prime stable, 3d/video not so stable

[EBH]

Hi

I have the sistem in sig (6750@3,72) which I have primed for about 12 hours and it was stable. The thing is that once, while playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. one or two days ago, I got the system freeze on my (the video became diformed and and the sound hung on the same loop over and over) - had to do a hard reset.

Today it happend again, only this time I was playing some kind of online flash video (youtube-like) with prime doing it's stability test in the back (about 6 hours into it). Same thing - video went bad, sond jammed and had to reset the machine. I don't know what kind of test prime was doing at that exact time (the overall test was "blend").

Could it be the video card? The thing is that it wasn't oc'ed and today I wasn't even in anything 3d.

Any advice, please?

Thanks!

 

[Brolloks]

When you say it is Prime stable did you test the CPU and RAM seperately to see if they both stable? Could be that your RAM is stable and the CPU not or vice versa. Run small FFT's in Prime and also memtest to ensure they both stable. Then to test your vid card run ATI Tools "checking for artifacts" test, if it passes 10 minutes your vid card should be good. As a final check run Crysis benchmark test (you only need the demo to run the benchmark) for 20 loops or so and if it passes you should be good to go.

 

[Albuquerque]

I've had this happen when hammering on my Q9450.

I can prime for days (quite literally) at 3.7Ghz / 462FSB, and I can do memtest the same way. But when I threw in my pair of crossfired 3870's and started crunching on some Crysis or HL2 (I believe STALKER was in there also) I would get lockups very quickly.

Turned out to be a northbridge limitation; it just couldn't handle all of that stress simultaneously. With some hardware monitoring, I was able to see my NB temps shoot sky-high with all of that load together. Fans didn't help, it was just too much stress... I ended up having to downclock to 3.6Ghz / 450FSB for stability in all my games.

 

[Brolloks]

Alby, that is also a sympton I've seen and experienced before (now that you mention it), most of the times people (including myself) forget about how much strain the NB takes, effective cooling on NB really makes a system stretch further and runs longer OC'd, they should have better default cooling on chipsets.

 

[ziggo0]

What PSU do you have as a simple question?

 

[EBH]

A 500W Sirtec "High Power"

 

[Albuquerque]

A 500W Sirtec "High Power"

Ok, next question -- what else is in your rig? Video card(s)? Memory sticks? Hard drives? I only found one review of a Sirtec power supply, and it was "meh" to be honest. With a lot of overclocking and enough other hardware, it's quite possible that your PSU is what's holding you back.

 

[ziggo0]

That's what I was thinking...if your CPU under full load is stable during say Prime95...and you don't have your card under a full load sucking down that extra power, you might be at your limits.