Pentium D 945 (3.4Ghz)
ECS P4M800 PRO-M
Corsair 512 MB DDR2
128MB ATI Radeon 9200 PCI
WIndows XP Professional SP2
First thank you for reading my post.
My problem is simple and very complex :rolleyes:
I have recently built the above mentioned system, this is a PC for my wife so that we can play games together, and also for her to use and learn Photoshop and Office suite. Originally after i installed windows i couldent even install the game World Of Warcraft. The machine would restart half way through disk one of a 5 disk install. I began investigating and i found out that i purchased a rather cheap motherboard. Of course having faith int he IT community i was not discouraged i was sure i could update, reinstall, tweak or improve the machine so it would function. I installed all of the most recent drivers for the motherboard and video card, I flashed the BIOS with the most current version (10/4/2006) and I tried again. The install was successfull. I could install photoshop, dreamweaver, iTunes and most importantly World of Warcraft :cheesy:.
Now the fun starts. The machine ran the game flawlessly for about an hour and 15 minutes. At this time it restarted. There was no crash, no freeze, no error, nothing the screen just goes black, the PC POST's and then starts windows. At this time my first thought was over heating I checked the CPU temp, it NEVER goes above 113 F. In my experience this would not be hot enough to cause a reboot, just in case i checked BIOS settings, the setting to shut down on overheat is disabled. So i went back into windows started the game and it launched and ran fine. I played another 30 minutes then shut it down for the night thinking it may have been a fluke 1 time thing.
The next day i was detirmined to test this "one time thing" I began playing the game, again after about 1 hour it restarted, same symptoms, no error message no crash nothing just clean restart. Whenever the game restarts i can ALWAYS get back in, sometimes for 5 minutes, sometimes for 1.5 hours. This leads me to belive it is not a heat issue. I have turned off the "automatically restart" in the windows settings. I have removed all cards except sound, video, and network. The same symptoms occur. I have never been able to play the game without a restart. When the PC is not running World of Warcraft it will stay on and run normally until shut down.
512MB is the minimum required for this game, but if this was the problem would i get some type of error or warning or lock up?
One thing that i notice is even though the onboard video is disabled the display settings show the ATI card as secondary. Is this typical behavior?
I still have faith that this system will run the game like it should, but i have tried most of the fixes i know and to no avail. If anyone can assist me or throw me some more suggestions i would be greatfull.
sorry for writing a book about it, if theres any other info you need let me know, and thanks again for reading.
p.s. help before the wife strangles me! :lol:
