DFI Lanparty UT NF3 not playing nice w/ 9800 Pro

[jhatfie]

I posted on another forum, but I figured the more help the better. I recently purchased the DFI LanpartyUT NF3 250GB from NewEgg. Lucked out and nabbed it for $107 when they first showed up there. Installed it on Thursday and it booted up and appeared to run perfectly. That is until I decided to play games or run any benchmarks like 3dMark.

Problem: Games and graphic benchmarks will freeze, get black screen or simply cause the computer to reboot within 2-60 seconds of running. Sometimes after reboot it will have a error stating that the system instability was caused by my 9800Pro drivers.

What I have tried: First of all I've owned 4 nForce3 A64 motherboards, so I am pretty familiar with how they work and are setup. All the components I am using were pulled from my Chaintech VNF3-250 where they have been running perfect for about 2 months at 2.55ghz. While running stocks speeds I've tried reinstalling Windows XP several times. It is the one rolled up with SP1, so I typically load it up, then DX9, then chipset drivers and then graphics drivers. I have tried ATI Catalyst 4.7, 4.8 and 4.9's as well as the most recent Omega drivers, 3 seperate nforce chipset drivers, thought it might be hard drive related so I tried install with RAID 0, 1, without RAID and one drive. Also tried using SATA ports 1&2 as well as 3&4. I've tried lots of bios options including disabling CPC, CPU throttling, SATA ports 1&2, upping AGP voltage to 1.8v, Disabling Fast Writes, etc. I am able to run Prime95, Memtest86, superPi 32M stable at 2.6ghz with this motherboard so I do not think it is unsable in this regard. Updated to most recent beta bios and it did not help either although it did fix my temp reporting. I am fully watercooled and idle at 36C and load at 40-41C with Prime95 running.

Anyone have any clues?

[HKPolice]

Remove the stock northbrige cooler? Slap on somethin better, or at least make sure theres AS5 in there.

[jhatfie]

I was planning on using my Thermalright NB-1, but it will not fit because the AGP slot is to close and it will hit my card. I removed the stock heatsink and used some AS ceramique in the meantime, but it did not help with my crashing. I think I still have a Vantec Iceburg laying around that should be better than the crap OEM heatsink and should fit. Either way the NB gets warm, but is right in the airflow path of my 105cfm 120mm fan from my res so it gets a fair amount of airflow.

[HKPolice]

Try another video card? lol. Did you try the older nForce 4.27 drivers? The new 5.10 drivers gave me some problems with Colin Mcrae Rally.

[jhatfie]

I am about to buy another video card to tell you the truth. I have been reading of multiple A64 setups having problems with 9800 Pro/XT's and freezing/black screens in games. I am sure it is some sort of driver conflict problem, but I am never seeing any resolutions as to what corrects the problem other than using a different video card.

My next option is another fresh re-install with DX9b. There are a couple people with a similar problem as me that showcased itself once they updated to DX9c. I doubt it is the issue, but I am grasping for anything right now.

[reject]

try loosening ram timings

[HKPolice]

Most of the video card freezing is caused by nForce3 + GF6800 setups. Turning off fast writes fixes this in most cases. I've never read anything about R98Pro feezes

[jhatfie]

Tried losening ram timings. Ran Memtest for 10 loops to make sure it was stable. Turning off fastwrites did not make a difference either and neither did running DX9.0b instead of c. To reduce the probability of a conflict I disabled everything I could think of including onboard audio, SATA ports 1 and 2, 2nd IDE channel, etc. Still no go.

I just ordered a 6800nu to test out. Hopefully this will correct the issue, if not then I RMA the board, if it does, then I sell the 9800 Pro. Should have it Wednesday which is my first day off after 3x13.5 hour shifts.

[Byron]

Hi, i've had those conflicts with my ATI 9600pro and gigabyte nforce3 mobo... not only me tbh, most ppl with that combo have problems mainly while playing on line games and most of them while beeing connected to "punkbuster" servers.
Had various lockups within games, but thats because i had disabled the fast write, after enabling it, most probs sorted out apart from a weiird freeze (pc freeze, not freeze for few secs within the game.) while playing on line connected on punkbuster server.

What i did was to uninstall the GART driver from 5.10 nforce drivers i had installed previously and installed the GART driver from the 4.27 nforce drivers. Then i also uninstalled the 4.9 Catalyst drivers and installed the Omega 2.5.90 drivers... system works peachy now!!! :)

All games run fine on me.

Try that and let us know if things go better or worse :D