Bought a new puter:

4000+ single core
dfi lanparty ut rdx200 cf-dr
2x Corsair TwinX XMS3200 400mhz C2
Radeon x1800xt 512MB
OCZ 600watt PowerStream PSU
WD Sata 250gb
antec p180
g15
g7
some creative 5.1 speakers.

You may remember the thread I posted about WoW getting black screen crashes. I then found it was happening in other games. I flashed bios, tried about a million different drivers for both video and audio, tried this again with a fresh format and install of windows, monitored the gpu temp (which was fine) and memtested the ram, twice. All to no avail.

Took it back to merchant, who took 3 weeks to tell me that there is nothing wrong with the hardware and that it must be a driver issue. This pissed me off immensely. I take it home, problem is still there. use very latest audio + video drivers, problem still there.

Now the wierdest part is, that the crashes happen in the following games I have tried: HL2 + mods, WoW, Battle for middle earth 2.

The crashes don't happen in bf2 or bf2:sf... why could this be? I need help, this is driving me insane. There may or may nor be sexual favours for whoever can solve this problem.

i feel your pain brother

iv been the subject to absolutely f***ing random s*** like this, and then someone will fiddle iwth your PC for half an hour, or youl take it to a lan, and it will just magically f***ing stop

ALL i can suggest is, i got it alot when i had a f***ed version of direct X. try get the latest one / download the same file from different sites as there could be something minutely wrong with the installer thats causin the f***ups

also make sure all your peripherals that are plugged in are plugged in properly

make sure bios is to default , nothing is oced.

i was getting blue screens one day could not find absolutely anything wrong, then noticed 1 single pin running from my game theatre XP sound card to the external rack thing they have. that 1 f***ing pin that was bent was causing my PC to bluescreen EVERY f***ing time before it would boot. straightened it back up with a pair of tweezers and it stopped.

also im assuming the hardware dude u took it too swapped out all gear 1 by 1 ala process of elimination, but its a good idea to do it yourself, for peace of mind if nothingelse. get a couple of mates over with similar gear, and start swapping s*** out and in.

also it could be a shorting problem. iv had that too, when i was changing motherboards a screw had gotten wedged in between the board and the backplate, causing random s*** to happen, sometimes it would boot sometimes it wouldnt

could ALSO be a power issue. get a mate to bring a different PSU!

buy a dell, i'll leave now

last edited by Rodolphe at 22:53:15 14/Mar/06

This is a long shot but you don't have anything stupid like Norton/Symantec Antivirus installed do you?

It caused random crashes on two of my systems continuously for months, making it look like driver/hardware error.

Like I said, a long shot.

I've been told corsair ram has issues with DFI boards?

I've got a spare PSU i'll give that a shot soon.

Also, my dram voltage setting in bios is set to 2.65 by default, where on the corsair website it says it should be 2.75... could that be causing the problems? The RAM also isn't set to its 2-3-3-6 timings in bios by default I think, you have to do that manually (i think ><)... Would that be doing it as well?

Tried different (older or newer) chipset drivers? Tried running the games with your soundcard disabled? If one of those games supports it, have you tried changing the games config files to run in a different rendering mode (ie opengl instead of direct3d, or possibly even software rendering?)? And do you have any refresh forcing tools etc installed?

If you are running multimonitor mode you might want to try disabling your other output devices and then running the problematic games, too.

mate is that a standard AT Raedon or an Asus card at all? After trying all the other suggestions I recommend trying one more thing. Make sure everything is at default, nothing overclocked and then ensure you disable the VPU recover feature in the ATI drivers.

Give that a go.

Then hop on over to the Rage3D forums, there is a s***load of pages over there with people of various configs suffering black screen crashes just as you explained. There is a specific thread if its the Asus board as well.

Do you get any audible beeping when these crashes occur, any looping of sound at all? lso I have read a LOT of threads with people and the DFI mobos having nothing but trouble, apparently a great mobo but a son of a bitch to set up correctly. Very fukin finnicky is the word to get it at its sweet spot. Try OCAU threads as well.

oh and one other thing isnt the new xt cards limted to a 60hz refresh rate?? maybe setting your desktop screen to the same rate as those you have set in your games might stop it.

Tried different (older or newer) chipset drivers? Tried running the games with your soundcard disabled? If one of those games supports it, have you tried changing the games config files to run in a different rendering mode (ie opengl instead of direct3d, or possibly even software rendering?)? And do you have any refresh forcing tools etc installed?

Yeah, used chipset drivers that came with board and latest ones. Pretty sure they're the only 2 around as it's a newish board. Using onboard sound atm. no refresh forcing tools. only the 1 monitor.

mate is that a standard AT Raedon or an Asus card at all? After trying all the other suggestions I recommend trying one more thing.

its a gecube. tried disabling VPU recovery thingy, didn't fix it. Also put refresh to 60, problem still there :'(

I've posted on the DFI forums to no avail so far, i'll see what they have to see over on the RAGE ones but if anyone else has any suggestions please share =(

I'm guessing it might be a RAM thing, as you don't seem 100% sure about the right settings.

Try using just 1 stick of RAM, then swap to the other one, see if you get the same results.

Get 100% certain about what RAM settings you should be using. Contact the people who you bought the motherboard from and ask their technicians what it should be set to in the BIOS.

Maybe try using a different video card too. Troubleshooting is a just a process of elimination right, so you could try a different video card, problem still happens, a good chance it's not the video card, still possible, but far less likely. I'm thinking RAM though.

What kinda sexual favours we talkin about.. I'm not easily pleased. I don't wanna end up sitting on the end of the bed saying this doesn't usually happen to me if you get my drift.

If it was a RAM problem wouldn't it happen in BF2 as well? and 3dmark? I've got the DRAM and cas latencies set to what they should be. I've never really had to set RAM timings before though so I have nfi how to do anything else.

If you are really concerned that its a ram problem, download Memtest and let it through once or twice... if it finds no errors, you can strike ram off the list. If you want to do some other system tests you might want to grab the ultimate bootcd and have a play with it(memtest included).

It sounds like more of a driver/config issue though, from the symptoms.

These things drive me nuts, I know they are so frustrating. Mate is windows fully up to date? i.e. Dx9c ect, and is the net framework fully up todate as the Cats use that for their drivers and control panel now. Check all is seated correctly and cables and such correctly fitted, take your ram out and back in again. Monitor driver installed or are you using the 'default' monitor from windows? Use Driver Cleaner and re-install your vid card drivers from scrath, make sure no virus scanners are running when you do so...same goes for the soundcard.

good luck, I still get the feeling its vid card/driver/mobo related, if it was your memory it would s*** itself in just about everything.

I've got a DFi board and getting the same problems.
Only happens during the day time after being on for 2hours+
Or my video card crashes and that VPU s*** comes up.
Should have bought a Asus board >:(

icewyrm: I said i memtested it in my first post. merchant also tested all hardware, prime95 for cpu, 3dmark05 looping for gfx card etc.

Yeah, i'm 90% sure its a driver issue as it crashes in most game but won't crash in BF2 or 3dmark05 or 06. I'm about to try to make it crash with catalyst drivers 6.1 and 6.2 - am running 6.3 the latest ones atm.

psycho: yeah directx is up to date as is .NET - using microsoft monitor driver or whatever the default one is. I've reseated stuff a bit, though if the problem was not being seated right things would s*** themselves doing other things than games wouldn't they?

Should have bought a Asus board

You said it ;)

What do you mean by a black screen crash? I am assuming the screen turns black and the computer locks up?

screen freezes, sound loops for a few secs then makes a loud buzzing noise, screen goes black buzzing keeps going, from there can only reboot.

edit: VVV no probs duder, ty for the reply anyway :)

last edited by taggs at 08:24:42 16/Mar/06

Sorry, posted when I was sleepy.