DX10 and Prime95 problems.

Hi all,

I started having problems some time ago, about when I upgraded my PC from an Athlon x2 to an intel Pentium Dual core (I was on a budget at the time). I upgraded to the following PC spec:

Pentium Dual Core E2200
2gb Corsair XMS2 PC2 6400 C5 (2 x 1gb)
Asus P5Q-Pro (I did originally have a Gigabyte GA-P35 DS3L, but I sent it back thiking it was the problem)
Ati HD4850 (Gigabyte branded)
Hiper M series 580W PSU
Vista Home Premium X64

I reused the following components from my old PC
X-Fi Extreme Music (I have tried taking this out as well)
160Gb Seagate 7200.9 SATA drive
Antec P180 Case

Now my problem is this; when playing any DX9 game I have no problem (including Crysis DX9 mode forced), but all DX10 games crash within 1 - 2 minutes. In fact, Crysis crashes within 30s maximum when using DX10 mode. This can manifest itself in a number of ways:

Corrupted graphics
Blank screen
"The display driver stopped responding and was reset"
**** has stopped working (replace asterisks with name of favorite DX10 game)

In an effort to find the problem I have tried a different gfx card (HD2900XT), different PSU (Antec Truepower 2 380W) and run memtest x86 overnight (no problems). I have also run a drive fitness test I downloaded from seagate, again with no problems. However, when I run prime95's torture test I get various results. The first two modes run fine for hours, but the blend mode fails within 30s, always with the same error (something about rounding expecting 0.4 but receiving 0.5). The one thing I did notice was that the hard drive was getting thrashed by the blend test.

It would seem that the only two components I'm not sure about now are the processor and the hard drive. But the drive passed the DFT and I would have expected the processor to fail on the other prime 95 tests if it were at fault.

In the bios I have not overclocked anything and have left everything at auto. I have also tried increasing ram voltage to 1.9 as per the spec of the ram and disabling the performance features (mem oc charger and clock twisting etc). But the result is always the same exactly.

I have also tried reinstalling vista a few times, including all updates. Same problem every time, so I'm fairly sure this is a hardware fault, but I can't work out which bit.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

This could be a Heat issue possibly

What temps are you getting on your PCU and Graphics Card?

Hi,

My temps at the point of the crash (or about 20 seconds after as soon as I can get to the desktop) are:

GPU 51

CPU 25

System 31

They all sound fine to me, and I would have expected the more intensive prime95 tests to have thrown that up. Temps were my first thought too, which is why I installed all the monitoring software off my motherboard CD, but it all looked OK to me.

Thanks for the advice.

Chris

Yeah the problem is 20 seconds is a long time in electronic cooling if you could try installing ATI tray tools that has a monitoring graphs function or GPU-z would keep data long enough for you to see the temp of the GPU when it crashes.

Have you tried reinstalling the graphics drivers (and what drivers are you using?) make sure when you uninstall you clean the registry and delete any ATI related files that might be laying around.

This is really wierd. I've been hunting this problem down for weeks and now it has just stopped entirely. I am very confused :confused:, but also very happy :mrgreen:.

I think installing Ati tray tools or gpu-z must have done something, but I have no idea what...

Anyway, cheers for the help. If I ever find out what fixed it I'll let everyone know.

Cheers

Chris

Edit: Just FYI though, the GPU never went over 70 C during gaming according to the gpu-z log file, and the windows install was a completely clean one, i.e windows, drivers, SP1 + updates, Crysis 1.2.1 and that's it. No AV, no nothing (I've just installed Avast now everything is working).

Hmm if the fresh install sorted it all out my guess would be a driver issue but if its sorted no need to worry :)

Go enjoy yourself :)

Ah, the problem has reappeared. Just tried playing Crysis again and it locks up almost straight away again every time. I can't work out what has changed though. The fresh install didn't fix it as I had the problem after I had reinstalled (in fact I've reinstalled in all at least 5 times now trying to hunt this down). It is so infuriating that the problem appears to be temperamental and makes it almost impossible to track down.

This time everything was the same as when it was working, no change other than loads of display driver stopped responding errors. I'm going insane with all this now!

To answer the earlier question, Cat 8.9 official version drivers.

Chris

I think its a dodgy graphics card.

I would normally agree, but I find it hard to believe that I've had 3 dodgy cards in a row (2900XT, 4850 reference model from Gecube and 4850 Gigabyte triple core cooling 1gb frame buffer model). My best guess would be the processor or ram, but I don't want to just go and send stuff back randomly without tracing the problem first.

Chris

hmmm

Good point, I would RMA the CPU first.

Ok, sounds like a plan...

Chris

Interestingly, I left my PC running the Long Drive Fitness Test this morning and it failed! Now, all my crashes seem to occur when the hard drive is in use. Connected????

Chris

Hmm, might be worth getting a different hard drive and trying. A fair amount of hassle, but not exactly expensive.

Right, I finally found the problem and the PC is now totally stable :rockon2:

It turned out that the memory was defective, a chap from work lent me some known OK PC6400 to try and it started working fine. I've since bought a corsair 4gb XMS2 kit and that is fine too. I'm just RMAing the 2gb kit now, just glad to have finally solved the problem. Odd though that the memory was fine on memtest x86.

Cheers everyone for the help on this problem.

Chris

memtest while good doesn't test the memory in the way it is used in windows so can potentially miss problems you are best off running both Memtest and Memtest HCI which runs under windows and can find errors which Memtest may miss.

http://hcidesign.com/memtest/