**NEED WALKTHROUGH ON BIOS SETTINGS**
On 6/27/2008 I purchased:
OCZ Gold Series 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667
2 x HITACHI Deskstar 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700
HIS 3850 Radeon AGP
RAIDMAX SMILODON case
BFG Tech 650w PS
IDE connected Optical drive
First thing I did, once all the components were put together, was set the 2 HDD's up in a RAID 0.
Installed my own sound card X-FI Extreme Music.
Installed Windows XP Pro
Installed BioShock and played it for a few minutes then the computer froze up and had to hard reboot.
CPU temp. was 40C so it wasn't a heating issue.
I messed around with the BIOS. Tried the game again and it crashed again, reset back to factory defaults.
Tried another game (I can't remember what it was, but it was one that came on the bonus CD with the video card) It played for a 5 min. then got really choppy then froze up and had to hard reboot.
Sound from the X-FI never worked right at all with anything, it sounded scratchy and choppy, so I just removed the X-FI sound card and used (re-enabled from BIOS) the onboard sound and the sound works fine.
I went and updated the BIOS to the current BIOS at that time, and installed Windows 7 RC. I then installed Mirror's Edge it played great for about 5 min before the whole system would lock up.... again hard reboot.
At this point I decided that this computer will be used for nothing but a media center. The latest BIOS was released 2.20 from ASRock so I updated along with Windows 7 Pro (Retail).
I wanted to try one last time with a game. So I recently installed Force Unleashed Sith Edition, and the game ran fine for 20 min. The fan on the graphics card was pegged out. Then the screen just went black. I thought that the graphics card was overheating so I opened up the case and stuck a massive house fan right beside opened tower to disperse heat. Tried the game again, after a hard reboot, and the game played for another 20 min. with the same black screen lock up.
I then found this post on this forum:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=27590819&postcount=2108
I followed those instructions and I could play the Star Wars game for about 30min before it crashed again. Any help would be great on resolving this. I know that this computer can do so much more than just being a media center.
Thanks in advance!