Hey all,
Anyone here have (or had) an AMD chip with a GForce (or any card, I guess) and have the PC lock up and crash and not be able to reboot for a period of time?
My buddy is having this problem and we are trying to find a way to fix it. (It is hindering our gaming. ;))
Try the viddy card in your system. If it crashes too, there’s the problem.
Look at his power supply. If less than 300 watts, there might not be enough juice to prower the card properly.
Update drivers. Update DirectX if not already. Update everything you can that has to do with system performance/gaming.
He had a VooDoo 3 card in there before…same thing, but not as often.
We’ve tried other power supplies…same thing.
All drivers are up to date.
The next step is to update the BIOS’s…(But we have to wait until his PC allows him to boot up again.)
It sounds a lot like the CPU is overheating, and the BIOS is forcing you to wait until it cools down. How long do you have to wait - 15 minutes to half an hour?
If you feel capable, take the heat sink off and check that there’s some thermal grease, and that the heat sink is tightly on the CPU. Make sure the fan is turning!
My vote is that the guy has over-clocked the video card so high that the card itself is overheating and crashing the system. Crank it down a bit and see if it still happens (Better yet, get some more cooling for that card).
BTW- What kind of gforce are you using?
I, too, would suggest heat to be the problem.
Do what I did to my friend’s computer… get more fans. Grab a PCI cooling fan, drop the biggest heatsink/fan combo that you can find onto the processor, and cram the box full of case fans (wherever there’s a slot for one). Hell, if you feel like being creative, you can mount fans all over the place in there. Go nuts!
Marcus: Don’t think its a heat problem. He had the case off and a room fan blowing on the inside. It still crashed. 15 Minutes? He wishes…sometimes it would be days.
CnoteChris: He is using a ELSE Gforce2 card and it is not overclocked.
SPOOFE: He tried blasting an ocilating fan into the open case and it didn’t help. (Cleaned all the dust out though. :D)
Something I forgot to add. If he has the PC on and is surfing the net, it could last for hours, if he plays a game (Like DiabloII, or Unreal Tournament.) he’d be lucky to get five minutes use out of it.
I have done some reading and it seems that there was an issue with AMD chips and older Gforce cards. Many people on different forums have pointed it out, but I can’t seen to find a definitive solution.
OK then… time to get down and dirty.
What Geforce drivers is he using? What kind of RAM are we dealing with? What OS is he using? Updated the bios lately? Hmmmm. What about that power supply, is it an older computer?
If you get down and dirty and give as much detail as possible, more people here will be able to help.
In terms of the glich you talk about, yes there were problems before, but only affected a small minority of systems and games (IIRC).
Oh, one final point- What version via drivers are you using? Getting the latest 4in1 might help (Helped me and my vid problems a while back).
He’s running XP with 256 (or maybe 384) megs of RAM.
He just updated the VIA BIOS and, as far as I know, still has to update the board BIOS (His PC crashed before he got a chance to.)
The computer itself is about 1 year or so old. It’s a AMD 800Mhz Thunderbird. The power supply is probably 250w and I mailed him my old one to see if that was the problem but the result was the same.
A 350w power supply probably wouldn’t hurt, but it doesn’t explain why the PC won’t let him boot after he crashes. (After a crash, the PC will load up from the bootstraps but one the system check is done, it hangs. Sometimes it gets as far as the XP loading screen.
As for the drivers for the card, I’m not sure. He’s a bit of a propeller head so I feel safe in saying that he would have the latest and greatest. (I do know that he has tried other drivers with no change.)
I’ll let him know about the VIA 4in1. (If he hasn’t done so already.)
The heat problem mentioned sounds very resonable.
It happens less frequently when surfing than when playing games (games == more work for the cpu)
Happened with his old voodoo 3 card too (suggests the geforce isn’t the problem)
He can only reboot after some time (when the hardware is cooled off again)
As Marcus suggested, take the heatsink off and see if there is thermal greese under it.
Also try getting some cpu temperature monitoring software - depending on the cpu it shouldn’t go much over 60c or a bit higher with high frequency older athlons (non-xp).
blinx, I’m not convinced it’s heat. Why would it take days to cool down? (Remember, I had mentioned that it would be days before he could boot up again in some cases.)
He’s got a mother of a heatsink and fan. The case is riddled with fans and he took the case off and pointed an ocilating fan directly into the case. The PC still crashed.
Kwyjibo, Ah days - didn’t see that one.
Well I guess the mayor stuff there is left would be the cpu, the motherboard or the memory - I’d say the motherboard could likely be the cause, he wouldn’t happen to have a spare one to try?
We figured it may be the mother board, but he doesn’t have a spare one. 
He must have had it running this weekend as he sent me an email and told me I have to play UT2003 , so he may have applied the latest BIOS patch and that may have done it…but I have het to hear anything else.
Could be the slot. If it’s PCI, try a different slot. If AGP, well…
Another thing to try is rubbing the leads on the video card with a pencil eraser. They could be dirty.
Video RAM could be going out. Hell, it could be his system memory flaking out. Have him take out one stick and run his system until it craps out. If it does, put that stick back in and take another one out. Repeat until PC stops crashing or you’ve tried all stick combinations.
What brand and model of motherboard is it btw.?
I have 1.4 Athlon with GeForce II - no problems. My other system with an Athlon XP and ATI crashed all the time until I got ATI’s latest and greatest drivers…
I would try the following:
VIA 4-1 drivers, if applicable (includes PCI bus-mastering and AGP driver enhancements)
Setting all BIOS setting to default (if he managed to screw with the memory latency settings it may cause him issues)
Trying both the latest, standard nVidia Detonator reference drivers vs. the ones provided by Elsa (one set may work better than the other))
Re-installing DirectX, especially Direct 3D components, which would only be used during gaming
Slowing down the bus speed to 200 mhz (if he’s running @ 266), especially if the card is PCI
Moving the card to another slot, if PCI
Also, recheck the cooling. Doesn’t matter if he’s got a million fans if they all work against eachother. Any case fans on the front should be drawing air in, and the power supply fan blowing air out. FYI, removing the cover may actually affect cooling in a negative way, as it removes the convection effect of air moving through the case.
Other than that, I suspect a gremlin with the video memory. If its only crashing when using games, maybe the “upper” memory is bad (is only used for games that load larger textures). Is the video card receiving enough cooling? - all the GeForce II cards I’ve seen have at least their own heatsink on the video chipset…
A couple other things to try:
-Disable Fastwrites, if they’re enabled (It’s tucked in the bios somewhere)
-Reduce AGP down from 4x to 2x, or completely turn it off (Geforce had bigger issues with this than the glitch (IMO)).
-Crank back the drivers. If he really is a propeller head than you’re right, he’s probably got the latest and greatest. But the problem, of course, is that the latest and greatest are often not the best. If I were him, I’d crank it back to the det 23’s and see what happens.
Barring all that, and the above advice, if he wants to check if it’s the glitch, get RivaTuner or some similar program and aply the fix thorough that (Guru of 3D).
Hope on of those helps.
Thanks for the info guys, I’ll let ya know how it goes.
He’s running an :