Random freeze... ARGGG!!!

[Gemini_II]

Hello everyone,

I have been experiencing several different video loclup problems over
an array of hardware so I will start at the beginning:

Original Config:
Asus P3B-F
Pentium III 500MHz
384 MB RAM
32MB RIVA TNT2 (Diamond v770)
SoundBlaster Live!
Windows 98, then Windows 2000, then Windows XP Pro (all full
re-installs)
DirectX 7 and 8

Upgrade Config:
ECS K7S5A
AMD Athlon XP 1800+
512 MB RAM
32MB RIVA TNT2 (Diamond v770) OR 32MB GeForce2
SoundBlaster Live!
Windows 2000, then Windows XP Pro
DirectX 8 and 9

Latest Upgrade:
128 MB ATI Radeon 9500Pro
Windows XP Pro
DirectX 9.0b

I am a Network Administrator with quite a bit of experience so I will
skip most of the small bits. When I was running the TNT2 or the
GeForce2 (in all configs) I would experience the "infinate loop"
lockup on a regular basis depending on what games I would try to run.
It came down to running OpenGL games on the latest NVIDIA driver, or
running D3D games on the latest "WindowsUpdate" Nvidia driver. This
would produce stable use, but there should be no reason for me to
switch drivers to run different programs! While running dxdiag I could
cause a crash on a DirectDraw test when using the NVIDIA drivers.

Yesterday I recieved my new ATI Radeon 9500Pro (it is detected by all
drivers/programs as a 9700Pro though?) and thought I was free of the
freezes and hangs, but alas! I have tried drivers from Sapphire and
from ATI (normal and reference) and although I do not get errors in
Event Viewer, I still lockup. I have tried to run 3DMark 2001SE and
3DMark'03 and I crash them both within 1 minute. I have even had the
desktop lockup. I now complete all dxdiag tests perfectly.

I have all of the latest drivers, patches, AGP drivers, BIOS patches;
everything. I have tried old and new patches on the old and new
configs. I hear it's an DirectX problem, then a VIA problem, then a MS
problem. I have scoured the newsgroups and can find similar instances,
but nothing the same. I have tried so many different versions of the
above with no results (other than lockups/freezes).

If anyone has any insights on this, your feedback would be vastly
appreciated! My apologies if I left something out, feel free to email
me for more details, and thanks in advance!

Jason

 

[Jean Jasinczuk]

If with 3 different video cards you experience lockups, whatever driver you
tried, either you are very unlucky with your video cards or the problem is
somewhere else.
Have you tried different memory? Maybe the motherboard? Also the sound card
can conflict? Or even the power supply.

 

[Wagger]

Have you tried to force the card to run in AGPx4. Mine froze randamly in
games running at 8x.

 

[Thor]

A couple months ago I built a system..
with a sapphire 9100 video card.

I had a similar problem..
Mine worked fine in 2d but after a minute or two of running anything 3d I
would get a black screen, sometimes with an audio loop.
It sucked.. it crashed every time i ran a game or 3dmark.


I had all the latest drivers for the videocard..

I turns out the problem went away when I updated the Motherboard chipset
drivers and the sound card drivers.
(not sure which actually fixed the problem- as i did both at the same time)

You might want to double check those...

good luck.

 

[chris Neville]

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