CMOS problems...

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Useless

Useless

Bravo
Jun 14, 2002
5,886
63
Scotland
It's me, back for my bi-weekly tech help thread!

My PC crashed the other day so I opened it up and found that my video card was red hot (no built-in fan and no exhaust fan - I'm surprised it hasn't blown up before now). Anyway I used a room fan to cool it down and left the panel off, and I rebooted after a few minutes and all seemed fine.

An hour later it crashed again so I thought the video card was done and I bought a new one and an exhaust fan (they haven't come yet so I'm stuck with this crashing card until then).

The trouble is that today it crashed again as usual, except this time I'm getting an unfamiliar error message about CMOS failed. Also one about Overclocking Failed, even though I wasn't overclocking.

Now I can only start in VGA mode to get into XP - if I try normal mode the card won't get past the login screen before it loses signal to the monitor, and safe mode won't even get past loading Mup.sys. I can live with VGA mode for a bit, I'm just worried about my system. I had to reseat the video card a couple of times or else nothing started - the HD wouldn't turn on, the signal wouldn't besent to the monitor. I have no onboard video so I have to have the card plugged in to even see what's happening, but it's as though the system thinks that the card is just a bit too much to run along with everything else, even though it's been working fine for years now.

So is it my PSU, my vid card, my HD, bad memory, wrong jumpers or mobo settings, or a CMOS / BIOS thing? I can't decide what the hell is wrong except hardware failure, since I haven't changed anything in the CMOS or BIOS to cause this problem.

My system is:

> Mainboard : Asus M2V
> Chipset : VIA K8T900
> Processor : AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ @ 2300 MHz
> Physical Memory : 2048 MB (2 x 1024 DDR2-SDRAM )
> Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS
> Hard Disk : MAXTOR (250 GB)
> DVD-Rom Drive : HP DVD Writer 1035d
> Monitor Type : Maxdata103090 Belinea - 15 inches
> Network Card : L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Controller
> Operating System : Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition 5.01.2600 Service Pack 2
> DirectX : Version 9.0c

The PSU is 650W / 12V and is a few months old; the HD isn't clicking or anything and all health checks give it an OK.

Any techies got any ideas?
 
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have you considered leaving the side off the PC and having the fan blowing at the card the whole time? I had to do that for a little while with a similar problem and it seemed to help...

Other that than, do you have a system speaker? and is there any beep codes that may help diagnose the problem?
 
Sounds like your gfx card is dying and thats whats stopping stuff from working. The GFX BIOS usually loads before the MB.

The cmos/overclocking message is due to the MB BIOS detecting that your PC has had a hardware crash, it will by default warn you that defaults should be loaded (remember that most bios have AUTO settings by default that mess around with voltages and timings even if you dont). Message should have said something like press F1 to continue loading or press del to check BIOS settings, certainly not anything to worry about.
 
Thanks for the fast replies :thumb:

@ Vitz - ye I'm doing that m8, have been for two days now :( It helps a bit but the PC inevitably crashes eventually anyway, obviously depending on what I do with the card. To begin with it was Burnout: Paradise which was hitting the card and caused it to hang the first time, so I lowered the settings, helped for a bit, crashed again. I downgraded to Anno 1404 on minimal and now it can't handle that either. Oh well, might check to see if Fallout 2 will run in VGA :P PC Wizard says the card has its own fan which is operating at 100% but I'm buggered if I can see it :confused:

@ Mym - ye the card was obviously the main problem and I wasn't worried until that first BIOS message and then my HD wouldn't load and so on, I thought I was looking at a fully fried system :flame: I think I hit F2 for defaults but of course the PC isn't happy with anything other than VGA mode atm. Thing is I tried a very old monitor when the thing first crashed and it let me load safe mode, yet my usual monitor won't. I just don't get this at all unless it's a resolution thing, but surely safe mode defaults to 640x480? Which of course this monitor can do because I'm sitting looking at VGA mode atm. Hmm.

Oh well, got a new card coming soon, but you don't think I need a new PSU or anything? And what would cause the card to die? Just overheating? I thought that was the point of it having its own fan and heatsink. And how come it can do 640x480 VGA but when trying to get to 800x600 it starts blinking and artifacting? Can it really be so screwed that this is now beyond it?

Thanks again.
 
Also just noticed that my monitor is now detected as Plug and Play under VGA mode - it won't let me try anything else or change the refresh rate. Is this typical of VGA or is my monitor driver lost too?
 
dont know for certain on your last post, but its prolly due to the vga. the driver will be there for the dvi connection? you normally use i reckon, though its not something i know for sure.

Whats the problem with the HD? I assume its an intermittent problem? If it only doesnt spin up when the pc wont boot, its may be due to the system detecting an error prior to sending power to the HD, and... well, if im right, it kinda explains itself that :P

Presumably your card looks something like this?
GeForce_7600_GS_side.jpg

If it does then that would be a passive cooler aka no fan.

Anyway, i suspect that all your woes will be fixed by the new card, what have u gone for btw? upgrading or same kinda level? I only ask as some of the newest one need a lot of juice to be stable...
 
Ye the card must be a passive cooler like you said, the heatsink's a beast but it ain't doing its job atm :\ The HD didn't exactly fail, it must have not been powered on when the PC detected the card fault first, also as you said. I had no idea you were so helpful!

OT: I went for NVidia GeForce 9600GT 512MB PCI DVI, got decent reviews, especially for the price I got it at ( £60ish ). I prefer NVidia cards and my board doesn't have a friggin AGP slot anyway, which I just recently realised. It has its own built-in fan, should be OK with a 650 PSU (I checked), thing is it looks a bit big. My case is big but still... I bought a new exhaust fan to go with it just in case.
 
Well I got a new decent exhaust fan for the rear but there is no front vent on mine. There is a vent on the side panel which looks like it's made for a typical 80mm fan so I guess one at the back, one on the side would be enough? I'm going to get a tube of compressed air to clean the whole thing out too, but is two fans too much? And I take it they should both be blowing outward? Or does one blow inward to circulate air better?

I had the thing running in VGA for over an hour, tried swapping resolution briefly which kicked it out of VGA and asked the card to do some work, the heatsink immediately got boiling hot, the screen started flickering and I had to reboot. How is this thing so screwed...
 
2 fans aint too much tbh m8, ive got 2 120mm front fans, 1 120mm side, 1 120mm rear exhaust, and one 200mm top fan in mine, not to mention a 92mm cpu cooler fan and fan on my gfx as well + a 120mm fan in my psu :lol: (overkill anyone) haha!

To answer your question about fans, i would have the one on the side blowing in, the one on the back blowing out to get better circulation... My 2 front and 1 side fans blow in, top and rear out...

as for why is it screwed...? dunno - things just dont last forever i guess... plus as it's a passive card in a case with minimal ventilation, maybe it has been running a little too hot for some time now and its got to the point where it cant cope anymore... add to that the traditonally mediterranean temperatures for where you live at this time of year :)lol:) and you got yourself a problem :P I have a passive 8500GT on my machine downstairs that I've acutally sit an 80mm fan on to try and give it extra cooling (the case is loaded upside down and door on "wrong" side (no idea why) so the fan sits directly on the passive heatsink - as the card is upside down compared to normal) - seems to have made a decent difference, not that it will help you ofc as I doubt you'll be able to get a fan to sit on the cooler without modifying things.
 
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Finally got my new Nvidia card installed today but the default fan setting is 25%, so I used Rivatuner to set to 75% at all times. Is this OK or will this have bad ramifications later on? I changed it because I noticed that UT was stuttering with its frame rate a little, which concerned me quite a bit :(
 
The fan should be temp controlled, Ive never seen a reason to alter the fan speed on any gfx card Ive bought (other than when overclocking or ATI do a shit job at setting the fan speed) and Ive certainly never had problems. Having said that, it shouldnt cause any problems setting to 75%, thats pretty high so will keep the card cooler.

As for upping the fan speed because it was stuttering, have you checked what the fan and temp actually do when you play?
 
Well I'm happy keeping it at 85% for now just to be on the safe side, if it doesn't cause any problems then great. Nvidia are apparently less than wonderful at their auto-speed / fan settings and I read somewhere there is no such setting on this card, hence why everyone uses utils to control it.

I checked the fan speed and temp with PC Wizard and they look fine - fan speed stays at 85% (I since changed it from 75%) and temp is around 39 degrees which I think is damn good for a video card. I tried Jade Empire and it was stuttering same as UT, but then I checked the dual core affinity and realised it was only on one of the CPUs. So I added the other one and now the game runs fine. Not so for UT :( Changed affinity there too but I still get the stuttering. The video card seems to be behaving itself, my PSU is 650W and quite new so it can't be a power thing, I installed three new cooler fans on my case and made sure the airflow was setup correctly using guides, I even downloaded the AMD Dual Core drivers to make sure that wasn't the problem. And I'm now going to try the latest NVidia drivers - I would have had them installed before errors of course but the setup program - 190.62_desktop_winxp_32bit_international_whql.exe - kept handing me bs errors about system config :angry:

Rebooting now and testing again, and if UT is still slightly screwed then I'm out of ideas :cry:
 
Yep.

A few hours later and I'm still not much further forward. I've increased the page file size on all drives, I've checked for IRQ conflicts (none), I've played with fan speed, I've used a utility to increase the PCI latency because I read that PCI-E cards hog the latency a lot, causing other things to suffer...

UT still stutters. Only other things I can think of are defragging my HD (why this wasn't a problem with my old card I dunno but it won't hurt), or swapping the PCI slot for my sound card. Other than that I'm screwed if the problem is still there.
 
is ur sound card pci or pci-e? and if it's pci-e which slot is it in? Make sure the GFX is in the x16 slot if u have 2...

hmm, think this is a mute point as i just googled ur board and it only has one pci-e slot as far as i can see...
 
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Sound card is PCI and there is no conflict between it and the video card. I still think I might move it because I'm still having problems. The computer gets slower and slower until it struggles to open video files and web pages with the same speed it used to. I tried defragmenting my HD but it failed because it only had 11% space left, so I'll clear it out a bit and try again later. If that doesn't speed it up I'm out of ideas, I've tried everything I can think of. If the HD was the problem then why was it running fine with my previous card? Would a new PCI-E card be too much for a Maxtor SATA HD to keep up with?

Thanks for replies anyway, appreciated. Except Yako, you tosser :trout:
 
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