3D Games crash in new A64 System

A friend built a new A64 system last week. Overall it works well but crashes when he plays 3D games.

I hope someone has an idea what's going on here. Thanks!
(He hasn't overclocked - YET! )

He used these new components:

Abit AV8 939 Motherboard
Athlon 3200+, 64bit Winchester Core
512MB PC 3200 RAM (2x256)
ATI RADEON 9600XT AGP Video Card
400-Watt Ahanix Power Supply (silent)
Thermaltake Venus 12 Copper CPU Heatsink (2 pounds!)
ATI Silencer2 GPU Heatsink

(He used his old IDE hard disks, CD-RW drives and mid-tower case)

The OS is Windows XP Pro (don’t know if he has SP2 installed, will find out)

CPU temps: 36C light load, 44C heavy

This is an email he just sent me: “Windows and most applications run fine but any 3D Game blows up. Unreal Tournament 2004 dies unexpectedly after 10 minutes of playing. Sadly, this is one of the main reasons I wanted a faster computer. All other programs work perfectly.

Changes made, outside of the obvious getting all new drivers:
1. Set Windows Display, Monitor, to the correct brand
2. In BIOS, set AGP from 8x to 4x
3. In BIOS, set some other AGP thingy (VLINK?) to 4x

It seemed to work with these settings for a while but not now. I think I'll pull the 9600XT out and put my old one back in.”

Well, he's got to do some trouble shooting. Switch out PSU would be one thing to try. I'm suspicious of the ram. Have him run memtest86 test 5 and see how it deals with stress. The 3D games stress the whole system and it crashes so something is not stable. The CPU memory controller is another posibility.

Never heard of that power supply (psu). A good psu you might consider are from OCZ and Fortron. Who makes the RAM?

For your friend:

May be worth a try with nVidia GPU or another brand motherboard...

I had serious problems with a VIA & ATi combination with my first board (the very same AV8): Whenever the ATi display driver called the controller's own software to draw something instead of just doing the boring D/A-conversion, the on-board program looped, VPU recovery reseted the card to software mode and a little after the whole system froze.

I know I am not the only one who has suffered from these problems, since there have been thousands of cases (try Googling it, you'll find alarmingly many displeased users). They have occured with most VIA chipsets randomly since KT400; no one can tell which board refuses from co-operation with an ATi graphics card. I had my mobo changed since it clearly wasn't compatible (this was my own assessment of the problem as well as my retailer's once they had fought with the system for a week). I would otherwise have been very happy with AV8 except for a very annoying superbright LED mounted onto the board.

I suggest you try the board with a nVidia graphics card. If it doesn't work either, go to the reseller who sold it to you and tell you want to replace the mobo since it clearly is faulty. If no problems occur with nVidia graphics, have either the mobo or the graphics card changed to a compatible one. I am not sure how much protection your local law gives the customer, but here in Finland they really have little choice but to take back the board and give the money back to the customer. I had my AV8 changed to MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum 54G; I had to pay the price difference worth 21 € of course, but I got every cent of my money back from the incompatible AV8.

After changing the mobo and keeping exactly the same other components I have had absolutely no problems whatsoever; I don't believe it could have been any other part since both I and my retailer reached the very same conclusion: the mobo was incompatible with the rest of the hardware.

did he install the chipset driver??

He is not running the power hungry x800 or 6800 series card. I doubt that the PSU is the problem.

try turning off DEP.

There a lot of possible causes :

1 - Is DX9c and the latest Cat driver installed ?
2 - Is fast writes disabled in the BIOS?
3 - Are motherboard drivers the latest?
4 - Is the heatsink on the video card a new change or has it been used that way for a while? If the GPU sink is new look at that as the source of trouble since the issues sound like they are GPU heat related (3D stress/heat causes crashing). GPU heatsink could be to tight, to loose, or have the thermal paste/tape applied wrong. Also getting thermal paste on any of the tiny resistors between the GPU core and the shim is a possible cause.
5 - If the video card has been over clocked from a previous system he may need to reset it to defaults and start OCing the GPU from the ground up again because all motherboards have different limits for thier slots, some clock higher than others. Moving the AGP voltage up .1v might help but anymore is not recommended.
6 - As previously mentioned, the power supply is a question, if a spare is available swap it just to be sure.

Thanks a lot guys! My friend's out of town for the holidays but I will email this link to him. We appreciate all these great suggestions!

most likely the psu is the problem if he gets random crashes. happened to me before, there is a quick fix... buy a better one.

Just curious.

Did he RE-install Windows after the hardware upgrades or just plug the old hard drive into the new system and go?

tell him to try different ram slots for his ram, he may have em in wrong slots if he is using 2 sticks, and that could cause problems, did for me

It could be a duff CPU. I bought a XP 2800+ Barton once that wouldn't run at the stock FSB of 166Mhz. I had to underclock it to 160Mhz to make it work.

To rule out this possibility you could go into the BIOS, turn down the FSB from 200 to 195, 190, 185 etc until it becomes stable. If it does become stable then there's a good chance your CPU is duff, (although you are underclocking other components such as the mobo and memory so it could be those that are problematic).

jallen said:

Just curious.

Did he RE-install Windows after the hardware upgrades or just plug the old hard drive into the new system and go?

Click to expand...

It was a clean install. Don't need no dirty stinkin' installs here!

I would put money that it's the memory. See what his timings are, and see what RAM he's running, specifically. I know you said that it isn't overclocked, but my bet is on the memory...

The tendency is to assume it's the PSU, and I'd probably put that second to the memory on the troubleshooting test....

My friend plugged in an NVIDIA card and all is well. No more problems with 3D games!

Thanks to everyone for your help, especially Kurare because you got him going in the right direction!

Anyone else seen this VIA/ATI incompatibility?