PC Freezes when playing games

ThunderZtorm · #1 April 11th, 2006, 09:09 AM

Often when I turned on my PC, there's only a black screen on my LCD, telling me that there's "No Video Signal",
or just a black screen on standby mode. It'll take a few try before I can get it on.

And when i was playing NFS:Most Wanted about 1 hour or more, the game will start lagging, and the fps keeps going down,
strange lines and the 3d vector is like getting scrambled, and boom,the pc freezes or sometimes just restart itself.

I suppose my graphic card is overheated so I upgraded it with a fan.
unfortunately, i never played NFS:MW again after that :S so i don't know if that fan really helped much,
and i have a fresh installed windows after this.

Lately, I've been playing Guild Wars, and there's still a problem. It just a random freeze when i'm playing GW,
lower and higher graphic setting doesn't seem affect it (using bloom effect or without it will still freezes)
and it looks like only my monitor freezes, because i can still move my mouse, type on my keyboard (*)
and hear the sound, but alt-tab / ctrl-alt-del won't help, only reseting the pc will do. But this time i just left my pc on.
After 10 minutes i was still online when i checked it on my friend's pc and he can saw what i'm typing. (*)
So my pc was still connected to the server, not disconnected.

I was so pissed (because getting a good group in a mission is so hard lol) so I tried to alt-tab many times and
kicked my PC 2-4 times (I know it's not right x_x) but hey It returned to my desktop, with my GW running in
background, but when I clicked my GW taskbar, it just freezes again. I opened my pc casing and touched and
ticked my graphic card a few times, and poof, my monitor just went black again, the graphic card wasn't really hot.

One day, my pc just freezes again, but I managed to close my games and returned to my windows,
so I did a direct3d test on dxdiag, and here's the result.

Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 39 (SetDisplayMode to 640x480x16): HRESULT = 0x80004001 (Not implemented)
Direct3D 8 test results: Failure at step 6 (No hardware supported display modes found): HRESULT = 0x80004005 (Generic failure)
Direct3D 9 test results: Failure at step 6(No hardware supported display modes found): HRESULT = 0x80004005 (Generic failure)

after this, running a video on a video player like WMP will just crashes my PC.

and here's the event viewer log everytime my pc freezes,

The COM+ Event System detected a bad return code during its internal processing. HRESULT was C0000005 from line 44 of d:\qxp_slp\com\com1x\src\events\tier1\eventsystemo bj.cpp. Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services to report this error.

here's my PC spec :
Windows XP SP2
Intel Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
1 GB RAM
nVidia GeForce FX5200 (ASUS)

strange things is in my dxdiag it show that..
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz (2 CPUs)
and in My Computer...
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40 GHz 2.41GHz, 1.00 GB of RAM
2 CPUs ? how come ?

sorry, I'm new to this forum, and I wrote this long, I'm just trying to tell the detailed info about my problem.
I have read the other posts but it doesn't really help much, and this post is very similar to my problem
http://www.cybertechhelp.com/forums/...d.php?t=110777
(which is changing the graphic card is the best solution)
I'll upgrade my PC, but it's a very big problem in choosing the hardware, I don't know If I can post it here, or just in Hardware forum

Thx for reading and any suggestion is welcome !

**smurfy** · #2 April 11th, 2006, 11:53 AM

Hi and welcome to the forum. Don't apologise for long posts - there is no such thing as too much information

Quote:

Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 39 (SetDisplayMode to 640x480x16): HRESULT = 0x80004001 (Not implemented)
Direct3D 8 test results: Failure at step 6 (No hardware supported display modes found): HRESULT = 0x80004005 (Generic failure)
Direct3D 9 test results: Failure at step 6(No hardware supported display modes found): HRESULT = 0x80004005 (Generic failure)

You have driver problems.
Update the Motherboard chipset drivers and then the nVidia graphics drivers.

P4 Dual core is seen as 2 processors.

Quote:

I opened my pc casing and touched and ticked my graphic card a few times, and poof, my monitor just went black again, the graphic card wasn't really hot

You opened up and touched the internals while the PC was running? ? ?

ThunderZtorm · #3 April 11th, 2006, 01:35 PM

x_x yeah.. I wear something to prevent grounding, and I know shaking a pc while running is a bad idea.

I didn't know that I have a P4 that supports hyperthreading until today, because I never really pay attention to it,
and my P4 sticker don't have HT logo on it.

I forgot to mention that after the game freezes and failed dxdiag test, restarting the computer will return it to
its normal condition, good dxdiag test, etc.

I have updated my graphic driver, but not my motherboard chipset driver.
I'll update it a few days again, because tomorrow I have a really important midterm that all of the materials is in my PC.
I have searched the driver in Intel.com, searched my chipset and found this..

INF Update Utility [INFINST_AUTOL.EXE] (945KB) 7.2.2.1006 11/14/2005 Download
This utility installs INF files that inform the operating system how to properly configure the chipset for
specific functionality such as USB and AGP.

Is this what do you mean by "Motherboard Chipset Driver" ?
My Motherboard is ASUS P4P800 with chipset Intel i865PE, and this driver support my chipset as well.

Anyway, FX5200 isn't good enough to play nowadays PC Games, and even playing a High Definition video
will result in a noticeable low fps. That's why I really want an upgrade, but that's another big problem x_x
(budget VS MB socket, PCI-E)

ThunderZtorm · #4 April 12th, 2006, 03:01 PM

Is it possible to have this kind of error because of low PSU ?

I only have 250w PSU, and I know sooner or later I'll need a new one....

baboon · #5 April 12th, 2006, 04:06 PM

You are cutting it kind of close on that power supply. And the fx5200 was just an all around bad make for a video card. But I Do Not Argue with the Wise... you should listen to the steps that smurfy gave you.

ThunderZtorm · #6 April 12th, 2006, 06:44 PM

Thanks, but I need to make sure first what smurfy mean by "Motherboard Chipset Driver"
Because I NEVER updated it before, so I don't know exactly which one is MB driver.

**smurfy** · #7 April 12th, 2006, 10:19 PM

Yes, those are the motherboard chipset drivers I am meaning.

OK, Allow me to demonstrate first hand the importance of your motherboard driver...
I just installed a fresh Windows 2000Pro. Asus A7A266 motherboard (Ali chipset, AGP Pro slot) and 128Mb Asus GeforceTi4600UltraDeluxe (AGP4x).

Then I installed the latest nVidia (84.21 17 March 2006) drivers.
This is what my nVidia display control panel looks like:

Notice it's saying the card uses a PCI bus? I can use 3D now but it's cruddy and buggy and games don't like it because it's just like having a PCI 3D card.

Then I installed my motherboard AGP driver and wow, look at it now...

AGP4x!

Now I'm not saying that this is 100% what your problem is but I'd say it could be a root cause. Let's see how it improves things.

What happens when you run the card in PCI mode is that it actually seems to work harder to give you the performance you expect. I could quite easily run NFSU:2 on highest graphics settings in AGP mode with my setup. Try it in PCI mode and I had to turn down a couple of notches and the card would still overheat and cause the game to freeze up.
Run it like that for to long and you start running the risk of damaging the card (not as much risk as touching it - even grounded - while it's running though)

But I do agree, the FX5200 is not a good card.

ThunderZtorm · #8 April 13th, 2006, 02:40 AM

So I have updated my motherboard chipset driver, 7.2.2.1006, installed it and restarted my computer.
but nothing changes, this is the screenshot before and after the driver installation.

It's the same AGP8X, so I guess my previous MB driver work well.
As I never updated it before, I hope it will improve the other performance as well.

And...where can I check my MB Chipset driver version ?

Thanks for the detailed info, hopefully I can change my GPU soon, but learning something from my FX5200 isn't that bad =)

thanks again

ThunderZtorm · #9 April 18th, 2006, 04:17 AM

It seems there's no more random freezes when playing GW again, well it's random, but I have played for hours but it stills fine.

But another problem came out, that never happened before I updated my MB Chipset Driver. Whenever I use alt-tab there's a chance that it'll kill my fps to no more than 5 fps, alt-tabbing rarely solves the problem, but it's really rare. Sometimes when in the game I ported to another area, it'll happen too. Changing screen resolution while in the game won't solve it. The only way is just to restart the game.

So what's wrong now ?