New Comp - Unstable

ahmed5

ahmed5

ahmed5

Associate
Joined
2 Aug 2006
Posts
22
Hello,

I recently bought this new rig off OcUK:

Asrock 939 dual sata 2 w/ all drivers
athlon 64 x2 3800+ w/ artic cooling 64 freezer pro
radeon 9800 pro 128mb w/ latest Omega drivers
samsung 160gb sata 2 w/ 8mb cache
onboard realtek sound
1 gb ddr 400mhz ram w/ 3gb pf
win xp home w/ SP2

currently i've been experiencing a lot of crashing and possibly sound or graphics instabilities during games like fear and dod:s. (i havent tried less intensive games) i simply get random crashes during the game where the screen freezes and i've literally no control with the comp or the screen gets random rainbow coloured flashing and CTDs. once i restarted the comp after a crash and win xp told me that i got a BSOD due to unkown device drivers even though there was no blue screen.

i can't seem to figure the source of the problem, could it be my omega drivers? i'm thinking if i revert back to ati catalyst i will have to reactivate windows xp again (don't ask how i know this - long story - you can find it somewhere in the windows section of this forum). I'm going to run a memtest soon and perhaps check temps.

Please help

Thank you

EDIT: i remember experiencing this with ati drivers so forget that
 
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Did you use the card in your previous machine? Could be just starting to go, a friend's 9800 died recently and he was experiencing similar screen corruption, although no crashes.
 
my psu is an ezcool 600w - my mate also uses it and says its good. How do i check if it's performing well?

I've found something weird - my ram is running at 333mhz instead of 400mhz. Could this have an effect? also, i really doubt this is important but just incase, the stick is placed into slot3 not slot1.

the 9800 pro was in my old machine and was also used by someone else before i bought it off them. i do see it as a great bottleneck but i don't expect it to cause crashes.

the temps for cpu in bios were 40deg and 32deg for mobo - are these good? how do i check the temp under load?

note that these crashes only occur during playing games that worked fine on my old comp (same specs roughly but has XP 2800+)

Please give more suggestion. Thanks
 
ahmed5 said:
. the temps for cpu in bios were 40deg and 32deg for mobo - are these good? how do i check the temp under load?
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.

they do seem a little high but nothing to worry about. if you have not overclocked your cpu then i would expect them to be at say 32-35 idle with a arctic freezer 64 pro. and at about 40 under load
 
ahmed5 said:
my psu is an ezcool 600w - my mate also uses it and says its good. How do i check if it's performing well?
Click to expand...
Get some monitoring software (I use MBM5) and set it up to beep at you if the +3.3V, +5V or +12V rails deviate by more than 5%.

I still think it's the graphics card though... isn't there some used pc bits shop where you can buy a cheap card for a tenner so you can test in your area?
 
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