need help with nvidia,,,,,,,,,

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spanish-flytrap
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need help with nvidia,,,,,,,,,

Post by spanish-flytrap »

i have a pretty cool pc here's my spec's (well atleast i think its cool)

AMD antholon processor
IWILL mother board with the ali chipset
NVIDIA geforce4 Ti 4200 agp 64mb ddr ram
Litheon dvd cd-rom
dsl
networked to another computer
300 watt power source
511.mb ram
Soundblaster 5.1 live with eax
5 speaker hookup
running on WIN98 SE

now the problem im having is when i start into a game it restarts my whole computer or it freezes,,i dloaded update drivers for all my hardware,,,,,and got some bad advice on how to set my system bios which made it worse,,oh i did have a ati card before that did about the same thing,i just purchased the nvidia and need some help,,,,,,just please dont be mean to me ,,im still a newbie with comps,,,,,,

thanks to all who help :)
TonyH
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Post by TonyH »

Without knowing what speed Athlon processor you have I can only offer a guess as to what may be the problem.

With the 300 watt power supply you may not have enough power there to cover the load with a higher speed processor and the GF4 card. AMD recommends that most of the Athlon's above 1 Ghz be used with a 350 watt power supply or better.

And welcome to PCA. :D
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dadx2mj
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Post by dadx2mj »

Could be the power supply or many other tings too. I would make sure you have all the ATI drivers out of there and then try reinstalling the nvidia drivers. Do a search in the registry and make sure any reference to ATI is gone.

Welcome to PCA enjoy your stay and come and post often.
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spanish-flytrap
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Post by spanish-flytrap »

thanks guys i need all the help
i'll tell you guys the outcome thanks a bunch
spanish-flytrap
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Post by spanish-flytrap »

im sorry i did forget to add this

i have underclocked. The cpu is 1.33ghz and we have it clocked at 1ghz
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FlyingPenguin
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Post by FlyingPenguin »

It's likely one of two things: weak power supply or a PCI IRQ channel sharing problem.

I would highly suspect the IRQ channel sharing problem since you have an SBLive and that card is VERY prone to this problem (this is NOT the same as an IRQ conflict). More details on this problem here: http://soldcentralfl.com/quakecoop/glfaq5.htm#5_9

Since it sounds like it's an easily reproduced problem (you implied it happens every time you run a game) it'll be easy to test.

While I suspect the SBLive is the culprit, keep in mind there are other PCI cards that can also cause this (less likely nowadays, but it happens). I've seen it with PCI Modems, PCI NICS and PCI SCSI or ATA controllers.

I recommend pulling the SBLive card out of the computer and try running a game and see if it freezes or reboot (most games will run fine without a sound card).

If pulling the SBLive doesn't stop it from happening, try pulling ALL your PCI cards (make a note of which slot each card was in before pulling them!) and see if it still happens. If it continues to happen then I'd suspect it's the power supply.

If pulling the SBLive doesn't fix it but pulling all your PCI cards does, then you should install each card ONE BY ONE (and put them back in the same slots they were in) and test it until you find the culprit. When you find it, try moving the card to a different open slot.

If it's the SBLive that's causing it (as I suspect) then try moving it to another empty slot first.

If it doesn't work properly in any of the empty slots then you'll have to pull one of the other cards and try it there. If it works then put the card you swapped in one of the free slots. When you do this try VERY hard to arrange your cards so that they don't share BIOS IRQs (after the POST screen, BIOS displays a screen that shows everything detected by BIOS - memory, hard drives, PCI cards, etc. It will list the IRQ for each card) try to arrange it so that AT LEAST the SBLive and the Video card are not sharing an IRQ with anything else (if you have a lot of cards it's hard to avoid sharing IRQs).


Frankly, if I were you, I'd ditch the SBLive and use the on-board C-Media sound. It sounds just as good to me and won't give you the IRQ hassles. That's what I did when I upgraded to an IWill XP333 - I was elated to be rid of my flaky SBLive.


Hope this helps...
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“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez

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PreDatoR
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Post by PreDatoR »

Definately sounds like a underpowered PSU to me... Seems anytime a load is put on it, it does what its doing...
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