Frequent Crashes - Advice needed

Well, my g.f's PC is playing up again. It's a Packard Bell IPOWER 7650 with AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+, 2GB RAM and a pair of nVidia GeForce 7600 GT running in SLI.

All of a sudden today, whilst on WoW, the game froze solid and she had to power down to clear it. Since then it's been freezing during games, but she's been able to get back to the desktop but even then the screen went black on occasion.


I've tried using the nTune software to check temperatures, but no joy as it only reports one of the two cards temperatures. I've also tried Speedfan but I've got no idea which temperature corresponds to which component. One of them was spiking at 70+ degrees and I wonder if it was one of the GFx cards (was labeled as Temp 3)


Currently testing the unit with only a single GFx card and thus far it seems to be running ok.


Any advice on other things I can check so when I do call out the "Tech support" to get them to replace a new card under the coverplan, I can go "done that, done that etc" to speed things up?

Try both cards in on thier own, then check the temps on idle and after playing games.

Very strange, after taking both cards out and switching them around, the problem seems to have vanished. The only other change I made was I moved the PCI modem down a slot (it was adjacent to the bottom of the two cards).

At a guess this was all down to heat because the fan on the bottom of the two cards was obscured.

Ok, finally tested each card individually, one of them has definately got a problem. The system now wont boot with it in the secondary or primary slot and when it does boot up with just this one card in, lots of blue marks across the screen.

Also, looks like there's a potential cause on the board, the Northbridge chipset is burning to touch, which matches the Speedfan reading of 70 degrees. Given this sits directly under the graphics card could this have damaged the card??

I think it's unlikely that the temp of the northbridge would cause the GPU to completely fail, there is most likely an air gap between the GPU and the northbridge which will greatly inhibit the transmission of heat from one to the other...

If they are physically touching, heat will be transferred, but it still seems unlikely to me, my nvidia card will run around 70 on it's own when it's under load...

I must say the northbridge temp seems a little high to me, some active cooling wouldn't go amiss perhaps...

Artefact corruption such as you describe can usually be attributed to one of three things, with the most common cause being heat, a great article on the subject can be found here :-

http://www.playtool.com/pages/artifacts/artifacts.html

This detailed article may help you establish exactly what part of the graphic card is causing the corruption, it suggests trying to under-clock your card to see if the corruption goes away and things like that, I thought it was a good read, hope it's of some use to you.. good luck !

I went for the easy route in the end, tested each card individually, found out one of them won't even boot on it's own, called up tech support and am getting a replacement.

At least the PC is useable till then as it's an SLI rig :)

Sweet... glad to hear it's under warranty, that's the best fix of all :) :thumbsup: