nForce spontaneous reboots

[funkedup]

I have been getting a lot of these, as well as the computer completely freezing up and giving me a black screen of death.  Invariably it happens in Direct3D games with 3D sound.  More often than not, it happens when using menus in the game, not during actual gameplay.  The problem has not responded to driver changes, removal of all peripherals (NIC and TV Tuner cards, gaming devices, printers, scanners, etc.), and it has not responded to various BIOS settings.

Some guys (on various nForce boards) say it's power supply.  Which I doubt, because I have a 330 W Antec TruePower supply that should be more than sufficient.

Some other guys have attributed it to a problem with the onboard sound.  So I have disabled the onboard sound and installed an Audigy board.  So far so good, no problems.

I'd still like to hear what some of the resident experts have to say.

Config as follows:

Antec 660B Minitower
330W TruePower PS
2 x case fans (standard, attached to PS fan-only connectors)
1 case fan attached to mobo 3-pin connector.
Asus A7N266-C
512 MB PC2100 (Kingston)
Abit Geforce4 4600
Linksys PCI 10/100 NIC
Hauppauge WinTV PCI
HP Deskjet 3420
Canon CanoScan FB 620P
CH USB HOTAS
Gravis Gamepad(s) Pro USB
Logitech Wingman Formula Force USB
Win2k SP3
DirectX 8.1
Latest drivers for everything (and I do mean everything).

[Animal]

Well if its working good with the Audigy then it has to be the onboard sound.

Did it happen with older drivers? can you roll back to previous nforce drivers to see if it keeps happening?

I know you want to use your onboard sound, because Creative sucks and is the devil and they drown children by the creek and eat them.

[funkedup]

Well I bought the nForce for the purpose of kicking VIA and Creative out of my system.  The Audigy has only been in there for one day.  No problems yet, but who knows what will happen in the future?

And yeah I've tried 4 revisions of nForce drivers with no change.  I also rolled my GeForce drivers back a few times.

[Gunthr]

How about that ram? Is it new, or a new configuration? (should be in the lowest slot)

[eskimo2]

My guess is that you have a good PS, gone bad.  That's just what was happening with mine.  The system ran fine for the original owner as well as myself for a few weeks.  Then it started re-booting by itself randomly.  The PS worked fine but then developed a case of the hiccups.  

Word of warning, if this is the case - don't let the bad PS kill anything else.  I've had to replace the HDD and I still have a problem (I think my RAM is toast too, or the mobo.  I think when the PS went bad, it took out other parts with a vengence).

I'm far from being an expert, but this road that you are going down sounds pretty familiar.

Good luck!

eskimo

[DAVENRINO]

Both my Nforce rigs still runing great using Nforce 1013 drivers and 30.82 video drivers.
 DJ229

1.4 Tbird
Asus A7N266-C
Sparkle 400W psu
2 x 256 Crucial 2100
Seagate 30
Visiontek Gforce3
SB Live Value
Plextor 16/10/40
Intel Nic
XP Home SP1

[bloom25]

I haven't had a problem with any of mine Funked.  What games are giving you trouble?

[funkedup]

I ran memtest86 on the RAM and I can't get any errors.

Grand Prix 4, Ghost Recon, and NHL 2002 are the biggest culprits.

If the Audigy doesn't solve it then I'll return it (Circuit City, yaaay) and do a PS swap.  I'm building some new systems for my family anyways, so there are plenty of parts around.

Thx gents.

[weazel]

I fought this issue on a customers PC, direct sound was bugged regardless of the driver.

Open the options.xml file with notepad and under the section add this line:

TRUE

It forces game sound to run under software emulation, the only drawback is some weapons will "chirp" in place of gunfire.

[funkedup]

Another night with Audigy, and no instability yet.