hardware or driver issue

[Nukem]

ok... I have a friend of mine who updated his system. He originally had an Intel 3.0 Northwood P4, INTEL D865PERL mobo, and X850XTPE AGP card...

The now has: ASUS A8V Deluxe mobo, Athlon 64 3200, and a 7800GS AGP card.

Now the issue is this: ever since he upgraded he is having severe issues with playing games... not just one... ALL of them... Crashes like crazy... He tells me BF2 will crash on him about 10 times trying to play on round... (BF2 Fanatic!) Anywho... his other games do the same thing. I've worked with him, and updated everything. and I do mean everything... bios, drivers, even the AMD cpu driver. he's loaded windows 3 times since getting the new hardware. I'm almost convinced it's a driver issue, but there is one thing I did notice... the mobo tells me it's in dual channel, but he has the memory in slots 1/2 instead of 1/3. he also has 2 kits (2x512MB) one Kingston and one OCZ... that is the only anomaly to this whole thing... I'm about stumped...

He also has checked against virus's/spyware...

 

[Law]

What about checking the BIOS for any performance setting and try lowering them or check for stability issue with the setting. If you don't know what the setting are meant for, you can use this website to find the definition http://www.rojakpot.com/freebog.aspx

 

[Nukem]

the bad part is... The bios/CMOS has been reset twice. I even reloaded the bios, even though it was the latest.. But that is a good website... that does explain some of the settings I have!

 

[Law]

Yea I was able to figure out the same problem when I was playing games on my custom build PC from that website. But of course I have different hardware spec but the setting still applies to many computer. I figured out that the "fast write" and "top performance" setting in my BIOS was causing the hardware instability, therefore I just lower it or disable the setting and it seem to be running fine. This happen a long time ago (about a year) so I'm just writing this on top of my head but it's a good idea to keep in mind when your system is not stable.

Just remember though, when you reset the BIOS, it goes back to the default setting. You'll just be repeating the process if the default setting is unstable.

 

[Nukem]

good point...I'll check it out... thanks!