fullscreen = crash

Aurisor · Guru Joined: 20 Sep 2003 Posts: 361 Location: Boston MA

My system seems to have developed a very unfortunate problem. Without making any hardware changes, it now instantly crashes whenever I go into fullscreen 3D mode. It started off only happening occasionally, now it happens instantly every single time I go to fullscreen. It behaves exactly the same under windows xp, win2k and gentoo.

1) Is it even remotely possible that it could be due to the fact that my chipset fan broke? I just removed it. The system is absolutely 100% rock-solid unless I try to run full-screen 3d.

2) What components would be suspect? What would you test / replace first?

MacMasta · Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 1:00 am Post subject:

1. Absolutely; that qualifies as a 'hardware change' in my book.

2. Video card.

~Mac~

Aurisor · Guru Joined: 20 Sep 2003 Posts: 361 Location: Boston MA

OK, I actually fixed the chipset fan at the urging of another forumer on another site with a drop of oil. It's installed and running quietly. However, the crashes still occur. Do you think it's possible that running my system without the chipset fan could have damaged my mobo? See, personally, I would think that if the chipset were running hot enough to cause permanent damage, it would also have impaired the operation of the computer, but the issue always has been completely limited to crashing upon entering fullscreen 3d mode.

Unfortunately, I can replace my motherboard or my video card, but not both.

MacMasta · Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 3:43 am Post subject:

I think your conclusion is a valid one; if it got hot enough to actually break something, I doubt it would still be working at all.

What else have you changed recently?

~Mac~

Aurisor · Guru Joined: 20 Sep 2003 Posts: 361 Location: Boston MA

Well, the one factor that I can think of having changed is the ambient temperature...it's been rather hot around here lately. Right now it's around 80-85f with 94% humidity, and my operating CPU temp was about 55C. I tried eliminating this angle, though, by pointing a floor fan right at the case. This reduced its temperature, at least while I was idling in the BIOS, to about 45, with no result.

The wierd thing, though, is that every once in a while the damn thing just works fine. Tonight, out of maybe 10 reboots, trying quake 3 under linux, 9 of them resulted in an immediate hard lock, while the last one booted up without a hitch and let me play for about 20 minutes. I was even able to quit the game and relaunch it...as soon as I rebooted, though, it was back to its old tricks. As I write this now I seem to have managed to get the windows opengl screensaver to run...it'll do that indefinitely, but it'll decide to stop working again any minute. It's really frustrating.

Other than the chipset fan, I've made no physical modifications to the computer in some time now. I can count out any software changes, too, since the lockup appears under both XP, 2K and linux. The worst part of this whole problem is that it seemed to creep up on me suddenly. It started off with the occasional crash, and only lately it has progressed so that it crashes fairly reliably whenever I go to full-screen 3d.

Now that I think about it, though, the video card actually has digital flatpanel connectors, and I have to use these adapters to hook up my CRT's to it....they're kind of long, and I noticed that the cords tend to hang, and the torque tends to bend the card a little....maybe that screwed it up...i dunno.

Really, I think the only option that makes sense here is that the video card is just "going." Whatever the fuck that means. I think tomorrow I'll pull my brother's voodoo 4500 out of his machine, throw it in there, and see if that helps anything. It's very hard to test, though, because I don't have another AGP video card.

Oh well..this got kind of long...if anyone has any thoughts please let me know...I'll keep ya posted because I'm sure everyone's so fucking interested in my computer crapping out.

MacMasta · Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 8:00 am Post subject:

I have a story that may, or may not, be relavant:

I was using a motherboard once that claimed to only support 512 megs of unregistered memory; I stuck a gig (of unregistered) in anyway, as I was young, and adventurous.

And it worked perfectly, as long as you didn't try to put anything in OpenGL.

Why? Good question. However, with only 512 in there, it's as stable as a rock (and I'm typing on it right now).

So mayhaps your ram is going bad.

~Mac~

Aurisor · Guru Joined: 20 Sep 2003 Posts: 361 Location: Boston MA