Member Avatar for cancer

Ok here is the story.
Im a online gamer long time fan of any online rpg for the longest time i have been scraping by on the bare minimum of gaming hardware. I recently decided to play Everquest2 and its minimum reqs were a bit higher than what i had so i decided to upgrade, here is the problem. After swapping out my mmx 440 for a nvidia 5700 128 ddr card Apollo brand i was able to run everquest with no signifigant performance issues but one very annoying problem. Ranging from every 15 minutes all the way up to 2 hours i have random freezes. The comp freezes and nothing will end the freeze aside from a restart. After consulting a few forums i thought it might be a power supply problem. I upgraded to a 500w enermax noisetaker, no change game still freezes.

Next thing to check is cooling, despite running a temperature monitor and finding all temps in spec i added a 3rd cooling fan to my case on the side to push air directly onto motherboard and vcard, there are 2 other fans an intake and exhaust. with the added cooling no change still freezes.

A friend mentioned a possible memory leak so i purchased a new gig of kingston ram and although game runs smoother and load times are less the freezes still continue. All drivers and bios are updated with most current and for vcard drivers i tried the stock nvidia and the performance omega drivers with no change.

The motherboard is ecs k7vta3 with an athlon processor 1150mhz im not sure what other system specs i can give to help troubleshoot this problem, but id be glad to supply any info i can if someone would like to help me with this problem. At moment i have another vcard on order to test if somehow it is the problem since i needed another vcard for my other machine.

I am beyond desperate for a solution to this problem. this is my first post so if i missed any rules of posting all apologies.

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Dani AI

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Intermittent full-system freezes during gaming are often caused by blocked disk I/O, and in desktop builds a hot hard drive is a surprisingly common, easy-to-miss culprit. tried power, drivers, extra case fans, RAM and BIOS advice from and before the problem was traced to drive heat. The notes below explain why a hot drive can hang a system and give a compact, practical checklist to diagnose and prevent it.

When a drive gets too hot the firmware and platters behave worse: longer seek times, read/write errors, firmware timeouts or thermal throttling. The operating system waits for disk operations and can become totally unresponsive until the controller or OS times out. Audio behavior (continues, loops, or stops) depends on buffering, so ’s audio-check suggestion is a useful quick discriminator: if audio keeps playing while the rest is frozen it points away from GPU/CPU panic and toward I/O hangs.

Triage checklist (short):

  • Watch the HDD activity LED when a freeze happens. Continuous activity or long stalls point to disk I/O.
  • Run SMART checks (temperature plus attributes like Reallocated Sector Count, Current Pending Sector). Tools: smartctl/CrystalDiskInfo.
  • Check OS logs (Disk/NTFS errors on Windows Event Viewer) and run manufacturer diagnostics (WD/Seagate utilities) or a bootable live tool.
  • Move the drive to another bay or machine to isolate chassis airflow vs. drive fault.
  • Immediately back up important data if SMART shows reallocated/pending sectors or diagnostics report errors.

Prevention and remediation: add directed airflow to drive bays, avoid routing hot GPU exhaust across the drive cage, use rubber grommets to reduce vibration, and verify power/data connectors. A small fan often masks the symptom, but persistent SMART errors mean replacement. Regular backups and occasional SMART monitoring are the safest long-term measures.

Recommended Answers

All 6 Replies

Member Avatar for mikeandike22

you might have a driver problem or your system is not good enough to run the card check your system against the min requirements for the card and if you meet them then download the latest driver at nvidia.com

Member Avatar for borumas

Disable Fastwrites in the Bios, there are other bios changes you can make, when I get home I'll check mine out and list a few options for you to try.

Member Avatar for cancer

you might have a driver problem or your system is not good enough to run the card check your system against the min requirements for the card and if you meet them then download the latest driver at nvidia.com

the system more than meets the reqs for the card and all updates possible have been done.

is there a chance suggested by symptoms that the video card is just bunk?

Member Avatar for borumas

Ok check your BIOS and in an area likely to be called Advanced menu options or something like that you will have:
AGP Arpeture Size: 256
AGP Spread Spectrum: disabled
AGP Fast Write Capability: disabled
Enhance PCI Performance: disabled

Take note of the current settings before you make changes, then set them like I have here (also the names might not be exactly the same on your BIOS as mine) then save and exit the BIOS and try it- this may or may not work but some systems don't like having Fast Writes enabled or PCI peformance enhanced so it is worth a shot. Also you can probably get into the BIOS on that board by pressing Delete when you power it on, or maybe the F1 key- it should say when powered on something like "to make changes press DEL" on the POST screen when powered on. If that doesn't do anything then it may be a bad video card.

Member Avatar for cancer

Stupidest Problem Ever

after all the tech help from a huge variety of people one suggestion was never made and i never would have thought of it. There is only one thing in my case that i can not monitor the temperature on. The god damn hard drive its brand new western digital but somehow was overheating. I mounted a case fan directly underneath it and comp runs perfect now. Thank you for your tips and suggestions. Lol this whole project only cost me about 300 dollars in parts to realize a 5 dollar fan would fix the problem :)

cancer

Member Avatar for suRoot

is the sound ALSO frezzing or is it looping or does it carry on?

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