The sum of the whole is less than the sum of the parts

[fthlagen]

Now on step two of my "journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step."

Did all of the above, ran Thief 3 which stuffed up between 2 and 10 minutes into play.
Did the control panel change which does now yield BSOD (but completely blank one that responds to no input I can see.)

Then I ran in "Joint Ops, Typhoon rising" (It was bundled with the MOBO(!?). It's a 3D shooter (do I need to tell you that?) and it ran much more successfully (30mins to an hour) but eventually succumbed to the same bug.

Would anyone agree with me that this is a graphics card issue given that demanding games like T3 and Doom3 are causing rapid reboots, more sedate games are failing but lasting longer and normal system operation (moviemaker, etc) are flawless and lightning fast?

If so, how do I go about troubleshooting it? What diagnostics can I use.

If not, then wtf is it?!

Help me Obi Wan, you're my only hope.

[skuzgib]

Is your system prime95 stable?
Maybe you should try something CPU intensive like encoding a video or something, if it still happens you can rule out your GFX

[fthlagen]

I will download prime95 and run it to answer that one.
Should have an answer for Monday.

thanks.

[Zak33]

*cough* heatsink fitted right *cough*

seriously fella...one thing at a time.

Lets begin at point 1 and move onward.

Does it run on desktop without crashing?

If so:

Fire up something such as Word, and Excel, and Paintshop pro...and have a play....write a letter, edit a picture (DONT USE MOVIEMAKER..its crashes anyway).....is it OK for an hour?

If so.....benchmark time. Run 3dmark 2001 over and over...loop it. Is it stable?

DO one thing at a time.

Glad you got a proper PSU....when you listed your heavenly pc spec and then said Q tec, I nearly feinted.

I was in my car and the engine was running before I realised I dont know where you live, and so couldnt put out the fire!

[fthlagen]

Zak33 - Ah yes - It must all seem a little frantic.

I'm philosophical about the Q-Tec incident (let's just say I'm glad I asked the question! You'd have had to come to the Isle of Man so you'd need a boat or plane as well. Come and get my stuff working, I'd pay for the ticket!)

Anyway, thanks for the calming advice.

To answer your questions, does it run the desktop OK? Yes - but in my *hectic* attempts to find a quick fix, it occurs to me I've only seen it stable for a maximum of three consecutive hours (I've never pushed beyond that through impatience). How long before the basic setup is considered stable?

As for running regular Aps on it, I haven't got to that ahead of the games I've waited a year to play. I will install my regular non-games stuff (which is PSP6, Word and Excel!) and run 'em all together while doing stuff.

If that dies, I will spend Saturday just watching it sit doing nothing.

If on the other hand it passes the test, I'll have to work out how to get the utilities I read about on the site and start doing the legwork (bleh!). I'm verrrrrrry reluctant to go near the web with my dream machine (just because I want to rule out webnasties as the cause of my problems). I'll set an old machine up.

Your allusion to the cooling arrangements : Two questions
1) I used the micro tube of paste supplied by Zalman (they wouldn't provide crap would they? They wouldn't provide less than I needed would they?)
2) If the cooling is a potential culprit (and that would be great 'cause it's easy to fix), do my temps ring alarm bells? If so, is it because they are high or is it because they're not reliable (do I need to take a thermometer to the board?)

I've always known in my heart I'll have to sort this out the long way. The birth of the machine was marred by delays and payment issues with DABS. It looks like the labour may last a while..

Thanks.

[Lee H]

I would seriously check everything is seated and connected correctly - even if this means stripping the system and rebuilding it all again. Take nice care to position everything, and I would apply the thermal paste to the CPU ( see the thread about how to apply the paste - less is more in regards to compound ) and then once its up and running - a good session of memtest386, prime95 and also 3dmark and aquamark would show if theres any issues with any of the parts of the system.

[Purple]

i may get flamed for this but consider using nvidia rather than ATI. In my expierence nvidia drivers are far more stable than ATIs. That said it does sound like power or overheating to me. Possibly a hard drive - try just running your boot drive. Remove all the components and add them one at a time until it starts crashing. If it crashes with nothing but your hard drive, ram, and GPU it is likely GPU overheating or RAM problems

actually it might be RAM timing issue - go in to bios and set to fail safe defaults - also make sure AGP fast write is disabled.

[StormPC]

I have purchased the following (with a view to constructing a reliable gaming platform for the next few years).

FX53, 2x512MB Corsair RAM, Gigabyte X800XT AGP, MSI K8N Mobo
The CPU is cooled by a Zalman Reserator.

The whole lot's plugged together but when I run a game like Doom3 or Thief3, the system will work for between 2 and 10 minutes before rebooting.

So far, my chief suspect is the Q-tec 650 (I'm rapidly learning that this piece of hardware could turn into a bit of a system-eating liability.)

So - question 1 : Do my problems sound PSU related? If so, what's my next best bet ( I only have 200watt PSUs to fall back on).

question 2 : In my position, would you ever switch the system back on with the Q-tec attached?

I know you're gonna need to know voltages and that kind of thing (so where do I get that info from?)

Also, CPU temps ( my FX53 gets to 38/39 deg centigrade and no further - according to the BIOS ).

Many thanks in anticipation.

Make sure your water is circulating properly and that you installed the sightglass properly. If you installed it backwards the water will not flow at full speed.

Check your BIOS settings. Make sure AGP fastwrites are disabled. Disable sideband addressing as well. Set your memory to SPD and all timings to auto. Turn off all automatic overclocking and CPU thermal throttling. Clock your system at default until you locate and fix the stability problems. Do not overclock your videocard yet.

Boot into Windows and uninstall your Radeon drivers. Reload your motherboard AGP driver and DX9. Reboot and then reinstall the Radeon drivers (Cat 4.10 Betas are good). Leave everything at the default settings and test your system with games. You may need to reload some older games like Quake 3 Arena so they will utilize your graphics card properly.

If problems still persist try reseating your memory, videocard and CPU, including reinstalling the HSF (water block). Let us know how it goes.

[fthlagen]

FX53 stability problem update:

Removed and reseated cooling block - I had done that sooooo wrong (Cah - the shame) - anyway, scraped away *more* then half a grain of rice's worth of paste and re-applied new stuff : major improvement but still crashed on Thief 3.

Latest version of ATI's drivers installed - some improvements (Flightsim 2004 worked with all the trimmings) but Thief 3 still dying.

Finally...ran Torture test on Prime95.

Did fine with all the tests until it got to the RAM-intensive "merged" one where it reported a fault within two minutes. As the test was memory intensive, I looked at my RAM...

I bought twinned Corsair 512 sticks so that each side of the CPU could have its own slice (and dutifully installed these in the 'green' and 'purple' slots (per the K8N manual). This weekend I swapped the RAM into two green slots (non-dual-channel) and the machine runs fine on Prime95 (even runs Thief3 flawlessly).

So..where am I? I have a PC that works and in my flailing to find a solution, I have upgraded my power supply fom the fiery Q-tec and done my heat sink properly (so that's not bad). I can't escape the feeling that not having the memory in dual-channel mode is undermining the expensive FX53's abilities so I will now proceed to experiment with RAM. Is there anyone out there who can answer the following questions:

Is dual channel something the machine chooses or that I enable?

On an unrelated note, what AGP aperture should I select given my spec?

As ever, thanks for the concern. So glad I came here.
Marko.

[Firelord]

i may get flamed for this but consider using nvidia rather than ATI. In my expierence nvidia drivers are far more stable than ATIs. That said it does sound like power or overheating to me. Possibly a hard drive - try just running your boot drive. Remove all the components and add them one at a time until it starts crashing. If it crashes with nothing but your hard drive, ram, and GPU it is likely GPU overheating or RAM problems

actually it might be RAM timing issue - go in to bios and set to fail safe defaults - also make sure AGP fast write is disabled.

Why exactly are nVidia drivers more stable than ATi incidently?

Have you got any temp monitoring progs on there? have you tried memtest to check for memory errors?

[daniel_owen_uk]

Download and run memtest86, this will test your ram for stability.

AGP aperture is something of a mystery but it should be lower the more ram your gfx card has so I would say 32-64.

Sounds like the ram won't run in dual channel, its usually activated automattically if you have the sticks in the correct slots.

[Purple]

dunno tbh mate, just from a half decade of trying and testing, i found them more stable.

might be becuase they dont try to take over windows as much so no windows related issues, nvidia i think tend to 'sit on top' of the operating system, ati dig deep looking for performance and control? utter guess work but that is what it feels like.

This issue is hard to research because all you tend to come accross is flame wars between ATI and NVidia fans most of whom have never used the other manufacturer or even had a mate with one and tbh i dont care that much to find out

edit: but this is not the topic - help the man out

[Firelord]

That may have been the way when ATi was producing rubbish like the ATi Rage Pro but not the modern catalyst.

I used to like my nVidia cards but I like my ATis too and I am not a fanboy of either really but I think ATis drivers are on par if not better than nVidias now

[fthlagen]

I'll grab and run memtest86 tonight.

As I said, I will have a fiddle with the RAM tonight - there are two ways of populating the slots with dual channel and maybe the first set I tried had a defective slot (hope not).

As for the Nvidia versus ATI debate, I simply looked at hardware reviews and the X800XT was coming out on top for the most part. Until Halflife 3 or Thief 4 comes out and I need to overclock, I have no intentions of pushing my system (but I'd like to get dual channel running if I can, just because I can).

I hear what you're saying about ATI and I've read a lot of feedback from ATI customers on the web this weekend and they seem to have some difficulties with their drivers from time to time - still I've got one and from what I can tell, I was lucky to get one when I did as there seemed to be an AGP X800XT drought at the time.

Anyway, I will report back once I have memtest done and dusted.
cheers

[Purple]

try your dual channel setup, then in the bios go in to chipset features (or where ever you find the following setting)
CAS latency
if your ram is CAS 2 or 2.5 set it to 3 - if it still breaks set it to determine by SPD. Some clever RAM bod will tell you what this rubbish means, but it fixes a lot of ram problems

[skuzgib]

How about cooling it with air to see if the reserator's the root of the problem?