I keep crashing...pls help me

Ok I just got my new system setup and it consists of this...

Windows xp sp3
Gigabyte EP45-DS3L
Intel e7200
BFB 9800gtx+
Antec 500w earthwats psu
OCZ 4gb ram 2gb each stick...says vista upgrade on it and didnt realize this untill I got home.

CPU and GPU are still on stock clocks and all stock voltage. Windows boots up just fine and everything runs fine untill I attempt to play and kind of game. I cant get past the first 15 seconds of 3dmark 06. I have the latest nvidia 178.13 drivers from nvidia.

I thought maybe my psu wasnt enough to run this system but I had the same vid card in a dell p4 3.0 and never had a issue. I hooked up a thermaltech 250w vga booster which has 2 6pin pcie pins and i tried to run the card off that and that didnt work. I then tried to have 1 6pin from my psu and 1 6pin from my booster try and run it and still crashed. I then tried to just run it off my psu and still crash. When I crash I never blue screen, it just freezes and causes me to reboot. Can you guys pls help me out, thxs.

do you get a bsod or crash to the desktop?

just freezes, i dont get a blue screen or anything, after 30 seconds of the same frozen picture i just reboot.

That 500w psu isn't enough for that video card. You're underpowering the card.

Nebulous said:

That 500w psu isn't enough for that video card. You're underpowering the card.

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but i fed the card 250w alone via a seperate power supply and let the rest of the pc use all of the 500w and still crashed. I cant see how that card can require 250w under load. I also fed the card with 1 pcie from the booster and one from the antec psu and still crashed.

now it froze up a few times with me just runing programs like limewire. Could it be memory you think? Im using a vista mem upgrade kit and im not sure if thats causing the problem unless you guys still think its power.

I would say try a different PSU. (600W or Greater) of a QUALITY company.

The memory shouldn't be your issue.

markourn said:

now it froze up a few times with me just runing programs like limewire. Could it be memory you think? Im using a vista mem upgrade kit and im not sure if thats causing the problem unless you guys still think its power.

Click to expand...

Go into system bios and increase the system memory voltage .100 volts. Most MB's low ball
the system memory voltage in Auto settings.

If that doesn't help then try the 9800 in another computer and see if it behaves there.

Viper

ok i changed out psu from antec earthwats 500w to antec basiq which is 500w also but has more amps per 12v rail. I also removed 1 2gb chip from my system bringing me to 2gb from 4gb. I can now run 3dmark 06 and score 11k but when I try to play games like cod4/warhammer online it freezes 1 min into the game each time....pls help

9800 worked fine in p4 3.0 dell using the same psu im using now.

The p4 system doesn't pull as much power as what your main rig does. That is not a quality P/S, the combined 12v output is a lot more important than individual rails. I prefer for my P/S to have a single powerful 12v rail like many pc power and cooling P/S. What about when you run a stress test, is the system stable. Have you tried running memtest? Try it with one stick installed at a time(if some ram is bad, it is probably only one stick). It might be temp but you say you can run 3d mark now? How hot is the proc and vid card during this stress? Hope some of this helps.

Shouldnt the card has enough power coming from that independant "thermaltech 250w vga booster" ?

I would of though that would be more than enough for 1 9800GTX+

Nemes

i'm having the same problem. every game I play both with my new 4870 and my old 1800xt keep crashing. if anyone's every looked at the charts or seen how much a comp uses at full load, most people wouldn't be buying power supplys >500watts. My rig uses 320 watts @ full load. Seach for Kill-A-Watt if you're wondering how I know this.