What could be causing this?

[Darg]

Basically my graphics card seems to randomly turn off. The computer is still running away in the background as the sound keeps going. It's just the graphics card turns off.

Now I did have some pencil mods to up voltage to core and mem and also to disable the overvoltage shutdow. I removed all these and checked that the resistors were back to their original resistance.

I am currently running the spec in my sig but on the Asrock Dual-VSTA as I've had two P5N-Es die on me due to a bad batch from OCUK.

This is a brand new install of windows on a formatted harddrive. all drivers installed fresh then I installed SP2. I'm checking if it is SP2 by rolling back to just after I installed all the basic drivers (chipset, graphics, audio and wireless card).

I only noticed this starting to happen when I used ATi Tool for the first time after installing SP2. I hadnt tried any other 3D application up until then but I thought id just set my graphics card to its usual overclock before gaming. It seemed to run fine without artefacts at the usual OC speeds but then when I went to exit ATi Tool it froze. Then it would freeze if I tried to open ATi Tool on any other boot. I uninstalled ATiTool in safemode and figured I'd just use coolbits.

Happy enough with that I went to play wwiio only to have the screen turn blank after 20 seconds or so. All of tuesday (the day i installed windows) and yesterday this would happen when I loaded a 3D app. Now today I boot up to find it happening just randomly about a minute or so into windows. It seems to be a driver issue as Windows safe mode works fine.

I am currently restoring back to before SP2 and will see if that works.

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

 

[Darg]

Well after a night of fun that involved two full system formats and many trips to safe mode my system has died. It wasn't driver related as I had hoped. It proved to be a terminal disease that slowly grew worse and worse as the night wore on until finally at around 23:15 my system shutdown. All attempts to resuscitate failed and for the first time in years I no longer have a computer that will even boot up.

A brief run through of the symptoms as they appeared:

• Tuesday:

• Asrock board reinstalled with clean windows installation.

• All drivers installed successfully, Windows SP2 installed.

• ATiTool installed and graphics card oced to standard oc.

• First sign of bug as 3D applications cause blank screen and system freeze.

• graphics card set to stock but problem persists.

• Wednesday:

• Problem persists despite attempts to fix. Windows and DVD playback still works fine.

• Thursday:

• Booted into windows but the screen blanks after a few minutes.

• Boot into safe mode and rollback to before SP2 but problem persists.

• Reinstall windows with a quick format. Problem persists.

• Notice that error log contains a DCOM error that is looking for a file on D drive.

• Try taking out two 80 gig DATA and GAME drives to leave just the one 40GB drive.

• BIOS bootup is now extremely slow taking roughly two minutes to go through harddisk check even with both IDE locations disabled in BIOS.

• Reinstall windows with a full format. Install chipset drivers but as soon as they are installed the screen goes blank.

• All attempts to reboot the machine fail.

• System pronounced dead, cause of death either motherboard or graphics card.

R.I.P.

P5N-E replacement of a replacement (third time lucky) board should be arriving early next week. I will then know if it is the motherboard or the graphics card. If the GC then I will be on the hunt for a new one.