Found cause of Northwood instability!

[mschell]

I've been playing around with a 1.6A Northwood/MSI 645 Ultra for the last week and was having a rather frustrating time getting the system to run stable at faster clock settings. Typically the system would reset (freeze followed by a flash of blue and reboot) after a few minutes of running a CPU intensive application (Seti) The problem first seemed like a voltage issue but raising it to 1.7 had no effect whatsoever. Then heat could be the problem as the system would never crash immediately but take a period of time, it would usually take less time after the system was warmed up. Broke out the freeze spray and hosed down the CPU heatsink while running Seti, no difference still crash. Chill the Northbridge and any other MB component that might be overheating, no change. OK the hardware is not the problem.

Boot into safe mode (Win XP Home) run Seti and it runs fine. Open other programs with Seti running, this would crash the main system in a few seconds but it chuggs along at (144MHz FBS 2.3GHz CPU). Did this for an hour, no crash. OK it a driver as safe mode uses different drivers.
Boot into main system, use the disable driver function for the Nvidia 23.12 drivers installed, the system reboots with a VGA type driver, rerun the above test and everything is fine, no crashes regardless of what's running or how long.

My question is does anyone have an idea of what NV video driver to use that won't cause the system instability? The video card is the MSI G3 Ti200. I used the 23.12's as they were the latest digitally signed drivers but any stable driver would do at this point as the 60Hz refresh on these VGA drivers is killing my eyes.

Thanks for any info! - M.

 

[THUGSROOK]

that could also be an AGP funtion problem for the motherboard.

 

[subhuman]

Hmm maybe its the Sis chipset?

 

[THUGSROOK]

subhuman
i wouldnt call it a SiS645 problem, as the Abit and Asus SiS645 boards dont have that problem.
however alot of new MSI moboards are having alot of problems lately :Q

 

[mschell]

Installed the 21.83 driver and everything seems fine. Seti has been running fine along with with any other programs I want to run. I'm testing 146MHz (2.33GHz) now, I do 2MHz jumps with at least 8 hrs. testing before moving up so it will take awhile to reach 150MHz which is a goal and a stopping point. No sense it pushing it too hard and frankly I'm tired of crashes.
I'm a bit miffed about wasting massive amounts of time chasing a hardware problem that turned out to be software but I know better now. I should have loaded up a basic Windows install on another partition and used it to test the hardware's stability.
Anyway, here's some system specs,
MSI 645 Ultra/1.6A Northwood stock HSF (Costa Rica) 1.62v via VID mod
256 MB Centron Cas2 PC2100 (Newegg)
Enermax 351W PSU
BIOS settings,
2.5t
Fast timings
Normal delay
CPU/Mem ratio set to 1/1 (292Mhz mem freq.)
On the 645 Ultra, be sure to enter the detected hard drive's setup, 32 bit addressing is disabled by default, enabling it speeds the drive considerably.
The 645 seems to be a fine board especially for the $74.00 I paid for it. MSI's web site is better than most with a users forum and a compatiblility report on every motherboard. Negatives are a malfunctioning temp sensor and the lower DIMM clips obstructed by the AGP card. CPU core voltage is a bit limited with 1.56v max without a VID mod but I'm not so sure I needed it now.
The SiS IDE seems especially fast, Sandra reports scores around 26000 for my 40G Maxtor DX741.

 

[augiem]

mschell,

I don't know if this will help you, but I saw on some tweaking site that the Detonator drivers load up a service (NVIDIA Driver Helper Service) that can sometimes cause random crashes. (The author of the article said it caused his system to crash a lot. ) I don't know what it does, but you could try turning it off.

I don't know WinXP, but in Win2k to get to the services, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, NVIDIA Driver Helper Service -> DISABLE.

Augie

 

[Schmo]

<< I don't know WinXP, but in Win2k to get to the services, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, NVIDIA Driver Helper Service -> DISABLE. >>



Same steps under WinXP as long as you have your control panel in "Classic View". If you are in "Category View", you go to Performance and Maintenance then select Administrative Tools, and everything is the same from that point.

 

[mschell]

Just an update - Finished testing the 150MHz FBS mark. It's as solid as any system I've used and very fast. You can almost watch the Seti progress bar move, I've burned through all my cached WU's, the Seti server seems to be down so I need another number crunching bench to keep the heat on this system. I did disable the NV driver help but noticed no difference. The 23xx series of NV drivers just seem unstable on this P4, the 21.83 is working well.

 

[Regalk]

The 23.11/23.12 are dogs - 21.83/21.85 are much better - I use 21.83 as well.

 

[Egrimm]

<< The 23.11/23.12 are dogs - 21.83/21.85 are much better - I use 21.83 as well. >>


I agree, I had problems with the official 23 drivers too, and that was with a AthlonXP 1600+ on a KT266A mobo. 22.80 worked much better, it's strange, the unofficial drivers have always worked better for me.

 

[Yelf]

Where are you getting the 21.xx drivers??

 

[Errtu]

nVidia's site has a link on the left side called "Driver Archive" in the download section for your operating system. Choose that link and you get your choice of many drivers, including the 21.xx's.

 

[Egrimm]

<< Where are you getting the 21.xx drivers?? >>


Hmm, can't remember, but I can send 'em to you if you want. I have, like, 15 different versions of Detonators taking up space on my hd, of the 21.xx series I have 21.81 for Win2000/XP and 21.83 for both 2000/XP and 98.

 

[Yelf]

You guys are quick! Clicked refresh and I there's my answer.
Thanks!