G400 lockups (freezes) with games

[Phillip Schuster]

Hi all !!

Well I have a Matrox G400 and I have some problems with it. Always when I want to play a game (Unreal Tournament, Quake3, Half-Life and Counterstrike) the computer freezes and it loops the last played sound. After I remove the sound card (physically) from my computer and try for example Counterstrike it works fine, except that there is no sound !! I thought it's my old Diamond Monster with very old drivers, so I went and bought a Creative Soundblaster Live! (by the way great sound card !!), but even that did not help. Then I thought perhaps a bug in DirectX7 and downloaded DirectX7a, also that did not help. Today I formatted C (something I hate !!) and reinstalled Windows 98 SE !! Again, I started Counterstrike and after the first sound was played during the game (the menus are working fine with sound and without lookups) it freezed ;(((
Even after I started Creative Lava (this displays some weird 3D Stuff in a window which shall represent the music) my system crashed. But playing hours MP3 works fine. So, it seems always when 3D and Sound is played together I get problems. Unreal Tournament plays about 15 minutes until it crashes. Counterstrike sometimes also plays about 15 minutes until it crashes.
It can't be heat problems because the mainboard, G400, Soundcard and the CPU don't get very hot. I know what's hot (I had a TNT and Voodoo2 before) and my current hardware is cold (this even says my motherboard-heat monitor).

I think I have to say that I have an ASUS P2L97 (LX-chipset). Perhaps this is the reason, because it's quite old. But perhaps someone else knows another solution without going out to pay a lot of money for a new mobo which perhaps does not help, too !!

Thanks alot.

Phillip

[Kruzin]

You'd be amazed what you can find if you use the search function of the forums.
I plugged in "p2l97" as a keyword, and look at what it came up with
http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum5/HTML/006751.html

[Phillip Schuster]

Hi !!

Thank you very much. I have searched nearly every forum and never found something. So I simply gave up. I see, with this forum it was wrong.

Thank you very much. I already thought that it's a problem with my dawm motherboard.

Phillip

[jlordsen]

I have also encountered this problem with my OEM G400 16MB SH(locking, sometimes with sound loop), but only sometimes - appx. 3 times a month. It seems that forcing AGP 1x helps.

Unlike the thread starter I have ASUS P3B-F.

In a thread advised by Kruzin is stated something about voltage. In my case ASUS probe signals 3.5V at +3.3V, it means 6% difference. Similar situation is at -5V which is in absolute value lower by 6-7 %. +12V, +5V and -12V are also lower in absolute value but not so much.

Does these values cause the problem? (In General hardware forum some say that "ASUS is way to picky about the temps and voltages on the board and chips.") If yes, where is the fault - in MBo, in power source (230W)?

JLordsen

@ Celeron 400MHz, ASUS P3B-F, G400 16MB SH, 128MB, SB 128 PCI (VIBRA), CDD, FDD, ZIP


[This message has been edited by jlordsen (edited 07 January 2000).]