Power Supply Issues? Help/Advice Needed

[Zarcharien]

Ok, I'm pretty familiar withpc systems/designs, however this issue has got me stumped. I'll start straight from the begining [:D].

I recently upgraded my system, by upgrade I mean more like an overhaul. My old system general specs/stats consisted of the following:

* amd athlon xp 2000+ (socket a)
* soyo motherboard
* 512 pc3200 (2 x 256)
* 80 g hard drive
* 330 antec true power supply
* Nvidia mx 440 64Mb graphics (7198 drivers?)

So ...you get the general idea without me going further. This sytem ran Horizons fairly well, average 30 fps out of town and 10 in town. Of course there was the usual lag at times and choppiness, but the game ran fairly smooth and I very rarely rarely encountered ctd, lockups or system restarts.

A week ago I decided to upgrade my system to the following general specs/stats:

* amd 64 bit 3000+ (socket 754)
* gigabyte motherboard
* 1024 pc3200 (1 x 512, 1 x 256, 1 x 256)
* same hard drive as above, although I did do a fresh install of Windows
* 450 coolmax power supply
* Nvidia fx 5200 256Mb graphics (7198 drivers?)

So ... I log into Horizons. Everything is running very nice and smooth, much better then the old system. Fps of70 -80 out of town and 25 -40 in town (any town). Hardly no lag or choppiness, no problems with frequesnt porting and the game loads and shutsdown 10x faster then before. Yay [:)] !!HOWEVER, all poisitives must have a negative right, else the world would stop turning [:S]. Now, I very frequently ctd, lockup and have system restarts almost to the point I can't play the game. So, you think this would just be normal Horizons gameplayright ... wrong [8-|]. This happens in other games to just not as frequently, probably because Horizons draws on more system resources then your average game.

I call the graphics card manufacturer and they say it has to do with my power supply notoutputting enough volts, so I check it using Everest Home Edition and Gigabyte Utility Manager (both just to make sure of the estimated accuracy) and I get this:

Voltage Values:
CPU Core 1.57 V
+3.3 V 3.28 V
+12 V 11.84 V
VBAT Battery2.85 V
DIMM 2.58 V

They inform me that this isbasically running 2D mode and not enough to support 3D mode causing the problems. So, I call the motherboard manufafcturer to check to see if the motherboard (bios) is somehow limiting the voltage output. Which as I expected they say the bios contols the cpu voltage only for the most part. So, I email Coolmax to get more info because this power supply should be enough to handle anything this pc requires.I'm waiting for a reply andI have also emailed Horizon tech support and waiting a reply to see if anyone can offer me advice/help or solution to this problem.

In the meantime, I thought I'd post here also and see if any of you tech experts out there might have some input. Afterall, isn't everyone a system/software pc expert nowdays (including myself)[:D]. Any help anyone could offer is greatly appreciated. Thanks for the help!

Zaracherien

btw: game settings, bios settings, windowsand drivers are allup to date and should be configured correctly for the most part for optimal performance.

[Pharcellus]

At first thought, it sounds like a heat problem, though it could be a power problem, even though a 450W powersupply should be more than enough for that system.

I'd say watch your temps; CPU, Video card, chipset, and ambient in the case. If you don't have sensors available, there are little drive-bay sensor packages that you can get for less than $100.

Also, does your video card have an auxilliary power connector? If so, make sure it is hooked up to an independent cable straight from the power supply.

Outside of that, I would start looking at driver problems and search the web for problems with your specific combo of hardware.

[Zarcharien]

Thanks for the info Phars.

All temps for the devices and inside the case in general is good (normally no more then 80F or so). Video card dosent have an aux power. I've been leaning towards your last suggestion, driver problems. Horizon's tech support replied too, and I think they are leaning towards it being a driver problem.

I've checked most of the basic drivers to ensure everything is up to date, but that dosen't really mean anything at this point. Guess I'll try to keep focusing on the drivers and see what I can come up with.

[Custard]

Heat problems can easily be diagnosed by opening the case and pointing a desk fan at the computer.
If it continues to crash it may not be heat related.
Oh yeah, never trust the temp readings from onboard/inbuilt components.

Power supply problems are sometimes hard to diagnose because it really depends on which output rail from the PSU is supplying too little or too much power to the computer components. eg. while your processor and motherboard might be getting sufficient power the data on your hard drive may be getting corrupted because the drive is getting too little power to operate effectively.
Swap it out if you can get your hands on another PSU.

I'd generally steer away from mixing different types and sizes of RAM. Sometimes it worked for me other times not.
Pull out the two 256Mb sticks and see how the PC runs. Of course it's performance will suffer, but your trying to test if your components are working properly. Then try running on just the two 256 and see how it goes.

You could try reseating all the components (vid card, RAM, anything else that plugs in) to see if that makes a difference. Just don't do it on a dry windy day while rubbing a balloon on your head.

[Zarcharien]

Oppss [:$] I forgot to mention one other important detail. If I take out the Fx 5200 video card and replace it with my old Mx 440 video card; I then have no problems running Horizons. Both these cards are using the same 7198 drivers.

[Pharcellus]

OK, that narrows it down a LOT.

You are looking at these possibilities, then:

1) Overheating video card. Check to make certain the fan is turning and not obstructed. Some newer video cards will need the slot next to the AGP slot open to provide adequate airflow.
2) Bad/incompatible motherboard BIOS settings related to video. Try setting all of your BIOS settings to "safe" or "compatible". There usually is a menu selection in your BIOS that you can select which does this for all settings. If it works fine, then go back and tweak ONE setting for performance at a time, then test it thoroughly.
3) Driver incompatibility or improperly-installed drivers. Go to add/remove programs and remove any/all video driver installs you see there. Change your video driver to the default "Standard VGA" if you need to. Install the drivers fresh, starting with the latest WHQL certified version and going to older revisions. Then try newer revisions. Try reinstalling DirectX. If you try up to 3-4 revisions in both directions, and have the same problem, then it is most likely not the video driver.
4) Undocumented incompatibility between your motherboard and your videocard (sadly, these things still tend to happen; best thing to do is google for your video card and motherboard model number with the words "freeze lock-up lockup crash" or similar and hope someone has posted something similar somewhere else and gotten it to work).
5) Defective card / motherboard. Usually the worst situation. You have to get another board and video card and swap them out to see if the problem goes away.

Note in each stage, try to reduce system complexity as much as possible. Take out everything but the video card from the slots. Leave the BIOS settings at "safe" when you start working with the drivers, especially if the problem behavior changes noticeably. You may have a compound problem (BIOS settings AND a borked driver install), and reducing complexity / settings to simple / safe ones will speed up finding the all of the problems.

[Custard]

2.5) In your BIOS settings turn off AGP Fastwrites and see if that makes a difference.

[Zarcharien]

I think I may have found the problem with some system drivers (2). I played last night for almost 1 -2 hours, traveled in town, out town, enegaged in combat, crafted and teleported/recalled several times. Not 1 crash, yet, but I'm stil testing and playing the game of elimination [8-|].

I had the problem with the agp fastwrite when I first set up the system. My old bios would set it to disabled by default, but the newer one didn't. Took me a few to figure out what was going on there [:)]

[Fourwinds]

I think I may have found the problem with some system drivers (2). I played last night for almost 1 -2 hours, traveled in town, out town, enegaged in combat, crafted and teleported/recalled several times. Not 1 crash, yet, but I'm stil testing and playing the game of elimination [img]/Web//emoticons/emotion-15.gif[/img].

I had the problem with the agp fastwrite when I first set up the system. My old bios would set it to disabled by default, but the newer one didn't. Took me a few to figure out what was going on there [img]/Web//emoticons/emotion-1.gif[/img]

Heya Zarcharien,

I have a similar problem with an FX5200 graphics card and hanging ... If you could explain which system drivers you updated and which nvidia driver set you are using I would appreciate it please.

Thanks

[Zarcharien]

Well, I just played Horizons again today for about 2 hours. Did some crafting, a little combat and probably ported around 20+ times (checking consigners for tIV techs). Once again, I didn't crash, lockup nor auto restart. I'll try to provide as much info as I can.

The first problems I found with my system was 2 drivers.
1st for PCI Bridge device located under system devices in the device manager, for this I just used thenormal update driveroption.

2nd was for the SMBuscontoller driver (which is part of the Nvidia nForce3 chipset driver, see below)which I used thedriver disk for the motherboard to update. However, at this point I also went and got theentire newerupdate forNvidia nForce3_64 chipset driver. This update forthe nForce3_64chipset includes audio,ethernet, IDE and SMBus.

Also, Iwas actually using 2 ethernet devices ( one onboard which was disabled and one PCI ethernet adapter). I unistalled the PCIethernet adapter and enabled the onboard one.

I'm not for sure which, IF ANY, of these things made a difference because I was testing many other things also at the same time and cannot remember the order in which I did them, but for whatever reason everything seems to be ok now.Icould be wrong all together, andof course anyone is free to correct me where I'm wrong, but maybe this informationmay help someone.

Btw, I also use the 7198 Nvidia graphics driver (nv4_disp.dll , 6.14.0010.7189) and direct x 9.0c

[Guaran]

Yeah make sure you have installed the latest chipset drivers for the motherboard.

If you look in device manager and see any yellow exclamation marks or disabled components under the -System, thats usually chipset drivers.

Also if you install WinXP from a CD thats winxp or winxp sp1, install latest directx before upgrading the service pack. sometimes the directx upgrade which is built into sp2,will not install properly when installing sp2.

If the crashes were in Hz only, I was going to suggest going into Horizons options and resetting to defaults. That speeds up graphic performance.

[Enos Yorl]

Just a heads up,

If you do upgrade your video card to one of the newer ones in the future, you'll want a well known brand power supply (antec 400 smartpower here), that has at least 18v at the 12V rail.

I've noticed a lot of issues in this game that could berelated to not enough power under load, and the above is the norm for later model Nvidia,ATI cards.

[Custard]

I hope you meant 18A at the 12V rail. 18V at the 12V rail will probably let all the magic smoke out of the computer.

[Enos Yorl]

Bah,absolutely.

18A NOT Volts.[:#]


Brain cramp there/[:|]