problem and run through all this with another video card.