Hp m1160n w/bfg 6800GT OC keeps crashing

[100LL]

I am having issues with my BFG Nvidia 6800 GT OC graphics card. The computer has a tendency to crash usually to a black screen with no sound , color, or automatic reboot. The crashes only occur during ganes such as Battlefield 2, Doom 3, Painkiller, FEAR demo, and Need for Speed MW demo. When the crash occurs the computer fans still run; however, the fans and lights on the card will sometimes be off after the crash. Upon reboot there are never any error messages. Temps in the BIOS read at approx 52 C and the graphics card reads around 68 C Core temperature. I have considered the following reasons for the crash and have troubleshooted as follows:

Temperature - Since the crashes are so random, sometimes an hour into play, sometimes 5 min into play, I have a hard time believing this is the issue. Both the computer and graphics card manufacturer say the temps I have witnessed are normal.

Power - I replaced the original 250Watt PSU with a Mad Dog 350 PSU with 20AMPS on the 12V rail. This power supply 3 manual fan speeds. Crashes occurred during all three settings. I swapped this supply with a Power Win 450Watt PSU with 20Amp on the 12 V. The same types of crashes occurred. Could the issue be inadequate power on the 12V rail?

Anivirus - Norton Systemworks and Firewall 2005 - Antivirus auto-protect turned off.

Graphics card - Mad Dog PSU comes with a VGA HDD, connected graphics card to both that and then the molex connector, no change in stability. Swapped out the 6800 with a BFG 5900 XT OC, Painkiller ran slow with the same graphics settings but did not crash. Attempted to UNDERCLOCK the card using COOLBITS, games still crashed.

Memory: I added 512MB of Kingston ValueRam which I checked using MEMTEST. Test ran X times and memory passed. I have seen some stuff online about defragging memory - could this be a solution? If so how do I go about defragging?

Hard Drive - passed system test in PCDoctor and has been defragged.

OS - re-installed numerous times, issue persists.

Drivers: Currently using Forceware 81.98 for XP Media Ctr. and have tried numerous other drivers. I remove old drivers using control panel but have heard that remants of the old drivers could linger and cause issues. Could this be the problem?

Patches: All games have the lastest patches.

Please help!!!

HP m1160n
ASUS K8S-LA SiS 760/964
Athlon 64 3400
1 GB 3200 DDR SDRAM
HP BIOS 3.14
WINDOWS XP MEDIA CENTER

 

[swker98]

i tihnk this could be a power issue but first did you plug the 4 pin molex into the card itself, ifso is it split with anything, also its best to have atlest 25 amps on the 12 volt rail, and its even better to have duel rails

are those vid card temps before of after you play the game

 

[100LL]

4 pin is in the card, not split with anything, it is direct from the PSU, not shared.

 

[100LL]

also, temps i listed are after gameplay.

 

[swker98]

im kinda thinking its a psu or gfx card issue but not positive

did you run memtest found at www.memtest.org let it run for atlest 8 passes

 

[100LL]

i ran it for 4 passes, took 2 hours, no errors, anything else to look for in memtest, andy special settings in memtest? how much should be in the cache?

 

[swker98]

if memetest past then we can look at the gfx card\powersupply, your card is a power hungry beast, i dont know, what all of your hardware, because in some cases you can get away with low power but imo you need a nice replicable brand of powersupply, that has atlest 27ish amps on the 12volt rail, and preflably duel rails, the only way to know if its a power issiue is to get a new psu

 

[SCHUMIinSA]

Well when I once had a graphics card which crashed to a black screen in games, it turned out that the card was close to death or faulty, can't remember which.

Try using a friend's graphics card and see if the issue is still there.

 

[100LL]

ran memtest again, 30 passes with no error, anything i need to look at closely with the cache (L1 was 128k, L2 1024K)? Also, anyone have the Antec 480Watt TrueBlue with 2 18amp 12 vot rails? I might try that one out. I am having a hard time reaching BFG, supposedly 24/7 support yet no one answers and my emails get bounced back! thanks!