Author Topic: Need help from the gurus! (Read 631 times)

CavemanJ · « **on:** April 24, 2003, 03:13:16 PM »

Ok. So the box is humming along nicely. Nice, solid performance, no real issues to speak of.

Then I'm accepted to the Star Wars Galaxies beta. So I get SWG installed and discover I need DX9. Off to windows update for DX9 (and a few critical updates I hadna gotten yet). Figured I'd go ahead and get the 43.45 detonators while I was at it. DX9 installed (reboot), find the device mangler, uninstall the GF4 (reboot), put the 43.45's on (reboot). Get into SWG. Other than typical beta stuffs everything's running peachy.

Decide to go flying. Check the cougar config, fire up AH, hit the runway, , "wtf was that?!?", , exit AH scratching my head.

The 's were the monitor flickering, like it was changing resolution. Except it didnae change resolutions, it just clicked/flickered like it had. So I reboot, check the Cougar, into AH, hit the runway, it does it again. Kill AH, check all my settings et al, reboot again. Check the cougar, into AH, hit the runway, and start rackin up kills.

Next day I play EverQuest for a bit, log into SWG and see what's changed, fly a few hops, then back to EQ cause my guild is raiding. No problems. Done raiding, log off and eat, machine sits idle for an hour or so, off to SWG and here it comes again. About every 5 seconds. Reboot and it's still doing it.

Only seen it happen in AH and SWG until today. Never happens EQ or Morrowind (which crashes to desktop whenever it feels like it anyway). Today while checking out some old mpg files I found hidden on the HDD it did it again. Not on every clip, just a couple of them. I run all 4 games and my desktop at 1280x1024, 85hz refresh.

I've tried going back to the 42.68 detonators, tried every refresh setting for the monitor (and yes, changing it in the gf4 options for overriding refresh rate too). Did the whole scandisk/defrag routine. Checked the monitor connection was tight, and even opened up the box to make sure the vid card hadnae come unseated somehow.

Barring something I've missed, I'm thinking a full format of C: and reinstall of the system is next. But thought I'd ask for ideas here before I go through that hassle since the system is ~2months old.

System:
MSI K7N2G-L nForce2 motherboard (using onboard sound and LAN)
AMD Athlon XP 2100+
512MB (2x256) Crucial PC2700
Asus V9280/TD GF4 Ti4200 8x AGP
Maxtor 80gb HDD
52x cd rom, basic FDD
Antec case w/ 400w PSU

I dinnae.. maybe I screwed up and missed something when I changed the vid drivers?

Reschke · « **Reply #1 on:** April 24, 2003, 03:43:18 PM »

Try rolling back the driver and see what happens. I remember seeing something about the newer GeForce drivers and how they are not quite up to speed. I personally am running the older 30.xx series drivers and have no video issues.

bloom25 · « **Reply #2 on:** April 24, 2003, 06:33:04 PM »

Cave, I've seen a LOT of problems on systems running det 42 and 43 series drivers. The 41.09 drivers are the last revision of the 4x series drivers that I've had any luck with. You need to completely uninstall the 43.45s. (Depending on how you installed them, there might be an add/remove programs listing for them.)

I've seen the 43.45 drivers cause reboots as soon as the system enters Windows. (That is actually why I ran 3dMark 2001 on that silly TNT2 M64 video card yesterday. I was testing stability.)

CavemanJ · « **Reply #3 on:** April 24, 2003, 06:49:49 PM »

Bloom I'll go lookin for the 41.09s, but I haven't had any problems with the 42.68s and they've been on the box since it was put together a couple months ago. Least no problems til I put on dx9 and SWG =\

CavemanJ · « **Reply #4 on:** April 25, 2003, 07:37:21 PM »

Ok, rolled back to the 41.09s and even found a nifty program to make sure I cleared out all the detonator files.

No go, still got the problem. Any other suggestions? I'm almost certain it's coming from dx9, cause didnae have any problems before I installed dx9. Or there's always the 'it's one helluva a coincidence that decided to start to fail the same time I installed dx9" option =\

bloom25 · « **Reply #5 on:** April 26, 2003, 01:20:12 AM »

There's no easy way to uninstall DX 9. (Though there are utilities to remove it.) I would probably redownload and re-run the installer in the hopes the original download was corrupted. It's probably not a bad idea to schedule to run a checkdisk on your hard drive for the next time the system boots up. There are lots of people running DX 9 (9a is the newest I think) out there with similar hardware to yours without problems, so it's a safe bet that something got messed up. If that doesn't help, you might try restoring your system back to a point before you installed DX 9.

I don't know what critical updates you did in addition to DX 9, but there are instances of updates causing problems. I've often noticed in the system logs that Windows restores older versions of files supposedly updated for one reason or another. If that happened to key Direct X files that could cause problems. (You might pull up the management console event viewer under system logs looking for Windows File Protection alerts.)

If that fails, make backups of anything important and remember to thank Microsoft for allowing you to spend some quality time with your computer reinstalling Windows. It might sound terrible, but other than service packs, I don't even bother with critical updates anymore. Most of them are related to Internet Exploder, which I don't use for web browsing. I have Opera set as my default browser and Active X turned off in IE. My other complaint is that I rework my system often enough that over my blazing fast 26.4 modem connection it would take the better part of a day to get all the post-SP3 Win2k updates.

I think a video card just now starting this 2 months after the system was built is pretty unlikely. The nForce 2 chipset itself has no issues that I know of with DX 9 and considering the shear number of nForce 2 based systems out there if there were you'd hear a lot about it in the tech forums.

(If you were wondering, the only issues I know of with the nForce 2 are that it's picky about DDR 400 memory modules, doesn't officially support PCI video cards (though that can be worked around by disabling AGP to PCI bridge in device manager), there was a problem with possible bios corruption on extremely overclocked systems if you don't save before exiting the bios (fixed with new board revisions and bios updates for existing systems), some of the older drivers had directsound issues (fixed), and finally some older nVidia 2.0 series IDE drivers can be troublesome with some CD burners out there under Windows XP if the burner isn't set to master. I know this doesn't help you any Cave, but I've built and worked on several Asus A7N8X and 8X Deluxe systems with DX 9 and never ran into anything like this.

)

Siaf__csf · « **Reply #6 on:** April 27, 2003, 04:24:21 PM »

I found out that all 40.xx drivers cause screen corruption on certain games. AH hasn't been one of them, but anyway..

In Commandos2 I get 'flicks' where half of the screen gets jilted for a fraction of a second every now and then. That happens only if I have 40.xx installed, if I roll back to 30.82 f.e. everything returns back to normal.

CavemanJ · « **Reply #7 on:** April 27, 2003, 07:21:27 PM »

Welp once I find the disc for my board I'm gonna wipe the C: drive and start from scratch.

Should install the vid/sound drivers AFTER dx9 right?

bloom25 · « **Reply #8 on:** April 27, 2003, 09:46:57 PM »

That's how I do it Cave. Make sure the nforce chipset drivers are installed first though.

CavemanJ · « **Reply #9 on:** April 27, 2003, 10:20:10 PM »

Aye, win2k pro, then the nforce2 chipset drivers, then all the windows update crap (including dx9), then the detonators. That's the plan anyway.

Though.. I'm begining to wonder if it might be the vid card itself. In the blue screens for setting up 2k Pro here and there, there is a black box (size of a cursor) or a letter in the text is black when all others are white. Dinnae.. guess I'll know if it keeps doing this after everything's reinstalled.

CavemanJ · « **Reply #10 on:** April 27, 2003, 11:13:14 PM »

Welp.. looks like the mystery is solved. While doing the windows update stuff I kept noticing pixals on the screen that were the wrong color, and they color/location would change as the various dialog boxes opened and were closed. Figured on one of the restarts I'd shut the box down, pull out the vid card, and use the onboard video to test. All the little spots disappeared. Futher inspection of the vid card shows the fan seems to have frozen (extremely hard to get it to turn).

What a pain in the ass.

DAVENRINO · « **Reply #11 on:** April 28, 2003, 01:26:17 PM »

Cave,
I would probably still go back to the 30.82 video drivers. Also if you need to reformat in the future, you may want to check out the Nvidia 2.03 WHQL drivers if your motherboard disk isn't new enough to have them.
DJ229 - AIR MAFIA

bloom25 · « **Reply #12 on:** April 29, 2003, 12:54:36 AM »

Cave, depending on how your card is constructed it may be possible to clean that fan without too much hassle. At least the mystery appears to be solved.

Your system must be pretty well cooled to have only games locking up with the video card fan not running at all. I feel kind of bad, I was going to mention to check to be sure the fan is spinning, but the symptoms and problem history indicated a software problem.

Maybe you should pretend it was a Windows problem, that way you don't feel so bad about reinstalling everything...

Vipermann · « **Reply #13 on:** April 29, 2003, 10:44:39 AM »

bloom is right about the software. It's too bad you weren't getting the artifacts in the games, that usually points to a heat issue.

CavemanJ · « **Reply #14 on:** April 29, 2003, 03:29:53 PM »

Bloom I think I'm just gonna send the sucker back and get the card replaced. Doesn't look like alot of dust has collected on it anyhow. The case is an Antec sx1040IIB, and has a nifty dust filter infront of the intake fans. I'd hope it's pretty well cooled with round cables and 4x80mm fans (2 intake/2 exhaust).

At first I thought about the card. But being ~2 months old it seemed unlikely, and the problem didnae start until I installed dx9.

And reinstalling windows was a good thing! The box seems a little happier now anyway.

About the artifacts... I guess you could say I was getting them in EverQuest.. kinda.. the whole screen would kinda freeze, and fps were like 1frame every 4 seconds (with a 'res flicker' between each one). They were only really apparent when widows was using the standard vga drivers.