Faster computer = more likely to overheat gfx card?

I have a problem with some games - rallisport challenge in particular, which if I play 2 races in a row causes my computer to just suddenly hang then restart. I've had that in a few other games too, but often accompanied by a return to windows and graphical weirdness.

Thing is, it was absolutely fine on my old computer, with the same gfx card. The old case was a dell dimension 4100, and the new one is a coolermaster centurion 5, so I'd have thought the airflow was better in the new one.

So can a more powerful system cause the same gfx card to overheat by making it work harder? (chucking more data at it). Or is another component at fault? Everything else apart from the hard drive is new and nothings been/being overclocked.

What temperature monitoring programs are there out that that can be used at the same time as playing a game?

Thanks in advance,

kalniel

Aparrently, motherboard sensors aren't particularly accurate, so aren't that useful anyway. If you still want to take a look at temperatures, I use Speedfan.

What is the difference between your old and new PC? Could be a PSU not providing not enough power, CPU not seated correctly, CPU overheating, faulty RAM...

Try running Memtest and Prime95 to test the memory and CPU.

I tried speedfan, all temperatures below 30 Celcius at load, except GPU core at 39 and GPU ram at 41.

Everything has changed in the PC apart from gfx card and hard drive - I was running a pentium 3, now it's an X2 3800 (specs in My System link). New case and everything. PSU is a 480W xClio (antec).

Memtest86 runs fine, I've not tried prime95, but sandra is fine too. In general, stressing the computer seems to be fine - I've run SMP pov-ray for weeks fine as well.

I've tried disabling the onboard sound and using a discreet card, I've updated drivers, I've reduced hardware acceleration on both sound and video, I've run the program using winlaunch to make it run only on one CPU..

But still the same - a few races in and the system restarts - if I play again immediately it crashes sooner, if I leave the computer off for a while it crashes after longer - hence my guess that it's temperature related.

I tried ATI tool, and the gradual increase in temperature doesn't seem to cause a problem - I've taken the GPU up to 41/44 degrees C without a crash, but rallisport in particular doesn't seem to act the same way.

Could it be a chip on the motherboard is overheating? The one motherboard sensor that speedfan picks up stays below 30 all the time even under load, but I don't know what that's sensing on the ASrock dual sata2.

Opening up the system to put in the discreet sound card none of the motherboard components were warm to the touch - the only things warm were the gfx card and the system memory.

Well, turned off automatic system restart (thanks MS!) and that showed me the error was occuring at

nv4_disp.dll address BF1AB890 base at BF04B000

I don't know what that means, but it's definately display related :p I'm going to clean out drivers, but I suspect it's the sign of a gfx card on the way out.

You can get these errors when you have a memory-related problem. Might be the video card memory I suppose. Try looping 3DMark05. You might also want to try Prime as passing this will definitely point towards your video card.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Thorsson

You can get these errors when you have a memory-related problem. Might be the video card memory I suppose. Try looping 3DMark05. You might also want to try Prime as passing this will definitely point towards your video card.

---

Thanks.. wasn't the video card, just changed it for my old one and got the same error.

Will try prime next. Why doesn't memtest86 show any errors?

I've not found memtest that good at finding problems. Might not stress the system enough.

appendum. Still no errors with prim95 torture test either.

I can get some errors on memtest but only by changing the memory size to all rather than standard - I get errors around 0007FF0180 if I do that specifically. But as this doesn't show up on the standard (non-reserved) tests is that just a result of running the -all parameter or is it saying I've got a problem in memory the motherboard is accessing?

Try reinstall all system and gfx driver.
I used to be not able to stable my system at 2.75Ghz and system rebooted when playing X3, but after I reinstalled the driver it ran fine at the same setting.

I already cleaned out and reinstalled gfx drivers, but will try all system ones next.

I also tried swapping out my RAM modules but they weren't the problem.

Maybe your graphics card bus, whether PCI-E or AGP, is running out of spec. Can you hard set it in the BIOS?

I think the gfx card bus was a good guess. I had left it all set to the motherboard defaults (and I'm not overclocking anything) but I tried cleaning out the AGP drivers and installing the Uli drivers rather than ASrock (recommended on a few forums). In conjunction with an earlier video driver (77.77) it *seems* to have cleared up. I haven't had enough time to test it thoroughly.

The only annoying thing now is that Rallisport is actually quite jerky on my supposedly faster card (asus fx5700 128mb). When I put my older card in (gf3 ti500 64mb) it's silky smooth - could the shaders on the FX be so crippled that even a gf3 beats it if it's only SM1 ? :p Bring on the next round of card releases please ATI and NVidia!