"Adam said:
I'm running an A7N8X-E Deluxe with a V9880 Ultra. All latest Drivers and
Bios. My system seem to be suffering from random restarts when running 3D
games, and won't even load UT2K4 without restarting. Any ideas??
Full Spec:
Athlon 3200+
Win XP Pro
A7N8X-E Deluxe
V9880 Ultra
1gig Crucial Memory
2* 120Gig SATA Maxtor DiamondMax9+ in Raid 0
The first thing you have to do, is go into Windows and disable
automatic restarts. That way, you can record the info from the
BSOD, such as what driver was at fault and so on. Alternately,
if you are lucky, there may be something in the event log for
each of the crashes.
If the code mentioned in the BSOD is always the same, and the
name of the code sounds like an AGP driver, then it could be a
problem with the video card. If the code that crashes has
fairly random names, it could be CPU or memory.
To eliminate memory, you can test with memtest86 from memtest86.com
or memtest.org (newer version).
Running Prime95 is a good stress test for the processor. If the
processor cooling is marginal, this test will heat up the processor
pretty good.
For video card testing, I use 3DMark2001SE, but basically any
game that has a fairly long intro screen or demo mode might also
serve the same function. By testing the processor and memory in
the previous steps, if the video card test freezes or crashes,
then the problem could be the AGP interface on the Northbridge
or the AGP interface on the video card. (Funny colored blocks
on the video card or other stuff like that, indicates perhaps
a memory or voltage problem inside the video card.)
Systematic testing will narrow down the possibilities a bit,
and you can follow up with tweak testing. For this, you need
a BIOS with lots of Vdimm, Vagp, Vcore adjustments and/or a
tweaker for the video card where you can underclock the video
chip. You may find a change in the symptoms after a bit of
tweaking.
HTH,
Paul
