Z_Vengeance

Hello,

Ive been having some crashes while gaming recently and am having trouble figuring out the exact cause. I want to know exactly what the problem is before my next hardware upgrade so I know what can be brought over from my old machine.

When playing certain graphically intensive games the screen will go black, with the monitor displaying "no signal input". Sound stops as well, and the computer needs to be hard rebooted.

This immediately seems like a graphics card or power supply problem, but my power supply is more than adequate. I have tried updating my video drivers, but that doesnt seem to help. My memory passes memtest.

The strange thing is this only happens in certain games on certain settings. Empire total war on highest settings will always crash, medium will crash sometimes, and low settings will never crash. STALKER causes it to crash on highest settings as well. Left 4 Dead has crashed on a couple occasions as well. I use rivatuner to keep my GPU fan at 100% when gaming, but this doesnt help. This same crash happened when I was running the Windows 7 release candidate, as well as with Vista now. The strangest part is most GPU benchmarks (furmark, etc) do not cause a crash.

Sorry for the long post, I tried to describe the problem in the most complete way I could.

Thanks in advance.

Chranny

I've had this problem too once, suddenly it just stopped so I'm afraid I can't tell you the solution nor the problem.

__________________

brettjv

Is anything overclocked on your system?

If so, that's an obvious place to start.

If not, given your description, the only thing I can think of is replacing the TIM on your 8800GT. Sometimes the TIM breaks down over time, and you can get hot-spots on your gpu core that may or may not get registered as a high temp (since you only have one sensor location on the chip), but can still cause instability.

If you choose to do this, get yourself some shin-etzu compound ... don't use AS5 or other cpu product - it's too thin to work right on a gpu core due to the much larger gap between chip and cooler.

__________________
3dMark06 w/GTX295 (712/1512/2484): 26,490
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=11655839
3dMark06 w/2x5850 (850/1200): 27,380
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=12952029

SmasherBasher

Sounds like RAM to me. Are you experiencing any BSOD? Just for luck, run each of your memory modules through an all night session of memtest to be sure.


Edit - got it! Change out your RAM to DDR2-800 as per the memory standard on your board. I had the exact same thing happen to me and the problems magically disappeared after swapping memory

__________________

rock3ralex

ram or your video card is going south. I had problems like that too when my video card was dying.

__________________

Z_Vengeance

Thanks for all your help, I have run memtest and the RAM passes fine. Ill try running it at DDR2-800 and see if that helps. Ill post results when Im home later tonight

tweakboy

Your memory on the card is heating up. You need to adjust your fan manually to 100 percent then you will be ok, also don't OC. It's just some cards the fan speed doesnt go up much nd your at 50 percent in GPU intensive game and its 80c ,, for example..

This is simply your fan not spinning fast enough... gl