If my Shuttle was a car it'd be written off by now

[quarryman]

It really would. Basically, it just keeps crashing. Well, more like hanging. Right in the middle of a game it will just stop and the only thing I can do is hit reset. Here's the symptoms:

About a month ago I bought my prized Reflexion Shuttle. Damn its nice. See my sgi for the specs. So away I went to get some benchmarks. I overclocked the P4 to 3.01GHz and upped the 9600 pro to 475/600 from 400/600. This seemed to go smoothly and I got a benchmark of about 13000 from 3dmark2001.

This kept me happy until i decided to play some games. For some reason it would crash for no reason. Back i went to 3dmark and allowed it to run on loop. Aha! after about 3 runs it would crash. My first instinct was the gfx. i clocked it back to stock speeds and put the fan on the highest setting. sure enough - problem solved. yay.

once again i was in gaming bliss. latley though the problem has cropped up again. I first noticed it in GTA3. After about 15-20 mins it will hang and will stop responding. The sound cuts out too and the caps lock key won't light up. not nice. It seemed to be ok with other games. It has played nicely for hours on Rise of nations and some of the less demanding games. another is Age of empires. A few days ago i got Vice city and now its happening all over again. I thought it might be a problem with GTA in general but yesterday it started happening with the Far Cry demo and then with Max Payne 2. After a few minutes it will just hang.

Obviously the first reaction is overheating but i really have checked everything. i've added extra fans to see whether its the ram, its not. I've clocked everything back to stock speeds and sometimes underclocked. I've re-installed the ATI drivers and even used the Omega drivers but it still happens. I'm 90% sure its not overheating but i still have my suspicions about the graphics card since it seems to be able to run prime95 for long periods without a problem. Do i need a BIOS update?

Here are my temps: (idle/load)

CPU 30/48
System 32/50
PSU 35/68 (i think 68 is pretty normal though.
gfx 32/45

Can anyone suggest anything else. I'm really at my wits end. These are some of the things that I suppose it could be:

• Hard Drive (Could it have a bad sector of some sort, but if so why does it only happen in games.)
• PSU (I really doubt it could be this. the shuttle PSUs are supposed to be very good)
• Software (I would have no idea where to start here bar reformatting and going from the start but this really is a last option and I feel the problem is more hardware related.)

any suggestions at all would be great. really want to get this setup stable.

[micovwar]

hi quarryman

i share ure grief to a certain degree (not shure if this is same problem) i have a 9800 which seems to play fine in pretty much all the games ive tried but i do get it locking up from time to time in vice city
donno why but it seems to play fine for sometimes hours at a time then for no apparent reason the game will freeze usually i hear a ping from the desktop (like a stop prompt sound) but the lockup is such an awkward 1 that i find it hard to get back to the desktop to find out what the sound indicates (usually it involves pressing escape till u get outov it,and sometimes even a hard reboot) when checking through the event log to see what the problem is it usually gives an error code of 1000 or 1001,i have no heat issues at all and my components are pretty rocksolid afaik,not much more i can tell you other than that as im still trying to find out why vice city crashes on me too

good luck

[malfunction]

It could be a lot of things...

Best to rule out your CPU and RAM so I'd recommend overnight prime 95 testing for the CPU / RAM in windows and either MemTest86 or DocMem for testing the RAM alone (MemTest86 can be downloaded as a bootable ISO ready to burn to CDR). Could be temps or the PSU - Motherboard monitor or similar would be a good way to monitor both temps and voltages