What is the problem?

Hi, currently my pc has its unfair share of problems. Often, when I am playing a game (mainly hl2, sometimes farcry) I will get a box with a message saing : 'The Instruction at 0x####### referenced memory at 0x#######. The memory could not be 'read' I sometimes also get lockups and bsod (just a blue screen) when playing a game (maily hl2 for those two). I am not sure which bit of hardware is causing the problem, I have rmaed the motherboard, run memtest for a few times on the memory which makes me think that it is my video card. If it is the video card I will simply get a new one and bin my current one (oem card ).

My system is not overclocked and its specs are:
ASUS A7N8X-e dlx mobo
AMD XP 3200+
Mushkin 2-2-2 special 2x512 bh-6
ATI 9800 Pro 128Mb
Creative Audigy 2
2x Maxtor 160GB S-ATA in RAID 0

I can do things like ray tracing, f@h etc with no problems so I do not think that it is the cpu.

Does anyone know of what could be causing the problem, I am using the 5.1 drivers, dx 9c win xp sp2, 1011 bios (newer ones just have samsung mem support and sempron cpu support. Temps are fine. 20C case, 46 CPU load. Thanks for any help/adive that you can give.

I am not sure I have heard of that happening with the 9800 card in those games, but that mainly comes from a bad OpenGL spot in the game. No it isn't the game itself, but it has to do with the card's fill rate and the overall shadowing/pixelling. You might could try removing and uninstalling the card and then replacing it back in. It could just be the drivers, if its a PCI I would put it into another PCI slot and see if it corrects itself (because of it asking for the drivers again).

Try 2 differnt things.

1st try running memtest. Referenced memory errors is genrally a sign of failing RAM.

2nd Do a complete reformatt and only use Service Pack 1 on windows XP. Alot of guys are having stability issues on SP2, including myself. Ever since I stopped the upgrade to SP2 none of my games BSOD anymore

Before SP2 it was a bit worse, I have done drivers, taken the card out and in coutless times etc. When I ran prime 95 I found that I can do the small fpu test fine, but with the others i formally get rouding errors after about 8 min.

Run the lastest version of memtest86+.

I ran it for 40 min with no problems, then I stopped it as I needed to do some crap on my pc. Do I need to run it for longer?

yes you should run it for at least 4-8 hours like overnight or something as with that amount of time you should be able to see any instability the ram has because when you only do it for 40 minutes the ram really does not get that stressed as opposed to running it full on for 8 hours...

just my .02

Well I ran memtest86+ for 3:30 with no errors and it did 6 and a half passes. So, what else do you think it could be if it is not the memory.

Freddie said:

Well I ran memtest86+ for 3:30 with no errors and it did 6 and a half passes. So, what else do you think it could be if it is not the memory.

Click to expand...

My guess woudl be SP2 and or a failing HDD

Before I got SP2 it was a whole lot worse, I would be lucky to be able to play for 10 min, also ati recommends that I use sp2, any way I can test my hard drive(s) as I can not see how you came to that idea, surely in things like disk defrag or in loading it would be a lot worse? But what do I know.