BSOD Nightmare with new Asus Geforce 8800 GTS 512mb

[Soylent-Red]

Hi all,

First post here, so let me know if i miss anything or there's anything i need to do.

Received my new Asus Geforce 8800GTS 512mb (65nm) TOP Edition card through the mail at the start of this week (Monday 21st January). First time i put it in i ballsed up the drivers, and installed the card before uninstalling the old drivers, ended up locked out of XP Professional (32bit) and so had to format.

Formatted C: Drive, reinstalled windows, all with new card installed. Ended up getting lots of BSODs, though NOT when playing games. These BSODs were coming up generally when idling in windows desktop, or running something minor like windows live messenger, nero, or other minor software like that. The most frequent BSOD was Windows Event ID 1003, Error code 0000000a = "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL". Unfortunately i don't have a minidump of this with me on this computer, but should be able to get hold of one later.

Anyway, i took this card out after about 14 formats in a different pattern each time. Put my old Asus 7900GT TOP back in, all was running fine until i started getting the BSOD "PAGE FAULT IN NONPAGED AREA", referencing the file win32k.sys, which now reoccurs every so often. My old card has never had any problems with BSODS, and nothing else in my hardware has changed recently.

It's annoying because the new 8800 card actually WORKS brilliantly when i'm in games, it runs things like crysis smoothly without AA on high graphics. But the moment it's doing anything standard it just comes up with crap.

So i'm thinking either -

1. This new card is incompatible with a part of my hardware.
2. The new card was dead on arrival and had some kind of problem with memory or something.
3. When i put the new card in, something else screwed up in my setup (despite using anti-static wristband).
-This could possibly be my RAM - although it has worked fine up until now?

It is worth noting that my old graphics card gives the same repeating "PAGE FAULT.." BSOD, while my new graphics card gives alot of different ones, mainly the "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL". So the former could just be due to something installed improperly.

My hardware is as follows:

Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe, Wireless Edition, Motherboard. Bios Update 1603
4x512mb Matched Corsair DDR2 6400 RAM
Hiper Type R 580W Power Supply
Western Digital Caviar 250Gb SATA HDD
Western Digital Caviar 320Gb SATA HDD

On reading alot of forum posts - people often suggest that it's the power supply - which doesn't seem likely in this case, since the problems occur when the card is NOT under load. And i have seen people using this hiper 580w with 8800 Ultras quite happily.

[trog100]

its a data error.. i dont think its your grafix card.. set windows to run a low level scandisk when it next boots.. auto fix errors.. it could be your hardrive is on the way out..

assuming your psu isnt in the proccess of failing it isnt that..

also run memory stability tests.. RightMark Memory Analyzer is good for that..

if overclocked slow things down.. see what happens..

trog

ps.. dont assume just cos your old hardware "was" okay it still "is" okay..

[Soylent-Red]

Thanks for the quick reply trog

I'll give it all a go, just reading an interesting article on changing the RAM voltage and timings to fix this reoccuring problem across 8800's. Will post back to let you know how it's going.

Thanks again

[EviLZeD]

hey i think it might be ur bios version 1603 i heared it has a whole bunch of issues on the asus forums also its hard to flash back to a later one i had a bsod issue and a lockup issue recently with vista and the cause was the 1503 bios i downgraded to 1201 its perfectly stable my system now

on the asus forums people are recommending to use 1201 or older bios for systems not running phenoms because the new ones cause problems

[Soylent-Red]

Ah really?

I started off on 1201 when i first installed the new card, and it was giving me the same BSODs at the time. I installed 1603 in the hope that it would stop them, but no luck.

I'm on XP Professional mind you, so those problems might be limited to Vista? (Hopefully)

Thanks for the input!

[EviLZeD]

yea the lockup issue was only on vista xp ran fine