Help me, having major problems.......

(Charlies Angel) #1

Hey, i have been playing ET since it originally came out, i used to have a:
CPU 1.6
Ram: 512
gfx card: gf4 ti4200

I recently upgraded to the following system specs:
Cpu: AMD Barton XP3200+
Ram: Corsair 1GB 3200 matched pair
Mobo: Nvidia n-force 2 ultra 400 A7N8X-E

I have had the following problems, i formatted my hard drive, and re-installed win2k after assembling my pc. when updating ET and adding my cfg back i began to play. Within 10 mins of me playing my pc crashed and restarted itself, this persisted continuously, untill i reformatted my hdd and installed windows again. Once doing this i did not add my config and i tried all over again, maybe there was a prob with my cfg. Anyways, it hasn’t stopped, and it usually happpens within 20 mins of me starting the game up, but it has been known to take upto an hour b4 it crashes and restarts my pc again. pls any help would benefit me greatly, i am in a tournee next week, and cant afford to miss it :slight_smile:

Yours sincerely Charlies angel :x

(MadJack) #2

Check temperatures on CPU, motherboard, etc etc etc…

(Oral_B) #3

Looks as if you have a system there. :clap:

What kind of cooling system do you have??
Did you install extra fans and heat sinks?

Can’t tell you how often something like that occurs cuz of over heating systems…
IMPORTANT:
You can never have too much “air conditioning”

(Charlies Angel) #4

my cpu temp is kept very low, i have a great heatsink, and around 8 fans to go with it, my cpu temperature is unfortunately not the problem

(ToeD) #5

i know somebody with that same cpu, and he keeps on crashing too all the time

(Sauron|EFG) #6

I had that same problem, and it turned out it was a faulty CPU (AMD 2500+).
It switched itself off at the wrong temperature apparently.

(Charlies Angel) #7

any1 know how to do anything about it. hey sauron btw and you toed :slight_smile:

(bacon) #8

There should be an option to turn off ASUS COP (the CPU Overheating Protection). There was on the older asus mobos but I don’t know if the new ones have it.
With it off, your PC shouldn’t shut down unless there’s a serious system error.

(Lekdevil.NL) #9

Switching off the CPU overtemp protection is reckless at best. It’s there for a reason…

In any case, the problem is reboots, not shutdowns, so the CPU overtemp protection is not involved here (as that only shuts the PC down and does not reboot it). Therefore the problems is most likely bad hardware (memory, CPU or motherboard), wrong BIOS settings (FSB frequency, multiplier, memory frequency, memory timings), insufficient power, bad drivers, or a combination of all of them.

To test for general hardware stability, please follow the instructions in my generic hardware stress testing post below.

Added: It would also help if you’d post the settings on your “Advanced Chipset Features” BIOS page. Also, what are the specs of your power supply (max. current per rail, max. total power) and what other devices do you have installed in your system?

HTH.

The first thing you must do is to verify your system stability. Begin by checking your memory with Memtest86+ http://www.memtest.org/. Let it run overnight. No errors may be detected during that time.

After that, use the “blend” torture test of Prime95 http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm. Your system should be able to run the TT for at least 12 hours straight without reporting a single error (just let it run overnight as well).

Finally, to check your video system, run 3DMark2001 together with Prime95 for another 8 hours. There should be no crashes and no Prime95 errors.

If your system survives all that, you can take the next step and start investigating the OS, drivers, etc. But first run the stress tests and report back your results.