System locks up

KevinCB

KevinCB

KevinCB

Associate
Joined
20 Jan 2005
Posts
386
Location
Crewe, Cheshire
Hi folks,

I'm having a problem with my system locking up when playing various games. At first I thought it was a graphics card problem, but now I'm thinking otherwise.

These symptoms have occured within the last week or so, which was when I was using a Radeon X850XT that I had bought 2 months previous. At first I thought this was due to overheating and I replaced the heatsink and fan with a vga silencer, but still had the problem. But the other night I took this out and replaced it with my previous card (9800 pro), as I was going to take the X850XT back. But I'm now getting the same lock ups with the 9800 pro, and I know this works as I've had it for over 2 years with no problems at all.

Does anyone have any ideas what it might be, as I've said I got the X850XT two months ago and it's been fine until last week.

My spec:

P4 2.66GHz 533MHz Northwood (I think)
MSI 865PE NFISR Neo2
1GB Corsair Value PC3200 Cas2.5 (2x512) - 1GB OCUK PC3200 (2x512)
X-Pro PSU 460W
PowerColor Radeon X850XT / Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro

Cheers
 
OK, It just locked up again. So I reset the machine, and it locked up on bootup before I even gor to the windows loading screen. I had to turn the power off to get it to load properly.

I tried the eventviewer anyway, and ther are no errors apart from one telling me it couldn't connect to the router, and a few warnings, but they don't occur around the time of the lock up.
 
Nope system is running at stock speeds.

I'm going to take some of the RAM out first and go from there I think.
 
Hmm, checked my RAM seems to be fine, also ran Prime95 for a bit, and it was OK.

I already have the latest version for the BIOS, although they haven't released a new one for about a year.

Also ran a few games with the side of the case, and just before it locked up on me I heard this clicking sound and a woosh as if the machine was restarting itself, came from the front of the case.
 
Still having the problems. :(

I think I have narrowed it down though.

I checked everything was inserted into the mobo correctly and checked the cables.
I reformatted the drive and reinstalled windows.
I ran MemTest86 + last night for a couple of hours, in which the RAM passed about 4 or 5 checks.
I've tried different drivers and when running ATITool it finds a few errors when scanning, and the 3d window goes all yellow occasionally.

When I tied running Far Cry earlier this week, as soon as I loaded it up the Menu started corrupting, and when I loaded the first level there was a lot of tearing. Although when I opened the console the corruption went away, but when I got outside it was all blocky and eventually the sound stuttered and the monitor went into standby mode.

Could it be the graphics card doing this?
 
Still had no luck fixing this problem, here's an update.

Yesterday a bought a B grade mobo to make sure it wasn't a problem with the board I had in. Now this board has the feature of displaying codes during the post if anything goes wrong on an LED display, which my other didn't.

When I first switched it all on it displayed a code telling me my memory may be faulty, so I took out a stick. Powered it up again and it still didn't work, but this time it just hung on the post screen and wouldn't let me do anything, and displayed the code 'AF' (which I couldn't find in the manual), so I took another two sticks out.
With the one stick left in I powered it up again, and this time it got past the post and worked fine.

So after reinstalling everything and first loading up a game (Halo), as soon as it loaded up the screen started corrupting again (click here to see a screenshot).
When I exited the game I had slight corruption around the icons and mouse pointer on the desktop, and also on the win xp logo when I booted up again. But as soon as windows loaded back up it was fine.

btw, the board is an epox EP-4PDA3I v3.x
 
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