Got my PC back from repair shop and they say it is an incompatability with vista and my video card so replacing the card with a new one , preferably an ati card will sort everything out.
So I ordered an ati 4850 512mb for £100 this morning should be a little better than my old 8800GT anyway but Im not happy about all this.
In total I could have bought a fully assembled pc with os preinstalled for the cost of all this nonsense.
dude that sucks bawls. I've assembled dozens of systems for people and not one have ever had stupid issues like this. That card is dx10, I don't understand how it can be an incompatibility with a fundamental feature of vista.
Unless it's just a problem with THAT particular card.
well I just thought I would let people know that my pc problems didnt stop when I got the ati 4850. It crashes after 5-10 minutes of play in some games and by crash I mean a screen full of lines and sound on loop requiring a full hard reset.
games which crash predictably
crysis
far cry 2
batman arkham asylum
darkest of days
other games like burnout paradise run perfectly fine.
I hate my pc yaaaay
I tried the card in my parents old windows xp machine and it works fine there but its hard to say why it worked fine in that pc and not in mine so I still think the card could be at fault especially when I saw this thread http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17997995 and noticed that those people all have the same card as me and get the same problems etc except furmark doesnt crash for me which is wierd.
Sucks to hear all of this Ged. My 8800GT did exactly the same thing in vista64. Since I moved to xp64 I haven't had any problems.
It doesn't seem like there are any genuine fixes out there, which is a shame because its a really wide-spread problem from the research I did when trying to sort it out.
Sounds now though that you might again have a faulty gfx card. Not sure what to suggest really. I feel for you.
Ged : my pc is due back from the repair shop today or tomorrow I was having the same freezing issues as you! They are saying it is a ram configuration problem, the motherboard manual section for fitting ram wasn't clear at all and it took a phonecall to the manufacturers to reveal the proper placement.
The ram slots x8 (2 in each bank - 4 banks) are to be interleaved from bank 1 up which looking from the side of the pc starts at the bottom and goes up, not from the top down as you would expect! You may or may not be able to interleave ram (leaving a space between each stick) either way the installation may be incorrect, best bet is to ring the manufacturer of the motherboard and speak to tech support.
If unsure download these programs and test your cpu's and memory;
Ged : my pc is due back from the repair shop today or tomorrow I was having the same freezing issues as you! They are saying it is a ram configuration problem, the motherboard manual section for fitting ram wasn't clear at all and it took a phonecall to the manufacturers to reveal the proper placement.
GCMP thats interesting, I might have a look after work. I have 4x2gb and each is identical so I dont know wether there is any room for error there as all the slots are full...maybe I should just try taking out 2 and seeing how the pc handles with 4GB?
Yeh you can check the ram with memtest x86, make a bootable dos disk from the downloaded iso and leave it in the drive, shut down and leave one stick in. Reboot and the program will test that stick in that slot.
Note you may have to reset the bios for the new config though.
Once you have sucessfully tested that stick try all the other sticks in the same slot to see if it's the ram sticks or a motherboard fault. From there a process of elimination should guide you to the problem.
Ps: I'm not saying it IS the ram at fault BUT bad ram/motherboard controller faults cause some wierd things to happen and this seems to be a common thing.
Yeh you can check the ram with memtest x86, make a bootable dos disk from the downloaded iso and leave it in the drive, shut down and leave one stick in. Reboot and the program will test that stick in that slot.
Note you may have to reset the bios for the new config though.
Once you have sucessfully tested that stick try all the other sticks in the same slot to see if it's the ram sticks or a motherboard fault. From there a process of elimination should guide you to the problem.
Ps: I'm not saying it IS the ram at fault BUT bad ram/motherboard controller faults cause some wierd things to happen and this seems to be a common thing.
Good luck
do you mean a bootable cdrom/dvd disk? Ive never done that before, sounds like a wierd test. why cant I just go through the sticks and test in crysis every time as a process of elimination?
actually I just tried having just 2 ram sticks in and it crashed so I assume if it was the ram at least 1 of those 2 sticks would be at fault. So I took those 2 out and replaced them with the other 2 but the crash still happened so my conclusion is that it is probably not the ram .
m8 diod you checked your ram voltage under your bios setting?
i purchase an amd 955 with 8 gb ddr3 1600 mhz from ocz, and i didnt pay attention to the manual at first, but after seeing my vista lokcking /freezing/bsod at nonstop, i just gave a look at the manuals,
finding out my ram needed 1,9 v, while the bios mobo used standards voltage @ 1.6 .
the ram was freezing because the system were unable to give enough power to them.
just a suggestion..
according on corshair website your ram works at 1.9. check your bios, just my suggestion. (http://www.corsair.com/_datasheets/TWIN2X2048-6400.pdf should be thos i guess)
ciao
but after seeing my vista lokcking /freezing/bsod at nonstop, i just gave a look at the manuals,
finding out my ram needed 1,9 v, while the bios mobo used standards voltage @ 1.6 .
ciao
my vista runs fine, even zbrush/mudbox or max run fine, burnout paradise and GTA4 ran fine so really the only reason I can think of for all this crashing only happening in specific games is that there is some specific problem with the video card and its drivers.
I did some research into the voltage of my ram a while back and didnt find anything useful in the bios.
put in individual sticks of ram last night and ran memtest and they passed perfectly, no errors. Ran crysis and it still crashes as usual. Also ran prime95 with no errors and coretemps were good.
so Im thinking it really must be the graphics card causing the crashing
Got RMA confirmation from overclockers.co.uk so Im sending it back asap
got my graphics card back, apparently its perfectly fine in all thier tests.
So I now have no clue what is wrong. Im tempted to just buy xp and do a format and install that but then Ive wasted about £200 on vista and a new gfx card.
removed every component(soundcard, network card, wacom, xbox controller) except the core items and the it still crashes when I try to play batman arkham asylum. I was told that my graphics card is perfect and passed all tests.
So its gotta be my motherboard or my psu...or a vista64 problem...or maybe a memory issue but it did pass memtest . Any tips on finding out which one of these is the cause?
Hi Ged, sorry to hear you've been having so much trouble with your PC. Sorry I've only skimmed through this thread and it may have been covered already, but have you checked to see if your problems have been caused by overheating? CPU-Z and SpeedFan can help you diagnose overheating problems.
EDIT:
Prime95 is another good test to see if your PC problems are from overheating.
This info is not of any help to you but id just tought id give people a heads up on that chassi. I bought the midi ATX version of that one and its way small. I recently upgraded my PC but kept the chassi and my new GTX285 card didnt fit
Sorry to hear you've had so much trouble. I bought a new custom pc and everything worked fine from the start! No problems at all. I have windows 7. It seems to me the reason you have all these errors is because of vista. Vista has tons of compatibility issues. In 7 its said that it's more concrete and they took time to sort out all the issues. Just a all around more reliable OS. I hope this experience doesn't take you to "The dark side" and stop you from buying a custom pc in the future. Custom one are a better deal than pre-built. HOWEVER you have to do research and make sure that its going to all be compatible and work BEFORE you order it. I went to not just one but several extreme tech geek sites and posted my part list, they then showed me better options for the money and with their extreme geek knowledge at work I was pretty confident in buying. www.techimo.com !!
I would suggest that you get your hands on a copy of xp and test it out on your comp to see if it fixes it. You could always buy it then test it out hardcore on every game you got just to see if it works. If it doesn't then return it to the store! Then if it does order 7!
(edit) It could also be that your part list is not compatible with each other. However I don't know, I'm not that technical. I'd post the list on techimo and ask them if all the parts are compatible.
It turns out it actually is something wrong with the card and it is very widespread and known problem with that series of cards, vista, the drivers and a few other things.
I ended up learning all this while I was at Raven Software because my computer had an 8800GTX in it. Kept getting the same errors. Black screen. Comes back. The device stopped responding blah blah blah.
Ravens IT Department replaces it with the same exact model thinking ahh just one bad card and this will be a quick fix, but yet the problems continued. So they ended up finally replacing my 8800 GTX with a brand new GTX 285. I never once had any problems after that with anything and nothing else in my system changed.
Now what is crazy is my old cards were then used in other systems and had no problems. So it basically comes down to from my understanding is just how those cards chips communicate with the chips on the mobo and other pieces of the rig and because of a few flaws it crashes almost constantly.
I have a 9800GTX in my desktop at home with Vista Ultimate 64 running. No problems at all. Batman is smooth as butter.
So just a heads up and hope it doesn't take you away from the custom pc direction as it's much nicer to have a custom pc then the other options most of the time.
Custom one are a better deal than pre-built. HOWEVER you have to do research and make sure that its going to all be compatible and work BEFORE you order it.
yup I did that, spent 5 months planning and saving up the cash before buying this pc, some of the parts are based on a best buy budget gaming pc in PCgamer others are parts that I researched and found steller reviews claiming it all runs well and is vista compatible.
The only old part was the 8800GT which crashed constantly and Ive now replaced with an ATI 4850 which crashes in a select group of games crysis, farcry2, batman, darkest of days and now I dont know if I can buy a game or not cause it might just crash after 10mins like batman does.
Ive run, memtest, prime95 and other clock speed and temperature checks as well as benchmarks such as furmark and 3dmark, it passes all tests perfectly but crashes in games. I think its most likely vista causing the problem but I cant proove anything. I might wait till windows 7 is released and then do a format and buy windows 7 instead.
either that or I sell my graphics cards on ebay , 8800GT and ati 4850 and then buy a geforce 260 or something but I dont know if that will help.
*edit...add colin macrae dirt to the games which crash list
Why not try Windows 7, Ged ? It's not so hard to get that for free at the moment. I got it from a co-worker who is an MVP so he has free MSDNAA and a whole bag of keys. If you work at a studio you could try the same thing. If not I could even try to give you my beta key (never used it), that will work until March or something.
It's worth a shot if you can get it for free. i have to say Windows 7 has been a lot more user-friendly, easy to use and stable for me than Vista so far.
You say both the ATI and the 8800 dont fix it, so I would assume it's not the graphics card thats the problem. Its Vista!!:poly142:
That's terrible logic.
First off, never use ATI cards, they often have issues with 3D apps like maya/Xsi/3DS Max. You could try Win7 There's free betas everywhere, but I doubt its the OS that's causing the issues. It could be a driver issue, some other faulty part (ram).
ZacD, are you sure about that? All the rigs I've used 3DS Max and what not (other than my own) have ATI cards. The Xbox 360 has an ATI GPU. ATI are no longer Nvidia's bitches. Their cards are perfectly fine and at the moment there's a lot more innovation going on at ATI than there is at Nvidia as far as I can tell.
Why not try Windows 7, Ged ? It's not so hard to get that for free at the moment. I got it from a co-worker who is an MVP so he has free MSDNAA and a whole bag of keys. If you work at a studio you could try the same thing. If not I could even try to give you my beta key (never used it), that will work until March or something.
It's worth a shot if you can get it for free. i have to say Windows 7 has been a lot more user-friendly, easy to use and stable for me than Vista so far.
much thanks for the offer! but I dont want to make any rushed decisions yet. I was wondering when windows 7 will be officially released?
the way I see it I have 3 options
1. sell my graphics card(8800GT) and a whole lot of old games I dont play and put the money towards a geforce 260 and try that out. Could be a waste of money and not work though and leave me another graphics card(ati 4850) to sell.
or
2. wait till windows 7 is released and try that but that might be a long wait...or not news says next month, 22nd october
or
3. try the windows 7 beta now...which Im not sure about because its a beta and could be unstable.
I'm using Windows 7 build 7100 and it's very stable. But yah, the full version is hitting retail on the 22nd of October so I would wait for that so you aren't wasting time switching installing and uninstalling a bunch of OS's.
First off, never use ATI cards, they often have issues with 3D apps like maya/Xsi/3DS Max. You could try Win7 There's free betas everywhere, but I doubt its the OS that's causing the issues. It could be a driver issue, some other faulty part (ram).
Yea I know, I was kinda joking hence the freaky face at the end.
I just figured out that I could actually buy the geforce 260 and then if it doesnt work just return it within 7 days as overclockers.co.uk state on thier website...or would that be risky?
I’ve got a problem when it’s time to use Batman’s glide in the game. When I hold , like it’s said to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he fels down in a poisoning gas. If somebody could tel me, what should I do there.
havent had the graphics card crash like before once yet, played DiRT and fallout 3 for about an hour each. There was a 2 crashes to desktop but I cant replicate those now, I think it was something going wrong in the game itself as vista didnt flag up any errors
Replies
So I ordered an ati 4850 512mb for £100 this morning should be a little better than my old 8800GT anyway but Im not happy about all this.
In total I could have bought a fully assembled pc with os preinstalled for the cost of all this nonsense.
Unless it's just a problem with THAT particular card.
games which crash predictably
crysis
far cry 2
batman arkham asylum
darkest of days
other games like burnout paradise run perfectly fine.
I hate my pc yaaaay
I tried the card in my parents old windows xp machine and it works fine there but its hard to say why it worked fine in that pc and not in mine so I still think the card could be at fault especially when I saw this thread http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17997995 and noticed that those people all have the same card as me and get the same problems etc except furmark doesnt crash for me which is wierd.
It doesn't seem like there are any genuine fixes out there, which is a shame because its a really wide-spread problem from the research I did when trying to sort it out.
Sounds now though that you might again have a faulty gfx card. Not sure what to suggest really. I feel for you.
The ram slots x8 (2 in each bank - 4 banks) are to be interleaved from bank 1 up which looking from the side of the pc starts at the bottom and goes up, not from the top down as you would expect! You may or may not be able to interleave ram (leaving a space between each stick) either way the installation may be incorrect, best bet is to ring the manufacturer of the motherboard and speak to tech support.
If unsure download these programs and test your cpu's and memory;
prime 95
core temp
memtest x86
GCMP thats interesting, I might have a look after work. I have 4x2gb and each is identical so I dont know wether there is any room for error there as all the slots are full...maybe I should just try taking out 2 and seeing how the pc handles with 4GB?
heres my motherboard reviewed
http://www.trustedreviews.com/motherboards/review/2008/06/26/MSI-P43-Neo/p1
Note you may have to reset the bios for the new config though.
Once you have sucessfully tested that stick try all the other sticks in the same slot to see if it's the ram sticks or a motherboard fault. From there a process of elimination should guide you to the problem.
Ps: I'm not saying it IS the ram at fault BUT bad ram/motherboard controller faults cause some wierd things to happen and this seems to be a common thing.
Good luck
do you mean a bootable cdrom/dvd disk? Ive never done that before, sounds like a wierd test. why cant I just go through the sticks and test in crysis every time as a process of elimination?
actually I just tried having just 2 ram sticks in and it crashed so I assume if it was the ram at least 1 of those 2 sticks would be at fault. So I took those 2 out and replaced them with the other 2 but the crash still happened so my conclusion is that it is probably not the ram .
i purchase an amd 955 with 8 gb ddr3 1600 mhz from ocz, and i didnt pay attention to the manual at first, but after seeing my vista lokcking /freezing/bsod at nonstop, i just gave a look at the manuals,
finding out my ram needed 1,9 v, while the bios mobo used standards voltage @ 1.6 .
the ram was freezing because the system were unable to give enough power to them.
just a suggestion..
according on corshair website your ram works at 1.9. check your bios, just my suggestion. (http://www.corsair.com/_datasheets/TWIN2X2048-6400.pdf should be thos i guess)
ciao
my vista runs fine, even zbrush/mudbox or max run fine, burnout paradise and GTA4 ran fine so really the only reason I can think of for all this crashing only happening in specific games is that there is some specific problem with the video card and its drivers.
I did some research into the voltage of my ram a while back and didnt find anything useful in the bios.
so Im thinking it really must be the graphics card causing the crashing
Got RMA confirmation from overclockers.co.uk so Im sending it back asap
So I now have no clue what is wrong. Im tempted to just buy xp and do a format and install that but then Ive wasted about £200 on vista and a new gfx card.
So its gotta be my motherboard or my psu...or a vista64 problem...or maybe a memory issue but it did pass memtest . Any tips on finding out which one of these is the cause?
I really hate my pc right now.
EDIT:
Prime95 is another good test to see if your PC problems are from overheating.
www.techimo.com !!
I would suggest that you get your hands on a copy of xp and test it out on your comp to see if it fixes it. You could always buy it then test it out hardcore on every game you got just to see if it works. If it doesn't then return it to the store! Then if it does order 7!
(edit) It could also be that your part list is not compatible with each other. However I don't know, I'm not that technical. I'd post the list on techimo and ask them if all the parts are compatible.
It turns out it actually is something wrong with the card and it is very widespread and known problem with that series of cards, vista, the drivers and a few other things.
I ended up learning all this while I was at Raven Software because my computer had an 8800GTX in it. Kept getting the same errors. Black screen. Comes back. The device stopped responding blah blah blah.
Ravens IT Department replaces it with the same exact model thinking ahh just one bad card and this will be a quick fix, but yet the problems continued. So they ended up finally replacing my 8800 GTX with a brand new GTX 285. I never once had any problems after that with anything and nothing else in my system changed.
Now what is crazy is my old cards were then used in other systems and had no problems. So it basically comes down to from my understanding is just how those cards chips communicate with the chips on the mobo and other pieces of the rig and because of a few flaws it crashes almost constantly.
I have a 9800GTX in my desktop at home with Vista Ultimate 64 running. No problems at all. Batman is smooth as butter.
So just a heads up and hope it doesn't take you away from the custom pc direction as it's much nicer to have a custom pc then the other options most of the time.
yup I did that, spent 5 months planning and saving up the cash before buying this pc, some of the parts are based on a best buy budget gaming pc in PCgamer others are parts that I researched and found steller reviews claiming it all runs well and is vista compatible.
The only old part was the 8800GT which crashed constantly and Ive now replaced with an ATI 4850 which crashes in a select group of games crysis, farcry2, batman, darkest of days and now I dont know if I can buy a game or not cause it might just crash after 10mins like batman does.
Ive run, memtest, prime95 and other clock speed and temperature checks as well as benchmarks such as furmark and 3dmark, it passes all tests perfectly but crashes in games. I think its most likely vista causing the problem but I cant proove anything. I might wait till windows 7 is released and then do a format and buy windows 7 instead.
either that or I sell my graphics cards on ebay , 8800GT and ati 4850 and then buy a geforce 260 or something but I dont know if that will help.
*edit...add colin macrae dirt to the games which crash list
It's worth a shot if you can get it for free. i have to say Windows 7 has been a lot more user-friendly, easy to use and stable for me than Vista so far.
That's terrible logic.
First off, never use ATI cards, they often have issues with 3D apps like maya/Xsi/3DS Max. You could try Win7 There's free betas everywhere, but I doubt its the OS that's causing the issues. It could be a driver issue, some other faulty part (ram).
much thanks for the offer! but I dont want to make any rushed decisions yet. I was wondering when windows 7 will be officially released?
the way I see it I have 3 options
1. sell my graphics card(8800GT) and a whole lot of old games I dont play and put the money towards a geforce 260 and try that out. Could be a waste of money and not work though and leave me another graphics card(ati 4850) to sell.
or
2. wait till windows 7 is released and try that but that might be a long wait...or not news says next month, 22nd october
or
3. try the windows 7 beta now...which Im not sure about because its a beta and could be unstable.
Yea I know, I was kinda joking hence the freaky face at the end.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/support.php#28days
just checked with them and its fine, Ive ordered the geforce 260 and I will test it out sometime in the next 2 days
You should wear a nipple suit. The immersion would really help you glide right.
http://playstationlifestyle.net/2009/09/09/eidos-sets-sneaky-trap-for-arkham-asylum-pirates/
But the PC version was released before his post so ... umpire says SAFE!!! :P
havent had the graphics card crash like before once yet, played DiRT and fallout 3 for about an hour each. There was a 2 crashes to desktop but I cant replicate those now, I think it was something going wrong in the game itself as vista didnt flag up any errors