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Odd freezing and restarting

Soldato
Joined
6 Sep 2006
Posts
6,302
Location
London
Hi, have to be quick as this might happen again at any time.

Basically I installed the 158.xx drivers for XP on my 7900GS last monday/tuesday and since then my card has been giving me random freezing (screen flashes black then on again but screen is frozen and only mouse can move) or just restarts my computer. These happen every 10 minutes even in windows. As soon as I start a game or any 3D app it crashes.

I uninstalled those drivers, ran driver cleaner and reinstalled good old faithful 93.71 but the problem persisted. I then formatted and reinstalled windows and installed 93.71 but the problem is still here. I tried reflashing my BIOS with the correct version but the problem persists.

Possible other issues that might affect it:

A couple of pencil mods on the card, memory was up to 2.2V Core to 1.55V but now i got rid of those and memory is at default 2.0V and core is at 1.39V (refuses to go below this to its default 1.2V no matter how hard i try to remove the pencil particles).

Installed my Audigy 2 card again which had previously given trouble with the motherboard causing some random crashing and crashes in game. These were roughly every hour. Have since uninstalled card and never put it back in after reinstalling windows so unlikely as culprit.

I removed the Video heatsink to apply AS5. In doing so I took off the vram pads and tried putting AS5 in their place. They no longer seem to make good contact with the heatsink possibly leading to overheating. I have the zalman ZF900-CU kit arriving tomorrow so hopefully if that's the case those heatsinks will fix it.

Getting the P5N-E Sli motherboard tomorrow so will hopefully be able to rule out my assrock board if the problem persists.

Anyone got any ideas? Did I bork my vram with a pencil volt? I kept within the recommended ranges and always tested the voltages with my multimeter. I was quite safe throughout.
 
Have you Checked all heatsinks and fans for dust built up ?

Cpu
Gpu
motherboard heatsinks
PSU vents...

Plus have you tryed with no overclock on your cpu and memory ?
 
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Yea I've checked them all. The only thing I can think of is that the vram chips arent connecting with the heatsink properly.. it's going okay with just a few stutterins in the last half hour.. tho now that i said that.......

EDIT: yes of course.. crashed a minute after :rolleyes:
 
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Wouldnt be easy to get another card. I'm hoping i borked the mobo. will find out tomorrow. Tried setting PCI-E to 100 from 101 I had it on (shouldnt make any difference) CPU down to 266 FSB from 285 (same again) and intel virtualisation to disabled. Nothing really that would normally cause this but im trying to think of anything that i changed around that time apart from the driver and the soundcard.

The thing is I hadnt touched the card w/ regards to pencil volts in a week and it had been running rock stable at the 1.39/2.00 volts. It just suddenly borked up once I put those other drivers on.
 
Would you believe that it seems to have been caused by setting my PCI-E frequency to 101. :rolleyes:

Thank ****!

Did not need the expense of a new graphics card. Seems to be working fine for the last 3-4 hours after I made that change. Haven't got any games installed yet though. I'll wait until tomorrow and my new gear for that.

Huzzah :D
 
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