Is it my drivers my card or my monitor thats causing freezups?

johnplayerblue

Hey!
Not really sure where the problem lies here! what it is, is my pc freezes up and my monitor goes blank with a warning to change my resulation to 1280 by 1024 with a refresh rate of 60Hertz only thing is they are my settings.
I have to reboot and move to a lower seting which i can live with but the screen is not right, its a Philips 170s LCD and i can see that its flickering and "Dancing" for want of a better expresion.
There is a newish PCI-Express gone into it, its a Nvidia Geforce 6600 which came with no drivers so it installed the below from the Nvidia site. Is it me or is it sometimes rather hard for a newbie to find what they need from that site?
Anyways some help please as its starting to get to me, also its a fresh install of XP Pro which i had a lot of problems with, registry wise which i've sorted with registry mechanic. Is it drivers or what the hell is it?
ForceWare Release 80
Version: 84.21
Release Date: March 17, 2006
WHQL Certified*

SouperComputer

its a fresh install of XP Pro which i had a lot of problems with, registry wise which i've sorted with registry mechanic

Based on this I think you have more serious issues than monitor drivers.

60HZ is correct for an LCD panel. Refresh rates are not as critical with LCDs due to the way that they work.

1280x1024 @ 60Hz is the optimum setting for your model of monitor, according to its specs. Going above or below this will result in a degradation of quality. Unlilke CRT's, LCD's cannot resize pixels so the best picture quality is the one where the screen res is the same at the native resolution of the monitor you have.

Mr. Presentable

Test it on another PC if possible. Is this happening during games? If so, are the game settings different from the desktop ones?

johnplayerblue

No it happens with normal use, as its a clean install theres not much installed on it yet. That said it has crashed and told me to change screen setings twice today and both times i was converting a .icso file to a .iso but i really can't see that been the problem? theres 2gig of 400mhz 3200 ram an amd 3200+ and a winfast main board with a serial hdd. At the moment the only thing i can think of is either the board the card or drivers but with the problems i had with the registry when installing is a concern but that seems to have been sorted and theres no more warnings or errors poping up.
I have tried another pc and the monitor is grand.
Please let it be drivers
Ps The mainboard i also bought second hand and it to came without drivers which i had to find myself
from cpu-z it tells me its a NF-CK804 with an nVidia nForce4 Rev A3 chipset which to be honest with the info i couldn't find an exact match but the chipset and all that comes with it Sound, Network etc etc work

8T8

What sort of registry warnings were you getting as you shouldn't be getting any errors on a clean install of XP or resort to something like Registry Mechanic at all.

The correct chipset driver is located at this link - when installing and prompted about the NAM (Network Access Manager so no you don't want to install it).

AMD CPU driver at this link.

As for a bios update to see if that could help well that could be tricky as it is really a Foxconn motherboard but sold by Leadtek under the Winfast motherboard range you need to know the actual model number they assign to it as NF-CK804 is just a chipset codename and not the part number. Take a look at the motherboard and see if you can see it's designation branded on the motherboard somewhere or at bios post.

I would also suggest running memtest+ in case dodgy RAM is the culprit and check your bios or your HD and see if it can be forced to run in SATA 150 mode (that's if it supports SATA 300 mode).

Also check to make sure that the RAM timings are set to SPD in the bios & not manually configured.

SouperComputer

download a copy of stress prime for testing and a copy of speedfan to monitor temperatures.

I would have said maybe a software\driver issue, but the fact that it has being giving you problems from the word go sounds like a hardware issue.

Start off with the CPU only test with stress prime. If you have HT or Dual core, be sure to launch two instances of the program. Run it for 20mins and see how your temps fair.

Do the same with the RAM only test. Be sure that the two instances of Stress Prime are in different directorys otherwise they will overwrite each others memory log files leading to a false error.

It may be best to run these programs in safe mode to isolate the unfluence of drivers.

johnplayerblue

Tnks a whole bunch lads! i was just about to put this thing in the corner and get my p4 back in, but i like this machine and have put a good bit of labour and hrs into it. I'm gona go through what you have given me and hope it'll do the trick. I myself think it may very well be a software issue and at worst the graphics card is bollexed which is not a major problem other than its a pci express which means i can't use my old reliable and solid Ati radeon to test or revert back to. Anyway, ill get cracking and hopefully be back with a solid machine by the end of the night/early morning. Cheers.