Need help!

[Gunner]

My pc has started to crash & freeze regularly now, it started on monday when I reinstalled Vice City: game froze once on tuesday, then it started happening everytime I tried to load a game yesterday. I thought it was just Vice City, a corrupted savegame or something. Last night I tried Battlefield:Vietnam, first multiplayer game froze the pc, so I rebooted and tried to create a server, same thing. And I just tried CS:S, first multiplayer game, same result: freezed. Windows XP itself is stable as usual, it's just the games that crash so far.

At this point I'm thinking the video card is overheating, or maybe the cpu but it's never happened before: I have a Zalman fan and heatsink mounted on the gfx card for extra cooling.

PC Specs:

P4 2.8ghz (Northwood)
1GB DDR PC2100 Samsung
9800 Pro Hercules (not OC'ed)

Adaware results: clean
Spybot results: clean
MS Anti Spyware: clean
AVG results: clean

Defragged, and cleaned invalid registry keys with Tweakxp.

Any ideas? :x

Edit: forgot to mention, I had the catalysts 5.4 when this began, I installed 5.5 today and it's still happening.

 

[Reaktor4]

Think youd be getting all sorts of artifacts if it was the video card overheating. Id run system stability testers like prime 95 or hot cpu tester if i was you. Maybe dxdiag too.

 

[Gunner]

Think youd be getting all sorts of artifacts if it was the video card overheating. Id run system stability testers like prime 95 or hot cpu tester if i was you. Maybe dxdiag too.

Okay I'll try those. And I just ran checkdisk, no problems there

I'm thinking it's a heat problem because the past few days have been really hot around here. I took off the side cover and I have a house fan blowing air at it, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea, I heard you're supposed to have an organized air-flow with an in-take and an out-take.

 

[Ti133700N]

It seems to be a common problem amongst the Radeon 9800PRO owners. The house fan is a good trick to see if the problem is overheating, this will cool down the temps alot so you'll see if you can play longer without the crashes. You can try the Omega drivers but I doubt it's a driver issue. Probably heat. Might also be the Cpu. Download MBM5 and you'll see the temps.

 

[Gunner]

I'll try MBM5 later along with Hot Cpu tester, I downloaded that but I can't run it now, the test takes six hours!

Funny thing is CS 1.6 works fine. I managed to escape a freeze in HL2DM and get back to the desktop, I was greeted by this error message: "engine error failed to lock vertex buffer in cmeshdx8::lockvertex". Been googling that for solutions.

Edit: Well, the "engine error failed to lock vertex buffer in cmeshdx8::lockvertex" solution was to use -dxlevel 70 or 80. That didn't work.

 

[Gunner]

Okay... basically all my games freeze except CS 1.6.

Edit: Cpu temp 47°C MB temp 37°C

 

[Gunner]

I think it's fixed now, last reboot, I got this error message: "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM\"

I thought I had to format, but instead I used the automated repair & recovery console (which is not automated at all by the way...). Ran another checkdisk in dos, and it fixed it apparently. CS:S and BF:V work now

But I would like to know if those temperatures I listed are normal or high.

 

[dream431ca]

what is your motherboard?

 

[Gunner]

what is your motherboard?

It's an ASUS P4P800 SE.

 

[Ti133700N]

Did you install your motherboard drivers?

 

[Gunner]

Did you install your motherboard drivers?

Yeah of course

The problem went away for now, I'm gonna backup all my files and get ready for the eventual hardware failure.

 

[Gunner]

Bleh, turns out I didn't fix the problem, Event Viewer log shows my Hard Disk has bad blocks and they cannot be fixed and the data cannot be recovered.

I'm looking to buy a new HD at the moment, are SATA drives really better than IDE? And I also read somewhere that the windows installation on a SATA drive is much more complicated, anyone know anything about this?

 

[ComradeBadger]

SATA drives are better. And their installation just depends really - mine went through without a hitch... but other people have had to install drivers for them to work

You'll be prompted to press F6 (I think) to install a 3rd party driver during the beginning stages of installation.

 

[Gunner]

Okay I just got back from the shop and I think I'm screwed... my PSU does not have a SATA power supply cable

Comrade is there anything I can do apart from changing the PSU?

Edit: Will this work? http://www***e-montgallet.com/prix/75012/acheter/6652/

 

[ComradeBadger]

That is fine, just buy and adapter like that, it''ll be fine

 

[Gunner]

I'm baaack! Thanks for the help Comrade. I discarded the old HDD and installed a WD 120GB Sata drive, so far so good. :E

 

[sinkoman]

Allot of sata drives have molex's on them too.

EDIT: Ah. Didn't realise you got the new drive already. Try running a bunch of benchmarks and stress test's to see if you're all good. Prime is supposed to be an extremely good cpu stressor.

 

[ComradeBadger]

Good stuff, and no problem

Windows all install ok?

 

[Gunner]

Yeah windows installed normally once I set the bios right. So much free space now mouahahah