New PCIe System Woes

[asmielia]

Hi,
I just got some new parts for my system which include the Gigabyte SLI motherboard and MSI 6800GT PCIe card. Installing Windows was a pain, I think there may be something wrong with my memory as I would get BSODs during the install until I switched it to single channel mode.

Once I got it installed, I installed the nForce 4 drivers, followed by the newest nvidia whql forcewares. My system is still a little unstable but for the most part, it's ok in Windows. That is, until I try to do any sort of configuring or running of 3D apps. For example, when I try and select the 6800GT tab in advanced display properties, it just hangs. When I tell Windows to kill the process, it still stays there forever. Exact same thing when I try and load 3d mark 05 or SiSoft Sandra. I tried loading two games and they both crashed before they even got to the menu.

I'm going to try re-installing Windows, but I don't know if that's going to help. I'm really worried my video card is screwed. It's gonna be hard to narrow down this problem because none of my old components are compatible with the new system.

Does anyone have any ideas of what it could be or what I should try?

Thanks,
Adrian

[MUYA]

It might any number of things, it could be motherboard is conky? your GT is wonky or that your CPU and or/motherboard doesn't like the memory you have installed to run dual channel stable. Some memory especially Corsairs seems to have problems with some AMD k8s. Memory modules that are double sided also tend to have stabilty issues. So I do not think it is a 6800GT issue. And hence moved to the genral hardware forum.

[Salamandar]

You should try and test your Memory, try memtest for 3 hours at least on each memory stick.
One more thing what are your system specs?

Could also be bad instable mobo, or a bad PSU.

[asmielia]

Both the memory and the PSU are from my previous system. I'm sure the PSU is fine, it never gave me any problems. It's an OCZ Powerstream 520.

The memory might be part of the issue. It's Mushkin 2x256 PC3500 Lvl II Black. It was working fine in my old system for a long time, but when I moved the machine from Canada to England, all of a sudden it had huge problems working in dual channel. But the thing was, I ran memtest for hours and there were no issues whatsoever. But the system would be highly unstable in Windows after like 2 minutes. I therefore suspected that it was a motherboard issue.

Anyway, so I'm sure some of the BSODs were the result of the memory, but I've since moved the RAM to single channel, and on my old machine that made it pretty stable. I'm still not convinced that is the entire problem though, since I don't really have issues with my new setup unless I try loading a 3d app.

I was gonna buy some new RAM anyway, but if this is in reality a motherboard or video card issue, I'd like to nail it down as soon as possible as my window for returning things for a quick exchange is very narrow

[PSYCHODAD]

I had a similar problem during my recent build. Everything was going fine until I installed the system drivers. Then I got a bsod and system wouldn't boot (just looped). I reinstalled windows and then installed the specific drivers that I needed from the device manager listing. System runs great now.

Hope that helps ya, it worked for me.

[asmielia]

It turns out there's nothing wrong with the video card. It was in fact the RAM.

Bad RAM must have corrupted the Windows install or something, cause when I re-installed Windows, everything worked, still had weird CRC errors when I tried installing some programs, so I ran memtest and isolated the bad stick. Things are good now. Gonna need some new RAM though, don't think 256 megs of single channel is gonna cut it.

Thanks for all your help.

Adrian

[MUYA]

That is why i changed your thread title and moved the thread to this section. you should not jump to conclusions w/o a thorough investigations of all parts. ;) Anyway, you are right, 256MB will just not cut it, heck even at my office 256MB is easily overloaded with firefox, Outlook express, Excell, Word and custom DB open. I suggest 1 GB at least! I can say 1 GB is worth it from the 512MB I upgraded from! :)