video card crashing?

[gotensan01]

I'm running the comp in my rig. When I play WoW for about 10 minutes, the game locks up. About 10 sec after the lock up, my video turns off. It seems like the computer is running fine except that there is no longer any display.

I recently changed my mobo to the chaintech one. I played a good 6 hours oF WoW initially without it ever crashing. Then the next day this problem started to occur. I am running the latest bios and the latest catalyst for my ati radeon.

One side note is that there is about an inch long scratch on the mobo and it seems that a connection has been severed. I was kinda worried at first but I ran the comp fine for over 24 hours so I figured it wasn't a problem.

Last time I checked, my memory returned no errors after memtesting it overnight.

Do you guys have any ideas?

 

[daveybrat]

I would lean towards the motherboard being bad personally. There should never be any traces cut on the board or you can have some serious problems with stability.
And depending on what trace is cut, you can have no symptoms until you stress the board (i.e. gaming, etc.)

I would first try running your 9800pro at stock speed and not the XT softmod you're using now. If that doesn't help, i'd say bad motherboard.

 

[gotensan01]

Originally posted by: daveybrat
I would lean towards the motherboard being bad personally. There should never be any traces cut on the board or you can have some serious problems with stability.
And depending on what trace is cut, you can have no symptoms until you stress the board (i.e. gaming, etc.)

I would first try running your 9800pro at stock speed and not the XT softmod you're using now. If that doesn't help, i'd say bad motherboard.

I ran the sofmodded 9800xt stable for about 4 months. It's been through many stress tests and real world gaming stress. No problems before.

I am kinda leaning towards the mobo but I have to run extensive tests elsewhere I'm thinking. I'm going to run prime95 overnight. I'm thinking that if my setup survives prime95 and 3dmark, then it is WoW. Is that a decent assumption?

 

[Kuch]

Go to the WoW site and read the tech support forums. They are full of people have similar problems to you, so it may be a game side problem. I too have this problem, but the reason I don't think it is game related is because I had my computer freeze up with artifacts twice even before I had WoW installed (after I just built it last weekend). I think mine is a nVidia 6800 problem that have been discussed in several threads here.

Kuch

 

[KBtn]

you also may want to roll back the video drivers if you have recently upgraded them. sometimes that latest drivers are not 100% compatible with the latest games. Basically everyone is a beta tester for the new driver versions...that's why new ones are constantly released

 

[ice024]

I had a similar problem with my fx5600 on an abit ic7-g max 2 playing warcraft frozenthone since i upgraded to a 6800gt about 6wks ago i have had no trouble

 

[gotensan01]

Cool, so I reformatted my comp and am in the process of installing WoW. If the crashing still occurs, I will try to roll back the video driver. I'll also check out the tech support in the WoW site. Thanks peeps!

 

[gotensan01]

Originally posted by: KBtn
you also may want to roll back the video drivers if you have recently upgraded them. sometimes that latest drivers are not 100% compatible with the latest games. Basically everyone is a beta tester for the new driver versions...that's why new ones are constantly released

Good advice. After the reformat and another reinstall, I made progress. This time the WoW crash did not crash my comp. So I was able to minimize a very distorted image of WoW to get back onto my desktop. A VPU recover message popped up saying that the driver failed to communicate with the hardware or something like that. So I'm going to try to rollback to 4.9 or get 4.12 Beta. I read in another forum that those work better.

 

[Rage187]

could also be your PSU

 

[gotensan01]

Originally posted by: Rage187
could also be your PSU

I guess it could be, but my voltages are reporting as on the money if not a bit higher. I have an old (2-3 years) but very nice Enermax 550W PSU.

 

[gotensan01]

I got WoW to stop crashing. I did 3 things on top of having the latest drivers and what not.

First, I installed my monitor's drivers so that it wouldn't just be a generic Default monitor to XP. I doubt this had anything to do with the crash fix.

Second, I set the AGP support from Auto to 4x. The other option was 8x/4x.

Third, I set my AGP Aperture size to 64mb.

I haven't tried putting up to 128mb with 4x agp but I think that may work as well. As far as I'm concerned, 64mb aperture and 4x agp is good enough until ATI comes out with an updated driver.