A7N8X and video crashing

Hi everyone

I have an A7N8X board v1.03 or so, 2500+, WInXP, 120GB Western Digital, DVD
burner... nothing else special... and a powercolor radeon 9600 lite.
Occassionally playing quake... it just crashes n freezes the system. While
sometimes it works fine. The previous video card was a radeon 9100... and
it worked great all the time. I have the latest ATI drivers on there. Also,
I put in an Asus 9500/GE and it crashes all the time too... not sure why.

Any help would be appreciated

thanks

Jeff

In article <JKHdd.166936$a41.160632@pd7tw2no>, "Jeff" <jlabute RemoveThis @shaw.ca> wrote:

 > Hi everyone
 >
 > I have an A7N8X board v1.03 or so, 2500+, WInXP, 120GB Western Digital, DVD
 > burner... nothing else special... and a powercolor radeon 9600 lite.
 > Occassionally playing quake... it just crashes n freezes the system. While
 > sometimes it works fine. The previous video card was a radeon 9100... and
 > it worked great all the time. I have the latest ATI drivers on there. Also,
 > I put in an Asus 9500/GE and it crashes all the time too... not sure why.
 >
 > Any help would be appreciated
 >
 > thanks
 >
 > Jeff

How does your system respond to other tests ? Can your computer
handle Prime95 (mersenne.org) torture test for eight hours ? Get
a copy and run it overnight. The idea here, is to run a test that
doesn't involve the video card, so you can be absolutely sure it
is the video card that is doing it. The nice thing about Prime95,
is it checks the computation it does, and can identify when the
processor+ram aren't right.

It could be the processor has a problem, the ram is bad (you can have
ram that passes memtest86 but fails the Prime95 test), the video
card or AGP slot are bad (unlikely in this case, based on your
symptoms), or the power supply is bad. As for power, I've been testing
an A7N8X-E running at 11x200, using three sticks of RAM, and running
the heaviest computing load I can manage, the motherboard draws
16 amps from +5V. The video card aux power is separate from this,
and my ATI9800 can draw 5.5 more amps on top of that. Now, most
power supplies these days can easily handle that load, but an added
effect, is the load varies a lot while tests are running. That means
the power supply transient response is being tested, and that
cannot be observed for correctness without test equipment.

So, try Prime95, and see if it changes the picture of where the
trouble might lie. Prime95 cannot help with the power supply end
of things, and only a swap for another supply will help isolate
a problem there. You can check the voltage levels with MBM5 or
Asus Probe, but if the levels are good, you still cannot be
certain whether the supply is causing the problem or not.

HTH,
Paul<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->