any news?

Thanks, unfortunately nope, no news. I am going to send my PC away and let them run some tests. Hopefully it's something inexpensive.

It seems so far a broken 3d card seems the most likely cause.

RAM is not the issue, processor is fine, power supply works fine, hard disks are working better than ever... the beeps when booting after the crash seems to indicate a video card issue.

I can't rule out two other things though. One of them being a broken motherboard, the other being a driver/software/Windows XP issue.

Yup, theoretically it could be a driver issue, apparently ATI cards have suffered from something similar to this sometime in 2007.

But it would hardly make sense in my case as I have been using 8.2 drivers and newer drivers for many many months.

Cheers

Update: My PC has been working fine for a good couple of hours now. Perhaps it was the power supply after all.

good to hear that

FYI; If you're still on AGP, ATI just released the AGP Patch officially:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/CatalystAGPHotfix.aspx

Thanks old_bill, I appreciate your response! But nope I am on PCI Express.

It may very well have been a driver/software issue though, God knows how often I've did a reinstall. Apparently sometimes it works, sometimes it may fail for some reason or another.

I am not running 9.2 at the moment... I think. I'm going to stick with the new power supply though.

Oh, by the way, two other suspicious facts... both Windows XP and Valve's Source engine had updates released late yesterday. It may have solved my mysterious issue. For all I know it could have been caused by an update preceding yesterday's.

(for the case that it doesn't continue to work properly)

Hi PHeMox,

I recently had very similar issues on my system (grafics: msi geforce 7900Gs). Problems sometimes vanished for a few days and returned then anew. At last nothing woorked anymore. I bought another grafics card in the end, but it wasn't the card, but the pciExpress on the mainboard that didn't work properly so I also bought a new mainboard (pwoer wasn't the problem). However I did a lot of researches as I had grafic problems with the new system as well at first:

1: Have you CCC installed and vpu recover activated? I had black screen when beginning to play grafic intensive games, however when activating vpu recover the grafic device will be reset and the game closed with an error (that's better than a complete crash). I could solve this issue by downclocking the grafic clock. That's not that nice but you could give it a try (you can use the CCC for that). First try it with a high amount (-100Mhz) when it works you can find the highest clock that works correctly (in my case that are -30Mhz, as the card is overclocked by company by 80Mhz that's not as bad).
2: Try another PCIE card for checking whether it's a mainboard problem.
3: If your ATI-card isn't published by ATI itself but by another company (ASUS, SAPPHIRE,MSI,...) go to their sites and check whether they have their own drivers (at least ASUS has them). That's important because different companies may build in different cooling systems on the card that might don't run properly with the native ati drivers.

Thanks.



In case it fails again, that'll be the first thing I will do. I am quite confident my 3D card is not broken. If it fails again then I pretty much ruled out the power supply...

You know, it wouldn't really surprise me if it's something funky with my mainboard, but temperatures seem to be within normal range all the time.

Okey, it's getting funny now... seems it might just be an issue with the Source engine. Probably has something to do with refresh rates and what it defaults to. I pretty much ruled out faulty hardware.

So.. it seems I have wasted 200 bucks on a power supply, but I might as well keep it now for a future upgrade.

And just when you think everything is fine again, it stops working yet again! :p

I've now swapped out my 3d cards (old x1600xt and new hd2900xt), but despite not being able to fit my hd2900xt in the second slot because of a new hard disk ... I have found out none of the two 3D cards actually start spinning their fans now.

Meaning a dangerously hot x1600xt 3d card. Also meaning, my 3D card is not broken. Which makes sense as it ran Crysis a few days back after the issue started for more than 3 hours without ever failing.

Seems my mainboard, something I did not hope for, is the culprit after all! :S

Cheers