Sam, I think the two most suspect areas are the rail voltage in the PSU and the memory. This, also assumes that you have flashed the bios to F13.

You can download Motherboard Monitor 5 and Memtest for free via a Google search, which should determine if the problem is in one of these areas. Lastly, there is the possibility of HD, vid card and / or driver corruption due to the power surge.

u have "two" chances to mess up your bios flashing on the gigabyte since its dual bios !!!

but really unless you have dodgy power supply and it gives out during flashing, flashing bios is as save as nything u do on the computer

Al:

Hey thanks for the replay, yes I have the latest bios. And the memory was working fine before all this happened so chances are it is still working. I am going to drive my 3 hour round trip to exchage my power supply

Thanks,
Sam

Hey all, I have a small problem with my board. Whenever I play graphics intesive games my computer either locks up or gives me the blue screen of death. I'm unsure of what is going on to cause this. My CPU tempurature never climbs higher than 50 degrees celsius, so I'm pretty sure its not heat related. The games I get locked up on are Warcraft 3 and Quake 3 Arena. Here's my system specs:

- AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (Palimono Core)
- 256 MB DDR pc2100 (from PNY)
- ATI Radeon 7000 64MB
- Western Digital 40 GB harddrive
- Seagate 20 GB harddrive
- Windows XP Pro Service Pack 1

I even tried my PNY NVidia GeForce MX 200 gfx card and got the same results, so I think my mobo has a problem somewhere. Any ideas? Thanks

Try turning off 'Fast Writes' in the bios as this has been known to cause instability.

If I turn of Fast Writes, Windows won't load properly. Could it be bad RAM? or a defective mobo?

I would suspect the ram. You may wish to dl 'memtest' and let it run for an hour or two. Lacking that, you may want to try an OS repair, because disabling fast writes should not prevent the OS from loading.

It was the power supply. I am back up and running now! ;-)

That's great Sam. I am glad it was a simple thing.

Al,

You seem to be the only problem solver in this GA-7VAXP forum. If no1 minds, I'd like to thank you in behave of every1 that you've helped for sharing your knowledge and being so useful. Keep up the good work Al.

God Bless,

Ed

hi ed........
did you see the information you needed off me......at the top of this page m8(27).........please could you help
thanks
les

Hi Les,

I think you got Ed and I mixed up my friend. Anyway, looking back, I see you are running an XP2600+ which has a 333mhz FSB, which should 'rocket' through the boot process. The first thing I would check is to make sure you are actually running at 166mhz (x2=333mhz) on your board. You will see a minature toggle switch block with either 1 switch (Revision 1.2 board) or two switches (Revision 1.1 board). For Rev. 1.1, make sure the switches are configured to 166mhz and for Rev 1.2, set the switch to 'Auto', otherwise it will be set to 100mhz which is way too slow.

Next, I strongly recommend you flash your bios to at least Revision F11 (you can use the Gigabyte '@Bios' through windows.), and then upgrade all your drivers except the Via chipset drivers which I found to be a bit unstable at times with their current release. Before you upgrade the bios, set your existing bios to 'Load Optimized Defaults'.

After this process, we will work on some memory tweaks.

Regards,

Al

@ Ed - Thank you very much.

Thanks Al, I got the problem fixed. It turns out that my Windows XP installation wasn't perfect. When I reinstalled it the system became ultra stable, even if i set the graphics options on the games to full blast. I even kept the AGP fast write option on and it was still stable (no crashing). I do have to do more tests however. Tonight I'm going to keep my machine on to see if it will really keep going strong. I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.

That's terrific Ali. Yes, I have often found XP to be a bit temperamental, but usually nothing that a clean install won't fix. Just as a hint to anyone else that may have to do a re-install of XP, if you have made any overclock or memory adjustments (or have 'Top Performance' set), re-set the bios to either 'Fail Safe' or 'Optimized Defaults' before your install and then re-adjust your settings later. This will save you from much cursing and gnashing of teeth.

lol sorry about that al..........(i feel a little stupid now lol)....anyway thanks for your help mate...its realy apriciated m8.............
thanks again m8 ...talk to you soon matey
.............your a star m8
les

hi again al............
ive looked at my mother board i have a ck ratio (6 little switches) which is set to auto
and i have 1 single switch next to the pci slots (sw1) which is also set to auto.......now i will try to update my bios (god help me lol)
ill be in touch soon matey
les

hi again al.........
ive got bios version f11 already m8
ive noticed on the gigabyte @windows that i got off the gigabyte driver disc ......that the dmi pool data is mentioned which i get everytime i boot up....takes bloody ages m8
............ohhhh well at least i dont have to update my bios lol
over to you matey lol
les

Ok Les, what we are working with is an XP2600+ (I'll assume it is a Thoroughbred), with your multiplier and FSB set to 'Auto', which should give you a multiplier of 13x and a FSB of 166 (you can confirm this through the Easy Tune 4 utility). Your CPU is running at it's stock speed and is not overclocked - so far, so good.

Now, we must check out the bios. The first thing to do is to enter into to bios and set it to 'Optimized Defaults'. Once this is done, save and exit the bios. At this point the computer will re-boot. Once the boot is completed, go into the bios once again and when you are at the first screen, push and hold 'Ctrl' and while holding Ctrl, tap 'F1'. You have now enabled access to a new catagory of settings. Go down to the Frequency/Voltage Control and enter the page. Now you will see a whole page of settings. With your indulgence, I'll get you to list off those settings for me.

Thanks,

Al

hi al.......
nice 1 for helping me out here m8
when i hold down ctrl and f1 all i get is a ...genral help box......
but i noticed that on my main bios screen there is a...frequency/control.....i pressed this and heres what is stated
spread spectrum modulater (enabled)
cpu host control (disabled)
x cpu host frequency (mhz) 166
pci/agp frequency (mhz)33/66
x dram clock (mhz) 166-ddr 333
cpu over voltage control (auto)
agp over voltage control (auto)
dimm over voltage control (auto)

i hope this is the right thing im told to look for lol
take care al m8
les

Unfortunately, my machine is not stable when running 3D games. I read on other forums that some graphics cards are power hungry. So I suspect that my 300W PSU is not adequate enough to run the games. Could this be the problem?

System Specs:
AMD Athlon XP 2100+
thermaltake volcano 11 heatsink
pny 256mb pc2100
40gb western digital
20gb seagate
ati radeon 7000 64mb
elements 56x cd-rom
tdk velocd 48x/16x/24x
antec 300W power supply
windows xp service pack 1

i made sure i got all the updated drivers and patches for everything, but still no go. any help or tips or places to do some research would be great.

thanks