Athlon & Geforce DDR woes

[Gordow]

A couple of months back I upgraded the motherboard, cpu and video card in my PC and ever since then I've had nothing but headaches.

The problem I'm having is that whenever I run any games that utilizes 3D graphics, like UT or Motocross Madness 2, my PC hangs. However, it works like a dream while just in Win98 or Win2k or in games like Icewind Dale or BG2.

Here are the specs for my PC:

ASUS K7V MB, 256Mb PC133 SDRAM, Athlon 700Mhz CPU, Creative GeForce Pro, WD 20Gb U/66 HDD, Creative SB Live!, Olicom PCI 10/100 Adapter (OC-2326), 300W Power-supply, 5 internal cooling fans

Neither the GeForce or CPU is overclocked.

I'm running all the latest drivers for my VIA chipset, GeForce card, SB card and Olicom NIC. Below is the list of things I've tried:

Removed all cards except the GeForce from my system and the only drivers loaded are the ones for the video card onto a fresh install of Win98. PC still hung while testing in various games/3D demos. I disabled all my USB, serial and parallel ports to free up resources and IRQs and checked the GeForce did not have any conflicts. It is set to use IRQ11 with the only other thing using this IRQ being the PCI Steering.

I have now tried all of the following seperately but with no success:

1) Adjusted the AGP Aperture size to 32Mb from 128Mb
2) Set AGP to 1X
3) Turned off AGP Fast Writes
4) Turned off Side-banding
5) Underclocked CPU
6) Underclocked GeForce card
7) Updated Mb BIOS
8) Lower the Hardware Accelleration for the video card
9) Disabled Shadowing of Video BIOS

Can anyone else suggest anything else to try? I am becoming increasingly frustrated as nothing seems to fix the problem.

Thanks in advance for any help offered,

Gordo

[Aleph1]

What drivers are you using for the GeforceDDR??

[Gordow]

Oops...sorry, I'm using the lastest Creative drivers dated the 13/7/2000. I've also tried using the latest Nvidia reference drivers (Detonator 3) on a fresh install but they didn't make any difference.

Gordow

[Aleph1]

Hmm...Ive had some problems wit Det3 drivers before (not sure what driver version is from 7-13-00)...when that happened I always went back to the 5.32 or 5.33 drivers. They ALWAYS work...just a bit lower performance.

BTW-We have very similar spec. (me Ahtlon600@825, Abit KA7, and such such. everything the same.)

You know...it might be the heat. It will lock up when it reaches a certain high temp. Even thought the chip isnt overclocked...I'd take off the heatsink apply a new layer of thermal goop (better than how they put it on) and replace.

Go to: www.geforcefaq.com (http://www.geforcefaq.com) for more info.

[Gordow]

Mmm...I'll try the older Nvidia reference drivers and see how they go, it can't hurt plus having Ghost makes it fairly quick to do.

I was wondering if it could be a heat issue but I've got as many fans as I can fit inside my full tower case. I have been reading some past posts from people who had similar problems, someone mentioned voltage problems which looked interesting. On that GeForce FAQ link provided, there was a link on that to another site that mentioned providing power to the GeForce fan from the motherboard instead of the card itself. I might give that a go also and see how things transpire.

Tonight I tried setting my AGP Aperture setting to below 16Mb to see if that fixed the problem but it didn't help.

Thanks for your help, I'll try some of those ideas now or tomorrow night and I'll let you know what happens.

Gordo

[Gordow]

Well, I tried installing the Detonator 2 drivers onto a fresh install of Win98 and then loaded up UT and MCM2 and played all the maps and tracks that normally result in lockups of my PC, I did this for about 30mins with no problems. Normally it only takes about 5mins for my PC to lockup.

I then went back to my original image that have the Creative GeForce drivers loaded and tried that with the same games again. Still no problems encountered after about 30mins of testing.

I'm beginning to think maybe it is a heat issue as I had left off my case's side-panel when I did the testing. I'll put it back-on and do another round of tests to see what happens.

If that doesn't make the problem occur again then I'm at a loss at what the cause is.

I'll keep you posted.

Gordo

[This message has been edited by Gordow (edited 10-25-2000).]