Overclocking and GPU problems

[devarinti]

I am currently on a build with an Intel E8400 3.0ghz processor and Zerotherm Nirvana with a Gigabyte EP43 UD3L motherboard. There's also 4 gigs of ram GSkill something. That shouldn't affect things all that much I would think. Lastly I have a Radeon Sapphire 4850 graphics card by ATI. One more thing, hard drive is an old school IDE 80 GB harddrive.

Here's my never ending list of problems that constantly seem to arise.

- I overclocked my processor to 3.72 ghz and had it stable there for a while until it started randomly shitting itself. For some reason I could never get my computer to boot up with any overclock more than 3.72, which no one has been able to explain.
- Overclock randomly started to fail one fine day for no real reason and had to settle back to optimized defaults. God knows why similar to most other things in life.
- Then I updated my BIOS and things didn't really change so I settled with optimized defaults.
- Then one fine day my computer started blue screening randomly without me making any changes to it. I am pretty sure it's related to the graphics card as it was a blue screen related to ati3duag.dll.
- Never could solve that problem but one fine day it went away on its own. The whole blue screen problem only occurred while playing Rise of Legends Rise of Nations. So, since it went away one fine day I left it alone.
- Then it came right back yesterday spontaneously. I have already reinstalled the graphics card driver in different orders bout eight times. Uninstalled each time and cleaned out all files with driver cleaner pro.
- Then my computer stopped recognizing the existence of a DVD drive. So, I scanned for viruses and everything using avast and nothing.
- I finally reinstalled windows. Here's another issue. Everytime windows starts up it'd say found new PCI device and do the whole hardware search crap. Except, it would end up saying your hardware hasn't installed properly everytime. The only PCI device on my computer is the graphics card which is installed correctly and currently seems to work fine although I haven't tried playing the aforementioned game yet.

Before I get a hammer and go all out on my $800 life savings (Yes, I am poor although a little exaggerated), I figured I would ask about the never ending issues and see if you guys could give me some solutions.

ATI tech support is fairly lost and Gigabyte has no solutions but to update bios and reinstall bios and drivers. Done it too many times in too many different orders with no results.

Thank you for your time and suggestions.

 

[BillParrish]

Wellllll you aint gonna like it but here is my two cents .

Go to Gigabyte and download all the very latest drivers for your board, lan/nic, sound, intel inf/chipset whatever and if possible burn them to a CD or a thumb drive. Get the latest video driver and put it on there too, and get the one released before the latest.

Download the manuf tools for that hard drive and do a low level factory format. The point of that is that it will identify any new bad sectors and put them in the "do not use" table. It will also kill any nasty deeply hidden things that might be lurking. You will then still need to partition and formart for Windows.

Open her up and check every cable for loose connectors etc. Every damn one, power and signals. wiggle it twice. Even check mounting screws are snug for motherboard and drives. Go over the entire machine. Nice time to grab some bread ties etc and clean up the wiring if needed.

Clear the bios by taking out the battery and setting the jumper with the power supply truned off and the plug out of the wall. Let it sit 20 min. Reinstall the battery, move the jumper, plug in wall and turn on the powwer supply. Hit the front panel power button and go directly into the bios. Load "Factory Defaults" reboot. Go directly back into the bios and change your settings as needed, memory voltage per manuf specs. other settings as desired. But leave anything you do not have to change alone from now. Run it at stock speeds for windows and driver installs. Make sure memory mulitplier is 2.0 and stays there. Memory Performance Enhace "Normal" Save and exit with the windows boot CD in the drive.

Make sure the network cable is unplugged. - no net connection.

Reinstall windows. If during reboot it tries to install any video or sound or other hardware you have drivers for - cancel the hardware install if possbile.
Make sure the windows firewall is on if you have it and/or you are behind a router/moded that assigns you a 192.xxx.xxx.xxx address.
Reboot and install the Intel inf/chipset drivers package.
Un-install any device drivers that windows installed that you have newer drivers for.
Load install the Lan/Nic driver
plug in the network cable.
Reboot
Go to windows update and let it do its thing with service packs etc. BUT NOT HARDWARE DRIVERS !
Install your video driver.
Reboot
Set up your screen resolution
install the sound driver
Reboot
install any other drivers rebooting between each install.

Go into device manager and see that every thing has a driver - no red or yellow icons - yada yada.

Now try a minor OC and run a stress testing program.

I suspect the heart of the issue is a game bug from what you say.

What are you using for a power supply ?

 

[devarinti]

Wow that sounds like a fun little process and I am definitely looking forward to it. I might as well try before junking it I guess. It is only a month or so old.

Right now the power supply I am using is a BFG Tech 550 Watt ATX12V power supply, which I would think is enough power to suffice for what I am running.

 

[devarinti]

Alright so I finally got everything to work. But there is one problem I haven't solved. Every time I overclock my processor, Rise of Legends goes back to its bluescreening. Every time I set the bios at optimized defaults, everything seems to work good.

So, any ways to getting around this or any suggestions as to what is causing the blue screening when I overclocked? It can't be lack of stability, since even at 3.2, which is .2 over its optimized defaults it does this blue screening and only for Rise of Legends too.

 

[Mega666]

only for Rise of Legends too.

There's the clue - it's a display driver - Game issue. Look for updates on both.

 

[devarinti]

There's the clue - it's a display driver - Game issue. Look for updates on both.

But if it's a display driver wouldn't it blue screen even if it were on default bios settings? It only happens when I overclock my processor, which usually requires some bios settings changes. Also, I just updated yesterday and I have reinstalled it a couple of times.