Fair enough V.R.

Hang in there Deacon. The truth (fix) is out there.

One thing to check. Make sure you have the latest AGP driver for that board.

Good luck

Pinch...

Try your Power Supply as well. If it's older, it might be losing juice, and that would also explain the behavior you're seeing.

Deacon,

In all of these suggestion and answers I didn't see anything about heat. If there is thermal protection on your mobo and your cooling is not up to snuff, it could be shutting you down as soon as these high processor/ gpu intensive program start generating significant amount of heat. On my Abit you can set the temp alarm points and I remeber reading that if temps hit a certain point it would shut down my athelon XP to protect the system.

Thanks for the info guys, especially Skyhawk.

I have to agree with clmixon. The first thing I thought when I read the symptoms was heat. Make sure that the heatsink is seated properly and you are using a proper thermal compound. If your MB has a temperature monitoring utility, use it and make sure the temps are within spec. Also, make sure when you flashed the BIOS that the temperature limits weren't set too low by default.

Regards,
Sartori23

Deacon, I have the exact same mobo you have and here's your problem: When you flashed the BIOS, did you do the LOAD DEFAULTS thing immediately after flashing? This step CANNOT be skipped after flashing this (p4t533) mobo (or is it mofo ). Go back and re-flash your mobo and before you do anything else, load the default settings. Reboot. Afterwards, configure your BIOS as you see fit.

BTW, ultraviolet light was not used to program PROMs. It was used to erase EPROMs. PROMs were programmed by "burning" the intersection of a column and row on the PROM using electrical current.

Frekin Ossifers!
Marine Corp Maintanince is called for,Get a bigger hammer!!!

You said Azus right? Does your model have C.O.P.?(I think thats CPU Overheat protection)I'll jump on the overheat bandwagon with my little story.

A few months back,I built a new box with a Azus MB.all was well for a couple of weeks then i started getting crashes whenever I tried to play a game.I could surf forums all day with no problem,but within a minite or two of playing a game,I would crash.

Someone suggested it could be heat, so I started monitoring the heat via Asus probe.sure enough,C.O.P. was working as advertized!

So I re-applyed the heat paste between the heat sink and the CPU and waa-la! Running smooth as silk.


I'm not sure if it was operator error or a shelf life thing.I used the same brand of heat transfer paste,but purchased it from a differant supplyer.

Hope you get it worked out.

Turbo, One of the nice things about being older (senior?) is that I actually lived/worked thru a lot of this technology. My first use of a personal computer, an Apple II, in 1979 was to operate a PROM 'burner' in my design work with Honeywell. It used ultraviolet light, shined thru the quartz window of the PROM, to erase the firmware ('UV-Erasable').

You are (somewhat) correct in that an EPROM is a one-time only electrically burned PROM.

EEPROMs are electrically [multi-] erasable.

Xylem, you're very welcome.

Deacon,

It only happens when you play a game correct?

I smell an overheating problem here. Try getting hold of a temperature monitoring proggie to check your temps. If it only happens when you're playing a game, it's very likely to be a cooling problem, since games are very hardware-intensive and heat your rig up a fair bit!

Deacon,
Try this..

If you flashed your bios perhaps your AGP slot is not getting enough juice. Turn the voltage up one notch for your AGP slot in your BIOS. I had this problem when I first got my 9700 card. Upped the voltage and problem went away.

Semper Fi
Tatsu

I have the same probs they started when I upgraded my card to a geforce 5600fx, only happens in lomac and cfs3..I changed the power supply for a 400watt one and it still does it occasionally.How do you change your bios agp voltage? might be worth a shot.Thanks

You need to look in your bios during post up.
I have an Asus A7N8X. In the BIOS under AGP DDQ Voltage I was able to to go from the default 1.5 up to the 1.6 volts. That stablized my system. I also turned off Fast Write Function in the BIOS.

Semper Fi
Tatsu

I have a fujitsu pc based on the GA-8STXCFS motherboard..I cant find an option in my cmos/bios settings for voltage.I presume you are entering bios during the boot stage (by pressing del?)Thanks

Deacon,

As others have mentioned, this sounds like a Power Supply issue. I had the same problem with the P4T533-C as well. Replaced the PSU with an Enermax 450W PSU and that fixed it. What is your current PSU? Are you overclocking the system? Since I don't know what's installed in your system, you may not need a 450W PSU.

There is something you can try to see if you can narrow down the source of the problem. In WinXP, go to System Properties and click on the Advanced Tab. Then Startup & Recovery Settings at the bottom. Once there, in the System Failure section, uncheck "Automatically Restart".

By doing this, if the system reboots, you should get the dreaded BSOD with an error message if the problem is related to a driver issue of some sort. If you don't get the BSOD, then it is most likely a Hardware issue and probably PSU related.

Next, in that same Startup & Recovery dialog, is the option to "Write an event to the system log" enabled? If so, you can go into Administrative Tools/Event Viewer to see what the error was.

If you don't see anything helpful there (and a lot of the times it's very cryptic), you can use a Debugging Tool to view the "Minidump" error log. However, that gets a little more complicated so I won't explain how to do that right now until you try the other things first.

Also, if you've not been there yet, I would go to the ABXZone Forums . You may find the answer there. At the very least, you can post your problem and someone should be able to help further. It's a very helpful community.

Good Luck! Keep us posted.

-Zeph

Thanks again for all the good gouge!

Latest Update: On Saturday, I reflashed the Mobo after finding out that there was a newer version of BIOS available (1010C vice 1009C). I also found an unknown parallel device loaded in my Device Manager screen. I think this was from my old printer which I recently replaced with a USB offering.

I didn't reset my defaults, which I'll have to try next, but just these two things allowed me to play LOMAC and FS2004 for about 8 hours total without being able to reproduce the error. I had solved my problem!

From the Thrill of Victory...

Until Sunday, when I decided to try BF1942 which was also giving me problems...
After 30 minutes REBOOT!

So I'm getting there but, not quite done yet.

BTW, I checked my temps awhile back...the chip was running at about 120 degrees or so which the Tech Support guys said was nominal. The fan is running and the heat paste which came with the processor looks fairly well distributed.

It's actually sitting in my car right now. I was going to ship it off, but now I'm thinking of trying a few more of these fixes first.

That way I can REALLY F@#$ it up!

Thanks again for all the suggestions.

Deacon

EDIT: Oh, Yes it only happens during games. Also, when Windows recovers, it will generate an serious error log.

It notes a driver error but states that it cannot tell which driver it is.

To be continued...