Computer on the Fritz

Afrikaaner

Solid State Member
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Hey, im new to this forum, so please excuse me if i put this in the wrong place, but i have been experiencing some infuriating problems. my current rig consists of:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+
DFI Lanparty NF4 mobo
ATI x800 vid card
1 gig some brand of ram, has heat spreaders
currently only an 80 gig hdd, waiting for sata 250 gig to be replaced
OCZ 520watt powersupply

and straaaange things have been happening...

first, when i had windows xp 32 bit installed, i would get blue screens of death, some responsive, some not. then i upgraded to vista for a bit (didnt like it...i need a better cpu before my next venture there), and instead of BSOD, i would get a sort of BSOD, but it would be garbled, no text, only strange patterns of dots in that whitish color that should have been text, sometimes it would restart itself, sometimes it would stay like that, but usually it would just flash that screen for about half a second, and restart. Then i installed windows xp x64, which is what im running now, and now REALLY bad stuff happens. the random crashing used to happen as i opened or closed a 3d app, leading me to suspect my gpu, but now it just happens whenver it wants to, and with no BSOD or anything, ill be typing or something, and POOF!! the screen is black and everything is lost. happens minimum of once a day so far, usually more like 3 or so times. And sometimes it will not load windows. it will get past the screen with the bar running saying its loading xp, finish that, screen goes blank, but instead of loading my desktop, it reboots. i increased the voltages in the bios by small amounts in case they dropped below operating voltage causing my random reboots, but to no avail. im at a complete loss right now, contemplating taking it in to someplace that would be able to diagnose it, but i dont even know what kind of a place to start looking for... any and all ideas are welcomed.

-afrikaaner
 
Welcome to the forum :)

Can you try a different video card? It certainly sounds as if that one may be faulty.

Have you done anything else in the bios apart from altering the voltages?
 
well i had tried to overclock it slightly, but didnt change anything other than the 200 mhz clock to 215 (from 2000mhz to 2150mhz), i have more than adequate cooling, so im sure nothing is wrong with my cpu, but i dont have another video card to try out. the only thing i noticed is when i run cpuz, the voltage should be 1.4v, but its always low at 1.376v unless i up the voltage in the bios to around 1.450, then the voltage reads at 1.396 or something like that

oh, and i had to turn off external caching to make the entire machine run wayy back when i first put it together, still have no idea what thats about.
 
Your voltage differences are called vdrop (bios to Windows) and vdroop (idle to load) all boards have it to varying degrees.

Mate I really believe the card could be faulty, can you boot into safe mode?
 
i can boot into windows, its just that at very random times, it will restart, and when it does, it takes on average 3 tries to boot. the most common times for the rig to boot is when i quit a 3d app (ie half life/cs:s) or every time i try to boot WoW, but would a bad gpu really cause all those random reboots?
 
i can boot into windows, its just that at very random times, it will restart, and when it does, it takes on average 3 tries to boot. the most common times for the rig to boot is when i quit a 3d app (ie half life/cs:s) or every time i try to boot WoW, but would a bad gpu really cause all those random reboots?


Afrikaaner, this sounds EXACTLY like the same issue I had once I finished building my computer. Upon installing Hellgate:London to give it a shot, my computer restarted by itself. This happened on many occasions, but only when trying to play games like HGL and WoW.

After a few restarts and then ONE four-try restart boot attempt (just like you mentioned), the restarting and problems began even when I wasn't playing any games.


I was THIS close to returning the video card because I assumed it was faulty. I stopped myself, though, and did the following:

(keep in mind I've got Vista)

1. Updated the BIOS
2. Updated all drivers; windows updates; re-installed video card drivers
3. Disabled tablet-pc support.

No more problems.


Go ahead and reinstall or update as many drivers as you can. Make sure your BIOS has the latest update, too. I used the ASUS BIOS update utility to flash with the newest one. Its all perfect now.


Let me know of any other questions you have. I did my fair share of research on this problem.


Cheers,

Chris
 
ok ive never updated the bios, any good sites to know about? any hints suggestions, how do i find which update to install?
 
Before you go flashing the bios (which is always a risky venture) how about we explore some other avenues, like possible faulty hardware e.g. power switch, power supply etc

Personally I would think this is more likely the cause than a faulty bios.
 
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