Chaotic Dreams

I bought myself a geforce fx 5900 today, and it's great playing with better graphics... for between 10 seconds and a couple of minutes when the screen goes black and the computer locks up.
Anyone know what's going wrong?

got drivers?
maybe your comp is overheating,check ventilation,cooling?

TKATK wrote:got drivers?
maybe your comp is overheating,check ventilation,cooling?

If you checked for all that and it's still not working, then it might be your gfx card ram.

yes, it could be any of the above mentioned

-the card ram could be defective (or the card itself)
-you could have bad drivers
-the system could be overheating (given that you say its between 10 seconds and a couple minutes, this one probably has the least chance as the culprit)
-some other hardware conflict

does the system lock up only when playing ut2k4 or any other games?

Well, I've done some testing and found that ut2004 causes problems fairly quickly as you start a game. I think it may be doing it mostly in when I'm in a fight, but it could be random (it doesn't take long for a bot to find you in death match).
Doom 3 does the same thing, again within a short period of time. Half life 2 lasted nearly 10 minutes before it came up with an error saying the monitor couldn't understand what the graphics card was telling it.
These are probably the most graphics intesive games I have, so that could be a factor.
The crashes themselves alternate between completely locking up, restarting the computer on its own after about 10 seconds of a black screen, or freezing for a while, then going back to windows but still having the black screen.

The drivers are up to date, so it's not that, and I'm running the computer with all the fans going and the side of the box off. It could still be overheating (the back of the card felt hot before the crashes) but if it is there's nothing more I can do about it.

had the same on my old comp,theres nothing you can do short of hardware swapping

It almost sounds like a bad card. Can you get an RMA and have the company send you a replacement card?

Actually running with the cover off may be hurting you... if you have two case fans making air flow thru the case from front to back, you should be okay with the cover on. But from your descriptions, I'd say the card is bad or overheating.

Oh, and using up-to-date drivers is not always the best idea. I've had two or so cards that would only work properly with the original drivers that I got out of the box.

Thanks for the advice everyone, but I took the easy option and took it back to the shop. I've now got a radeon 9800 pro now which is working fine.

Mick wrote:Thanks for the advice everyone, but I took the easy option and took it back to the shop. I've now got a radeon 9800 pro now which is working fine.

yea

wow, i almost got that card, good thing i stuck with nVidia

uh.. nvidia was the one he had problems with...

uh-oh...