Freezing/Lockup GT8800 woes

Hey all, posting in frustration at this point.

Am experiencing freezes/lockups during 3D gaming with the following setup:

CPU: Dual Core 2 E6750 (2 @ 2.66Ghz)
RAM: 2GB DDR2 800Mhz
GPU: Foxconn Geforce 8800GT 512MB
MB: Asus P5K SE
OS: WinXP Pro SP2

Was purchased as a pre-selected setup from local specialist (so not self selected components) so don't expect them to have chosen incompatible components, yet am seeing no obvious compatibility issues (ram speed, mb/cpu fsb speed etc.) either way.

Only suffer the freezes during gaming, between 1-10min normally. Windows operation perfect.

Screen locks, accompanied by a continuous noise. Will not accept Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Alt-Del etc. no error messages, just a straight hard-reset is all you can do.

Am running the latest forcewear drivers etc.

Is a brand new machine, fresh install, no funny buisiness.

Have tried the following games (all run perfect until freeze): Crysis, BF2142 and Dawn Of War.

All suffer the same freeze. Even occurs during intro sequences.

Temp up to ~85 (~60 @ idle). Used nTune to run fan at 100% and got readings of ~69 (~50@ idle). No change.

I have disabled the sound (via Windows Device Manager) with no change - is disabling it through this fashion enough to rule out sound/vga incompatibility?

As suggested elsewhere I have lowered the clock speed by 50 and the memory bus by 100 with no change.

I have also disabled the Memory Remap Feature (part of the BIOS, used for 64-bit memory allocation, was a fix for another very similar problem).

I know there a lot of similar problems out there to this. I'm even starting to suspect it's a phsyical needs-to-be-replaced fault.

Where do I go from here? The thing is literally unplayable.

Do you suspect this is the same as the commonly reported problem?

How can I establish whether this is hardware or software related? Or that it is even the geforce at fault?



Thanks all.

 

I have the exact same problem. It is very frustrating. After reading over gazillion posts. I decided to look at one possibility. Since the only time I had had something similar happen to me is back a few years ago when the fan on a geforce card died on me and I didn't bother to replace it.

Now with this GPU drawing so much power once it's put to work. It dawned on me that I probably had to monitor the temperature.

I did and on idle time, say just using it in windows it kept a steady 55F to 60F tops.

When I started any game that used massive graphics processing, the GPU temperature increased nominally from 30 to 40 degrees in question of minutes and it kept going up until I would get the blue screen of death or the screen would freeze with random multi-color lines.

I decided then to crank up the fan speed to 100% at all times. It didn't work. I decided to remove the card above my GPU. No luck. I removed the side panel and put a fan right beside the pc and bingo! I was able to keep the GPU temperature from rising above 72F.

One note though, is I kept doing additional test, since I used the drivers that came with my video cared, and decided to upgrade to the latest drivers and regardless of me keeping the GPU temperature at a decent level the computer froze repeatedly when put into intense graphic processing. So, yeah I think Nvidia needs to get on the ball on that one

Here's my machine specs and the games I tried.

Core2 Quad 6600 2.4Ghz
3GB RAM DDR2 PC5300
Palit GeForce 8800 GT super +1GB Video RAM


Games:
Crysis latest patch
Call of Duty 4 latest patch 1.5
Unreal Tournament 3 (unpatched)

 

Have you tried uninstalling/reinstalling the driver?

 

since its a prebuilt system look at the power supply and make sure it's strong enough to feed the card in 3d apps.

 

Guys, really if I get to cool down my GPU low enough I don't have any problems running the card on very high on every game. As long as it doesn't overheat. I am not overclocking it or underclocking it. It runs fine with the original drivers that came with the card unless it overheats.
Right now I am just going to probably get a water cooling system for it because it's a pain in the neck to have the case open I just don't think I should have to do that for the GPU to run cool enough. It's just ridiculous that Nvidia and manufacturers of the card release the cards without warning people about things like this, let alone that I have read so many inconsistencies as far as the drivers go.
Good luck!

 

proper airflow is important for ANY card much less for a card of this caliber. Make sure the case is uncluttered with wires and such and you may even add a fan or two to solve the problem before going to water.

 

I too have had this same problem, i have an EVGA 8800GT card. Stock bios only runs the fan @ 35%, or somehting low...during call of duty 4, it would get up to 80 degrees (crashed a few times) , and according to evga tech support, that's too high..I use Riva tuner, and have the fan run at 75% (100 was too loud, sounded like the card wanted to fly out) and my max temps seem to stay below 60 during a game. some problems i have read about say that even tho the GPU is now getting cooled enough, the vid ram may still be heating up too much, so i have made sure to get proper airflow in my case, and i havent had any of those problems anymore.

 

if some of you guys have ran your card with no fan , you MB will be shafted :cry

and the gfx card will be fired

Del