A debugging tale

[sheph]

Hi guys, I bought myself a new computer with the following hardware:

ACE Battle 4 ATX 500W
GIGABYTE GA-MA770-UD3
ASUS HD 4850 512mb
WD 500gb 7200 RPM
Kingston HyperX DDRII 4GB
Phenom II X4 940 6 MB

Nothing is overclocked.

I have alot of problems getting this to be stable. Here's my debugging / error history told in hopes someone knows whats wrong / broken:

I started out with Windows 7 x64, with Catalyst 9.6. But had alot of crashes in games, namely Ghostbusters (after 5-10 minutes) and in HAWX dx10 (after 5-10 mins aswell). Downgraded to Catalyst 9.3 with the same result. When it crashes it freezes completely, my screen says "lost signal" and the sound loops 2-3 secs before the machine reboots. Oh well I reinstalled W7 again and used the standard drivers with the same result, and tried the drivers that came with the card with again.. the same result.

Thought it could be my memory at this point so i ran memtest86+. It ran for 3 hours with no errors so I ruled this one out. Read online that the HD4850 in vista 64 bit has alot of crashes with the current drivers so thought I could try 32 bit xp. So I installed this one and tried the same games including Crysis. All crashes again (this time with a BSOD) in about 5-10 minutes. The BSOD says IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL but nothing about which driver crashed. It also crashed a few times just on the desktop in xp so it seems less stable in xp. Tried both 9.6 and 9.3 catalyst (where i used driver sweeper in safemode to remove the old driver completely).

Thought it could be a bad PSU / insufficient PSU supply, so I ran Furmark (GPU burner) and OCCT (CPU burner) for 30 mins with no crashes. The GPU gets stable arround 75*C and the CPU got to arround 80*C (room temp was 32*C). Read this isnt unsusual for those two components but still tried to tear off the sides of the computer (did this back in W7 and never put them back on) and turned on a vent to blow cool air into the computer which decreased the temperatures arround 7*C for both parts. But I still got crashes.

Another note to the PSU: Its connected with two 4 pin sticks mergin into one 6 pin (like the 12V one connected to the motherboard). I chose 2 wires that looked to come from different sources but how to i know which rail is which? It says on the side that i have two rails:

+12v1: 15 amps
+12v2: 16 amps


Tried with only 2GB ram (both blocks tested) but both time it crashed.

I'm thinking its a bad graphics card I've gotten me but I'm not sure. Anyone have a suggestion or something I could test to rule something else out? (Oh yeah did an error check on the HDD aswell with no errors :P).

Thanks in advance,
Lasse

[Aaron_8015]

Phenom II X4 940 6 MB

the CPU got to arround 80*C

That is really too hot and you should'nt really have it going over 60C (Room temp not doing you any favours).

Im not fully clued up on how much draw the 4850 takes but im sure 31 amps total must be close to the minimum.

Also never heard of the PSU manufacture.....

[sheph]

Sorry, my mistake, massive typo. Its stable at full load at 60*C. The PSU is from Ace, came with the casis.