Hard lock during gaming

S

sparksterz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 1, 2008
Messages
188
Hey guys, I've been playing games on my PC recently after switching over to Win 7 and I've been getting complete hard locks in several games. Ex. NFS:S, Oblivion, L4D/L4D2

It gets to the point where it's completely unrecoverable; I can't open up task manager or anything and I have to hard reset. From the looks of it going through the error reports in the administrative tools area it seems to be a problem with nvidia's drivers. It seems to happen about every 30 mins sometimes less. I'm kinda getting sick of it and I'm wondering if I should just pick up a 5770 as I figure that'd be on par with my current one (see main rig in sig) I unfortunately can't really spend more than $200 on one unless I wait for a bit. What is your guys' opinion?
 
have you changed your memory setting both on your ram or your gpu memory?
 
Hard locks are usually OC or hardware errors. I know Windows usually blames a GPU driver for locking up (i.e. nVidia something .dll), if your NB is overclocked, that is usually the first problem. So if you are overclocked, be sure to go back to stock. If you are at stock already, we will need more information...
 
I under-clocked my gpu processor and ram by 75 mhz and still had the same issue. I've also tried multiple recent drivers (last 3 months) including beta's up to nVidia's most recent WHQL drivers.
 
No, all my hardware is currently at stock. What other information would be helpful? The card I have (Asus ultimate 9800 GT) is basically a heavily overclocked 8800 GT which is why I figured my lock issues are due to my video card.
 
im trying to remember what i did when i had hard locks. The reason why I got hard locks was cuz my memory was overclocked (used memtest to fix it) memory on gpu was too high (lowered my overclock setting) lastly i re-installed the latest gpu drivers. thats as far as i had to go. never had to rma.
 
Well I actually have a nVidia card, do they have an equal testing tool? I've been using Riva tuner to under-clock my card.
 
huh, I guess I could run memtest and see if my ram is causing the lockup I haven't checked that yet
 
sparksterz said:
huh, I guess I could run memtest and see if my ram is causing the lockup I haven't checked that yet
Click to expand...

look in your bios if you memory is running at stock speeds you should be good but then again you never know. make sure the ram is seated properly
 
I mis-read the title of this thread at first. I was like, "Woah there buddy... no one need to know how much you like gaming, now."
 
ordovician said:
I mis-read the title of this thread at first. I was like, "Woah there buddy... no one need to know how much you like gaming, now."
Click to expand...

Lol no, I'm not getting that excited about gaming. especially not when my machine crashes all the time :mad:

I'm halfway through a pass on memtest so far now without errors and all my settings in BIOS have been set to auto, so I may look back and see if I can disable overclocking once this finishes, that could be the reason I keep crashing not really sure.
 
sparksterz said:
Lol no, I'm not getting that excited about gaming. especially not when my machine crashes all the time :mad:

I'm halfway through a pass on memtest so far now without errors and all my settings in BIOS have been set to auto, so I may look back and see if I can disable overclocking once this finishes, that could be the reason I keep crashing not really sure.
Click to expand...

I'd still hard-set your CPU/NB/RAM voltages. If you know the stock value, I'd set that instead, since setting AUTO tends to encourage over-volting. I mean, if something needed more voltage - great - but you want to be well-aware of specifically what got more voltage.

I think you may be right about the GPU overclock though, especially if you can pass memtest and say a typical CPU/RAM only stress tool like Linx/OCCT/etc.
 
I set my ram voltage, I'll have to look up my NB, my cpu is a 955 black edition, I can set that at a locked freq. to test it though. I'll try a cpu/ram test later today and let you guys know. In the case that this is a video card issue would a 5770 be a good replacement for around $200?
 
So far it seems to be running a little nicer...now I only get soft locks. Like the screen will stop updating, and the music/sound will loop for about 3 seconds and sometimes it will come back on its own, and other times I'll have to alt tab out of it. Does anyone else experience things like that?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top