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System Lockups...

L

lordroy

Gawd
Joined
Apr 25, 2001
Messages
703
Ok... I have a system I put together awhile ago (see sig)... it has been working fine for the better part of 3 years. Recently I started getting lockups, specifically in games, or more specifically in UT2004 and City of Heroes. I first attributed it to the age of the machine vs the new games, however 2 things seem to be giving me 2nd thoughts on the subject.

1) Sometimes I can play the newer games without a problem for 8 hour spans.

2) Sometimes I play older game (Half-Life & Q3A) with lockups.

I thought it might be a heat issue, but I went thru and made sure all my 6 fans were working in the case. I re-seated the video card, the processor, the HSF, the memory, all the cards, ect... cleaned the case with canned air... re-installed the OS... ect ect ect...

anyone have any suggestions as to what it could be? I consider myself a pretty good technician, but I cant seem to figure this one out.... and its my main rig...

-R
 
lordroy said:
Ok... I have a system I put together awhile ago (see sig)... it has been working fine for the better part of 3 years. Recently I started getting lockups, specifically in games, or more specifically in UT2004 and City of Heroes. I first attributed it to the age of the machine vs the new games, however 2 things seem to be giving me 2nd thoughts on the subject.

1) Sometimes I can play the newer games without a problem for 8 hour spans.

2) Sometimes I play older game (Half-Life & Q3A) with lockups.

I thought it might be a heat issue, but I went thru and made sure all my 6 fans were working in the case. I re-seated the video card, the processor, the HSF, the memory, all the cards, ect... cleaned the case with canned air... re-installed the OS... ect ect ect...

anyone have any suggestions as to what it could be? I consider myself a pretty good technician, but I cant seem to figure this one out.... and its my main rig...

-R
Click to expand...
Go into bios and set agp apature to a lower setting.
 
Ok, tried that. Locked up after about 9 minutes of play. Tried it at 3 different settings. (also I had it at the same settings "64M" for 3 years without problems, so I didnt think it was that)

Last night I let the computer run on memdoc. Woke up this morning, turned on the monitor, system was locked tight. Memdoc ran 27 cycles for 7 1/2 hours without a single failure, so I reeally dont think it is memory. (Memdoc runs off a bootable floppy with freedos and does bunches of memory tests).

I am starting to wonder if it is my vidcard or proc memory, but I cannot be sure.

-R
 
Did you do *ANY* upgrades prior to the *first* lock up? If no, then using logic depending on the line:

I have a system I put together a while ago. It has been working fine for the better part of 3 years.
Click to expand...

This rings a bell. Something had decayed. CPU temperature should be around 55C at best (but that's pushing it). RAM I would've assumed to be fine. Motherboard however...

-J.
 
Nope, no upgrades. In fact I had not opened the case in about 10 months (due to being unemployed and not able to upgrade).

The cpu temps seem to be fine and stable. If it is the motherboard, I dont understand why it would work sometimes but not others. 8 hours -vs- 9 minutes is weird. I am looking for some way to nail down the problem. I dont have spare parts to swap in/out to make this easier either.

-R
 
It's either motherboard or video. The motherboard has that BIOS option. It controls it all. So, if it fails by 9 minutes then it's something with the BIOS or video. Try borrowing a simple 32 mb card to run a Quake 3 game continously. You have friends right? :D

I hope this even gets you anywhere. But in three years, anything could happen to a single component.

-J.
 
I guess I could pull my old GeForce2 32m card out of my server box and stick it in my main... try that... ill get back to ya about that.

Yea, I guess 3 years is asking a bit much from all thoes different components. I just dont have the funds to upgrade as often as I would like, then again, who ever does...

-R
 
Why yes, I am broke.

The 42.5k are machines that I used to work on when I was working, all of them were loaded with the Folding software and were cranking out results. I didnt own them, but I had to maintain them. So I also loaded them with the software for the betterment of the world.

-R
 
Ok... 2 days of ugly graphics on my old GF2 card seems to have stopped the lockup issues... I ran a demoloop of q3a overnight and no problems...

hmm... Im gonna let this run for a few more days, then try and re-install the Ti4200 and see if it locks again... just to be safe... I really hope it was just some dust or something causing this... and that the card doesnt have any problems... cuz I wil be SOL until I can scrape together some more money...

If I have to replace it, I guess Ill go with a 5900xt or if I can wait a 6600... I cant afford anything over $200... suggestions?????


-R
 
You might try cleaning up the vid card and reapplying the heatsink with some fresh Heatsink compound. It's a little old and may have some overheating problems as a result of current leakage in the chip. Just a thought. I'd say it's time for that new AGP card.
 
you might want to try older drivers on that ti4200, ive heard cases of new drivers screwing up old games, specially in OpenGL... just a thought
 
I ran the 32m GF2 for days... no locks...

Pulled the HSF off of the Ti4200, cleaned the white paste that was on it, lapped the chip and the HSF a bit, applied some Artic Silver, swapped the cards out about 4 hours ago...

Ran the Q3A Timedemo loop for an hour... no problems... been playing City of Heroes for the other three... so far... no problems....

Going to run the Timedemo loop overnight... .see if anything happens...

I will post later on results...

-R
 
Update...

No lockups in the last few days (since swapping the cards back out), been playing Doom3 on the Ti4200 (med res 1024x768 @ 32.5 FPS) and ran its timedemos without any problems (Q3A does 212FPS timedemos btw with this card for hours). However, I let the computer run overnight (defrag 120G hd) and this morning, I did a reboot, when it came back to windows it was looking for a driver for "new hardware" (video card). This is something it did before from time to time, but not when I had that GF2 in at all. Does this tell me that the Ti4200 is going bad or what?

-R
 
The card may be going bad, but it might be a funky video BIOS. You might try flashiong the card's BIOS or just go with it as is and get a new card soon.
 
I looked around... no new bios ever released as far as I can tell... plus if it was a funky bios it would have reared its ugly head years ago...

Yea... the new video card might be the trick... I really would like to get a BFG5900XT but I cant seem to locate one to buy online anywhere....

-R
 
hmm It wouldn't happen to be windows ME would it? 3 years seems about right for ME. :p
 
AMDXPCottonFire22 said:
hmm It wouldn't happen to be windows ME would it? 3 years seems about right for ME. :p
Click to expand...

See sig (as mentioned in original post). Its Win2k Pro, recently formatted (as mentioned in original post). All windows drivers, chipset drivers, video drivers are current and updated (as mentioned in original post). Hmm... did you actually read my original post?

I would not touch Windows ME with a pole of infiniate length. I got out of Win98 Se about 3 years ago... with the birth of this machine.

Thanx tho...

-R
 
In my views, a Format is the cure for everything. I'd try that, and if that doesn't work, try something else.. I don't know what to tell you, other then I hope you get it figured out :p GL
 
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