Video Card Problem...

[RitualOfTheTrout]

Ok, my computer has had a problem with randomly restarting. Usually the problem occurs like this, the PC becomes really slow and unresponsive. You restart and sometimes its fixed but usually its the same problem. If you do a cold boot sometimes as soon as windows loads up the PC just restarts.

At first the problem happened a few months after I installed a new HD. coincidentally after it happened the HD reported via SMART the drive was having trouble. So I figured was the drive, sent the drive back via RMA got another one, again a few months later problem happened again, figured drive again. Now on the third drive and it seems to have surrvived the latest bout with this problem. Im guessing maybe some sort of hardware failure was damaging the drives now.

I think the problem is either my video card or memory.. Im not sure which one. When I run memtest68 I get no errors on any test, however if i run on the bios-all setting alot of errors come up. But any other test I get no errors, so Im wondering if the ram is bad, or that test is not supported properly on my PC board.

Now the reason I suspect the video card is this, when I booted the PC in VGA mode there was no trouble at all. In Normal mode it always seemed to reboot just as the ATI drivers were loading. I ended up formatting and reinstalling the OS and drivers, the problem happened once right after I restarted with the new drivers but seems fine now.

Now I wonder is there bad ram that maybe caused the video drivers to get corrupted and caused some sort of mishap with my video card, or is the video card just have a component going bad on it? Im leaning more toward the video card being the problem but then that one testing procedure in memetest reported thousands of errors (Bios-ALL) so im at a loss of what to try and replace first.

Any ideas? :huh

 

[it290]

I would try testing a clean install on a new partition, see if it's not just a software issue.

 

[RitualOfTheTrout]

Thats what I did, seems to be ok. Im not running it at a high resolution til I get some important files backuped up.

There was a collection of dust on the video card to, perhaps that had something to do with it.

 

[tsumake]

Hey man, I feel your pain. These kind of lock-ups always give me grief. Do you think that perhaps the videocard might be overheating? I had a similar problem with my Dell, and I eventually traced the problem to my videocard overheating.

 

[RitualOfTheTrout]

I suppose it could be overheating, I have good air flow through my pc though. The problem happened after I shrank 2 DVDs using DVD shrink, so maybe something did overheat. I also think the problem occured all of the times when I was neglecting to clean the dust out. So possibly to much dust + heat made the card unstable?

Could be maybe my CPU was overheating, its a P4 and they slow down processing when they get to hot from what I understand.

Im still also concerned about the results I got on Memtest using the bios all setting, I hope one of my ram modules isnt to blaim for this. I would think though that if a chip was giving thousands of errors and was actually bad I would have trouble more than once or twice a year.