Random reboots in games with ECS K7S5A Pro

[vdevore]

I'm practically at the end of my sanity here...

Anyways I've been looking for the past 8 days for a solution to my problem as stated in the topic. When I play any sort of games my computer randomly reboots itself giving me the dreaded "your pc has recovered from a serious error" message that ms gives you when I go back into windows. Most of the time before the reboot my sound becomes really sluggish (voice talk in slow motion like in Operation Flashpoint) and a bit choppy (Like in Morrowind).

This is my specs:

K7S5A pro v 5.0 (with the bios version that came with the board)
EZ Media 300 W PSU
512 mb DDR ram (Brand : not sure it has an m on it but it doesn't match the logo used by Micron Technologies)
Athlon XP 2400+ CPU at 133/133
Geforce 3 Ti 200 64 MB
Latest drivers for the C-Media Audio driver
(Have a raid card, 3 HDD, floppy, dvd, cd-rw)

This is what I've done so far:

I've tried to see if it's my PSU, I unplugged everything except my master HDD, cd-rw, and graphics card but it still happens (Might spring for another PSU but short on cash)

Tried different RAM: Generic and a brand called Centon

Added a volcanic heatsink and my cpu temp is around 45 idle 52-55 active (games) + I blew a desk fan into my PC to see if it was a temp problem (ie the chipset with it's wonderful thermal tape (if someone could show me a good place to show how I can safely add the arctic silver onto the chipset I'd be grateful)

Got the board/CPU exchanged

Everything else on my pc works perfectly (sound in windows ie when I play music or watch movies) I can encode videos easily with no lockups, run multiple windows applications, browse the internet, etc everything except being able to play games.

I'm not too sure about updating my bios since I'm not sure which one I should pick and judging from some of the horror stories that I read with updating bios I want to be careful not to fry my board.

As for the sluggish sound before reboots I'm considering buying a PCI sound card like Sound Blaster Audigy, and maybe even a PSU

But I wanted to expend all my other options that I can do without spending a vast amount of hard earned cash. Anyway thanks for reading this, this mobo is wonderful except for the reboot thing.

[NDC]

Could also be memory or simply a driver causing these reboots. Go to the link below and download a copy of Memtest and run it overnight. It runs in Windows, not DOS mode so it will test whatever memory is available. Press F8 and boot Safe Mode and run the utility so you'll have more available memory for testing.

http://hcidesign.com/memtest/download.html

[vdevore]

Alright thanks, gotta turn in for sleep anyway so we'll see if it's a mem/driver problem.

UPDATE: Well I ran it overnight in safemode but it didn't pick up any errors, could it possibly be my powersupply?

[NDC]

I really couldn't tell you. You said you unplugged everything and left on just he bare essentials and still it rebooted... Do you have another PSU laying around you can test with?



EDIT - What OS are you running?

[vdevore]

I'm using Windows XP

I also did the chipset mod thing, I took off that bad thermal tape and used arctic silver instead but that didn't help any.

I don't think it's my cpu temp since my old amd athlon 1.2 ghz ran at 57 C and it ran games perfectly.

I'm thinking I might have to get a new PSU since I do not have any spare ones as or nearly as powerful. The 5v and 3.3 v TCO is 150w and I read that I should have at least 180w but I just find it strange how I can encode video, or burn cd's, or other windows based heavy processor applications but not run games.

Anyone recommend any good brands of PSU's that won't cost an arm and a leg?

[sm8000]

Antec, Fortron/Sparkle (same people). As for that mysterious RAM, even if it doesn't turn up errors, the K7S5A is picky about RAM.

[vdevore]

Alright, I found a temporary solution though, well so far it's been working well. I went into the directx control panel and turned my direct sound acceleration all the way down to acceleration. the games won't reboot anymore if it's in emulation but it will in basic, standard or full acceleration. Maybe this could be in fact a driver error, but I do have the latest in my sound card drivers. I'll pick up some samsung ram and maybe a new PSU to see if that will enable me to play games in full acceleration

btw... what's the difference between emulation and full accerlation? if it's no big difference I might just leave it like this and save myself a hundred dollars.

[Kuasimodem]

I'm thinking I might have to get a new PSU since I do not have any spare ones as or nearly as powerful. The 5v and 3.3 v TCO is 150w and I read that I should have at least 180w but I just find it strange how I can encode video, or burn cd's, or other windows based heavy processor applications but not run games.

The reason that you're getting the reboots while gameing and not during the other CPU intensive activities is that when gaming, you are also running the GPU hard. Modern video cards (like yours) draw a lot of juice when rendering games. The higher end Radeon cards have plugs to connect directly to the power supply, instead of drawing power from the motherboard. Also, modern processors like the Athlon XP's draw their power directly from the 12V line, using regulators to bring it down to Vcore levels, to get a more stable power source.

Look at the sticker on the side of the power supply. To adequately supply both an XP processor and your video card, you should have a power supply that can deliver at least 15A of current on the 12Vdc line.

The ECS K7S5A motherboards are also known to be somewhat picky when it comes to power supplies, too.

[vdevore]

Finally solved my problem! It actually was a driver issue but I didn't exactly go it by true trial and error (one step at a time) But to anyone else that has the same problem, here's another possible way to solve it:

1) First when I installed the drivers off of the cd that came with the mobo, it installed two drivers along with the C-Media ones called "Legacy Audio Drivers" and "Legacy Video Capture Drivers" it wouldn't let me uninstall them so I had to "update" them as generic drivers and then uninstall them.

2) I then rolled back my c-media drivers (at the windows startup boot options screen) to 5.12.1.34 on date 6/27/2003 (last known configuration that worked. (not sure if this is the same one that's updated on windows update)

and voila I can now play games at full acceleration without it restarting, gone 2 and a half hours so far with no faults.

But I still plan on buying a new psu though, just in case my luck runs out, but judging from the error messages I was getting at each reboot (0xc5 and 0xc4) both referred to driver problems. Thanks again for helping though I do kinda feel moronic finding out it was only a driver conflict, but glad it is. This is my first custom made pc and it works like a dream.

[mre]

can someone PLEASE tell me what these 'generic' drivers are, and where i can find them. this problem is really making me crazy.
i have the same problem as the person who started this thread. and i also have pretty much the same specs:

K7S5A pro v 5.0 (cheapoman bios)
256 mb DDR ram
Athlon XP 2400+ CPU at 133/133
Geforce 2 MX 400 64 MB
Latest drivers for the C-Media Audio driver

can you guys please help me out?