I cant be sure its the mainboard or the vid card, so I will just post this here for now. I have the nVidia 780i XFX board, p4 3.0 8400, 4gb ddr2 800 ram, winXP pro sp2, 2 xfx nvidia geforce 8800gt vid cards, and a gateway 24" monitor 1680×1050 since i got this board, I have run into an odd issue. while everything else works beautifully, the system freezes whenever I watch a movie file (AVI, MPG, etc). It freezes at random regardless of the decoder in use or any background applications (if any). So far, it has ONLY frozen when viewing movie files. when the system freezes, it typically just locks the audio in a loop and the screen stops as usual. however, SOMETIMES it will preview the crash. the video playback will start showing many vertical lines like someone is running a blender in the other room and then the video freezes...sometimes the audio will keep going but the video freezes until I hit the reset button. In some cases, when I see the vertical lines appear, I try to close the media player before it can crash. This does not work, but sometimes the video gets all crazy, the colors change, the resolution goes incredibly low, the refresh speed slows to a crawl like when a window leaves a trail on top of a non-responsive window. I have the latest geforce drivers as well as the mainboard downloads. I tried changing the video card from the e-GeForce 8800gt to the XFX 8800gt. I tried running one vid card, two, and two in SLI mode, no change. I tried changing the memory from patriot to corsair, same speed and capacity. I tried using 2gb of ram, and changing between single and dual channel I made sure it wasnt a codec problem, it freezes for multiple codecs It does not appear to be heat related, the nVidia monitor logs show the GPUs never went above 142F and the CPU never went above 105F, I am running an inflow/outflow fan system while each hdd has a fan as well as the memory and cpu. The issue happens with every media player I have found. So far, it has not happened when watching DVDs. I can play Unreal with no issues, the board and vid cards run great. I ran memory testers and found no issues. I have a 600W power supply and I already tried it with one vid card and as few accessories connected to it as possible, the system still froze. I set the board back to its default values, but it did not help. I never changed any of the voltages or speeds to begin with. I tried disabling all unecessary background applications including the AV and firewall but it did not help. I have run scans for malware but nothing was found. I have reinstalled windows 3 times and the problem keeps coming back. I did notice the available RAM was way down to 2.75GB out of the actual 4GB, but that is the wonderful winXP ram issue that many ppl have to deal with. there is plenty of RAM available when it crashes so I doubt this is the issue. i have checked with nVidia but they have 0 support. they expect their customers to buy their defective junk and wait patiently for a fix. i dont have that kind of time. if anyone can help me, it is much appreciated.
Which power supply are you using? Wattage means jack. In a 32-bit system, 4GB of memory is the maximum amount that can be addressed, but this includes memory addresses for every device on the system, CPU, Serial ports, etc. When you factor those in, it's not an OS issue per say, but the limitations of what the 32-bit nature can deal with. Now, exactly which files are you using, and which media players are you working with? Are you running the files off your hard drive, a disc or both?
i cant recall the name of the power supply i wil have to look at the receipt for the name brand, but its an SLI ready ps. i THINK its the zalman based on the price cuz i spent ~$150 on it. i will double check when i get home. i tried running windows media player, media player classic, divx player, and even iTunes. the files i am playing are mostly AVI, some are MPG and few are WMV. i also tried converting some from DVD or AVI to DIVX format but that didnt help. most are files in which i converted to AVI from DVD. the files worked fine on my previous system, so I dont believe they are corrupt. I am running the files off of the C drive (SATA), an additional internal IDE drive, and also (but primarily) from an external USB drive (i think its IDE 500gb). most of my media is stored on and played from the external drive.
the power supply is actually the silencer 610 Silencer 610 EPS12V Power Supply - PC Power & Cooling 610w PSU is 12v not enough to run 2 or 3 way SLI? could that actually cause system freezes?
