I have an ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe / HDMI motherboard with an AMD 9600 AM2+ chip. Something weird is going on. When I'm playing Oblivion (and only this game), a very video and system intensive game, my system (running XP) will intermittently lock up. The screen will go black and be totally unresponsive. When I pull the plug, wait 30 secs or so, plug it in and restart, I get a message telling my my BIOS has lost its settings. I can go into setup, just save & exit, then the system will boot as normal. Recently, it wouldn't boot up at all. It powers up but nothing appears on the screen. I striped my system down to just the video card (and put a different video card in it). Nothing. I then pulled the motherboard battery and put it back in. The system booted up fine. Of course I had to reset everything in setup, but it's been fine, though I haven't played the game. I ran a memory checker, and everything was fine. I don't know if this makes any difference, but I recently had a power supply problem, a rather weird one that affected the sound card, which I removed and used the built-in one. Same problem. The new power supply is fine, the sound card is working fine. Any ideas? I love my game and don't want to stop playing it!
After changing the battery, and striping the system down, I think I have it figured out. Fortunately I'm running SLI nvidia cards. One of them may be bad. I'm still trying to crash Oblivion, but two days and it hasn't happened.
how about grfx drivers. are they up to date ? also what is your new PSU ? (make & model) and as Scorps suggested installing a patch for the game is a good idea if available BTW: here is quite a good BIOS articale [ot]but i would think it was good, cos i wrote it[/ot]failing that i would try a long BIOS reset
The drivers are up to date. I contacted the manufacturer (EVGA) and tech support had me download a utility to increase the fan speed on the offending card (can even adjust them independently). That may have solved the problem. I'd like to plug EVGA at this point. They've ALWAYS had the greatest tech support of any hardware manufacturer.
have you done any overclocking? have you checked for stability issues using prime95? have you reseated your graphics cards? what the power output on your psu? have you checked for virus's on your OS?
The problem was an overheating video card. EVGA Geforce GT 9600. There is a utility to increase the fan speed. I did that and everything is just fine.
