Don,
Greetings and hallucinations from just north of Fantasy Land (Washington,
DC)!
Hi Paul,
Greetings from Minnesota!
What, pray tell, were you trying to fix? Flash a BIOS only to cure a
problem. Flashing to just have the lastest and greatest is courting the
bitch Goddess Disaster with red roses, Godiva® chocolates and a 10 karet
water white flawless diamond from Tiffany's. With that on offer she is sure
to pay you a call. You will find that she is a lousy date.
I realize that it's not a good idea to flash the bios 'just because'.
That's why I was still at 1003 until I updated this board to 1007 in
preparation for a new SATA drive I had ordered. I had read that the
1007 included improvements to the SATA bios. I suppose my mistake was
in not just seeing how well the 1003 handled the SATA drive.
That being said, have you reinstalled the nVidia drivers for the board?
Sometimes they get confused when the BIOS is changed.
This I haven't done. Wasn't sure whether to reinstall the ASUS version
or go ahead and try installing the nVidia reference ones over the ASUS
version. I really have no idea how to uninstall the ASUS so it'd be an
install over them if I went that way.
Since I posted the message and responses below, I've done a few more
things.
I've uninstalled the video drivers and reinstalled new ones that came
out the day I was updating the drivers.
After unchecking the "Restart on Error" option in WinXP, I had one
crash to the BSOD where it pointed to an ATI file as the problem. I've
also had the system STILL completely reboot, and one occurrence where
it appeared all that happened was I lost the video. My LCD went blank,
yet the computer seemed to still be running.
I tried timing the reboots. It appears the first one occurs around 1
hour, to 1:10. The second one around 20 minutes later. (This was while
in-game, playing DAoC. The only crash I've had out of the game was
after five hours of playing MP3s with Winamp while playing Kyodai
Mahjonng.) When I opened the case and directed a fan on the innards, I
was able to put the reboot back to another hour. I suspected heat
problems with the video card, but it felt merely warm to the touch
after these reboots (as far as the ram chips,anyway. Wasn't able to
touch the actual GPU obviously).
ASUS Probe shows the MB and CPU temps to be around 30C and 40C max.
Usually about 27 and 35 or so, so I don't think the CPU is
overheating.
I blew out the case in case dust was a problem. I didn't really see
any standing dust on the CPU or Video card (though I am unable to
extract my dust filter from the front of my Antec Sonata case. After a
few attempts at pressing on tabs and pulling the filter out, both tabs
broke and the filter hasn't budged).
I've ordered a new video card in case the 9700 Pro is failing, and a
new power supply (current one is Antec 380), just in case the BIOS
somehow caused the board to use a bit more juice. I admit, I have no
idea if that's even possible, but it seemed that the problems only
occurred when there was a lot of video activity so I leaned toward it
being either the card actually going, or the card demanding a bit more
juice and putting the PSU over the edge and causing a reset.
In all cases, I am able to use the system immediately after one of
these reboots, and there never is any weird graphical artifacts prior
to a reboot.
Sorry this got so long. I do thank all of you for reading and posting
possible ideas.
To you also,
Don
My system is fairly plain:
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe v2 1007 bios
Athlon 2500+ Barton core
1g Kingston PC 2700 ram (as mentioned, passed memtest for 19 hours and
38 passes)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
120GB WD IDE hard drive
LiteOn DVD/CD-RW combo drive
LiteOn 52x CD-RW drive
Samsung Syncmaster 191T monitor