Help Required - Murder Mystery for OCers: Not Sure Where The Problem Lies?

[The Web Baron]

Hi all,

First of all, this is a cool place, and I'm disappointed to not have discovered it earlier! Hello, OCers

I have a really interesting problem on what would be known as an 'ancient relic' of a self-built PC at the moment. The specs are as follows:

- ASUS P4PE Motherboard (not to be mistaken with P4PE-X or P4PE/L etc.) with P4i65G chipset
- Pentium 4 2.53GHz Processor
- 2x Kingston PC2700 1GB RAM (total 2GB)
- Sapphire ATI Radeon x1950 Graphics Card
- Creative Sound Blaster Audigy! Sound Card with Live! Drive
- WD 250GB SATA Hard Drive
- CD-R & DVD-RW
- QTec 550W TruePower Supply
- Coolermaster ATX-210 case
- (WinXP SP3)

Some of you must be thinking, "Bloody hell, he's OLD!". The computer started off with 2x 512MB RAM sticks, a Ti4600 graphics card, an IDE hard drive and a 350W power supply. All have been changed over the years, the most recent one being the upgade to two 1GB sticks of RAM (at a cost of £60, yowzers).

I'm having a really, really weird problem with this system though and I'm hoping someone can help me out. It all started when, sometimes, playing rFactor, I'd get strange lines across the screen or the system would hang up. This would happen perhaps once in every two hours I played.

I then thought the system might simply be (finally) eating too much memory, so thinking RAM was the bottleneck I went and upgraded.

Sadly, the error kept occuring. I then wondered...oh dear, what if the power supply's capacitors were beginning to die out (like my old 350W did when I got the Ti4600 which is why I replaced it)? But then I realised, it's a 550W TruePower supply, which I would think should have enough power to sort out everything in my computer.

I then tried another test. I ran 3DMark06 (my computer originally got 11 points on the thing, haha - now up to a respectable relic level of 2700 last time it worked). However, the computer would hang - AT THE SAME POINT EVERY TIME. Almost at the end of the "Firefly" test, the computer would simply black-screen on me with zero reaction whatsoever (not even black screen, strictly speaking - the monitor would have no signal, I'd still hear humming from fans etc. but everything becomes non-responsive). I've now tested this 4/5 times and it seems to hang at the same place.

I'm now in the process of disconnecting the CD-RW and the DVD-RW from their respective power supplies and running the test again, JUST to see if it's a power supply problem, but I bet it doesn't have anything to do with it at the end of the day.

Can anybody shed some light as to what's going on? I will post updates as and when they become available.

Thanks ina dvance for all your help

Cheers,
WB

 

[The Web Baron]

Quick update:

Disconnecting the CD-RW and DVD-RW does not alleviate the problem. I can describe the exact moment it crashes:

- Just as the two wisps go out of the tree trunk with the face on it (towards the end of the Firefly test), the system crashes, all signal to monitor is lost, and system becomes unresponsive.

As mentioned in my post above, this is a way I have found to reproduce the error repeatedly. However, I don't know what triggers it or what causes it in-game to screw up like this.

 

[zbo]

Have you tried reinstalling 3DMark? What are the temps like just before the crash?

 

[The Web Baron]

Hi there,

I have tried reinstalling 3DMark06. I don't think that's the issue because it previously worked fine, and I'm still getting an identical crash when playing some games. This leads me to believe the problem lies deeper than the 3DMark06 installation itself.

Temps never exceed 50C at any point, both mobo and CPU. Well within operating limits, and I've had them much higher while gaming before with no issue.

 

[The Web Baron]

Mental kick - obviously you meant GPU temps!

Under load it's been overing around 70C, nothing that would scream as being catastrophic.

 

[zbo]

You right the temps seem okay, nothing too high. Try setting fan speed to 100% just to see if it does help. It could be that core isn't overheating but somthing else is.

Does furmark also make it crash? When ran on the statbilty test.

What about Prime 95? What about running both furmark and prime at the same time?

 

[The Web Baron]

Hey there,

I set the fan to 100%, uninstalled CCC and all ATI drivers (removed with CCleaner and DriverSweeper in safe mode and fixed any registry entries as well) and reinstalled. Took my graphics card out of the slot, cleaned it, checked all the connections, put it back in and made sure both power leads were connected.

Temperatures are now down to 52C but whenever any load is put through the graphics card, it seems to hang the system! It even hung once when I did the "Scan for artefacts" thing on ATITool. I'm really stumped.

 

[jayfella]

ok.

Removing the DVD drive/etc.. make no difference to the load on the PSU unless it is on full load - i.e. if your Drive was burning a DVD.

Too little memory or too little CPU power will not hang your system. The worst thing that should happen is that the game will run annoyingly slow.

If i had to take a stab in the dark, i would take a punt at the PSU. You can get a decent PSU for around £60 - but to be completely honest, i wouldnt really put any more money into that machine.. Its had its day, its served you well.. You can pick up a dual-core machine with 4GB RAM (AMD) for a relatively cheap price (you would be surprised) if your not looking for overclocking ability and "name brands".

Here in the UK - you can get a system - CPU/Mem/Mobo for around £120 - AMD Dual Core 2.5GHz / 4GB RAM - you got all the rest of the stuff u need - bargain!

 

[The Web Baron]

I suspect you're right, jayfella I will consider dismantling the old beast and selling off the parts towards buying a new rig. I think that individually, I may be able to fetch up to £150 off the old parts, mainly from the graphics card, RAM, and tower case itself. I'll keep the hard drive and possibly the DVD-RAM drive, and see if I can find myself a better system.

I live reasonably near to Yoyotech's store, has anyone had decent experiences with them? I'm aware they may be a bit more expensive (if they're MILES more expensive let me know and I'll build anyway) but I'm wondering if I buy a custom rig from them, if I get a warranty with it as well it may be worth it.

 

[ratbuddy]

Did ya disable any screensavers and power saving settings in XP?

 

[Adragontattoo]

Ok short of going to a total redo here is what I suggest first.

The below assumes you have spares or can borrow for testing, do not change more then 1 item at a time, test after each change/

Different memory
Different Vido Card
Different PSU

My first guess is corruption under load in the GPU or memory.

 

[jayfella]

I suspect you're right, jayfella I will consider dismantling the old beast and selling off the parts towards buying a new rig. I think that individually, I may be able to fetch up to £150 off the old parts, mainly from the graphics card, RAM, and tower case itself. I'll keep the hard drive and possibly the DVD-RAM drive, and see if I can find myself a better system.

I live reasonably near to Yoyotech's store, has anyone had decent experiences with them? I'm aware they may be a bit more expensive (if they're MILES more expensive let me know and I'll build anyway) but I'm wondering if I buy a custom rig from them, if I get a warranty with it as well it may be worth it.

personally, i always go with ebuyer (http://www.ebuyer.co.uk) - They arent the cheapest in the world, but they are very cheap. Their customer support and returns policy is second to none. I've bought from them for around 6 months now, and i honestly cannot think of a single foot they have put wrong.

£10 for next day delivery - or free delivery if you feel like waiting 3-5 days.

 

[The Web Baron]

My new system, I believe:

- Coolermaster NV 690 Black ATX Mid Tower Case
- Akasa 550W Quiet ATX12V/EPS12V v2.01 aPFC With Sanyo Denki Fan SLi/Crossfire Ready PSU
- Gigabyte Socket 775 Intel P43 ATX Intel Motherboard
- Akasa Nero Direct Contact Heatpipe CPU Cooler
- Sapphire HD 4870 Vapor-X 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E 2.0x16 Graphics Card
- Corsair XMS2 4GB 2X2GB Kit PC2-8500 DDR2 Memory
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 Yorkfield 2.66GHz 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Quad-Core CPU
- (Indulgence) Blu-Ray DVD Drive

 

[jayfella]

peow! peow! and the budget gets shot to pieces!

 

[The Web Baron]

Ratatatatat

Although I'm selling components from the old one to part-pay for this one, AND I lifted the hard drive into the new one - so I'm hoping overall I spent £400 or less on the new machine.