Game Freezing and Sound going into loop. Cause?

[Mark Duncombe]

What could cause a game to freeze, and sound card goes into a loop, and the only way out of it is a hard reboot? I used to get this on my old GTS Card, and now I'm getting it even worse on an 8800 Ultra. Games crash about 10 seconds in.

ASUS P5N32E SLi + Mobo.
1 x 8800 Ultra GPU
Sound Blaster X Fi Gamer
2 x Sata Hard Drives, 1 IDE (3 hard drives in total)
1 DVD Writer
Windows XP.
600W Strider Series PSU

I just turned the machine off, unplugged two of the three hard drives, and then tried a game again. I must admit, it ran for a good minute or so longer but still crashed in the same way.

Does this mean the power supply is not giving enough power to the system when games are on? If so, what PSU would people recommend? Should I only be using hard drive on its own, is that what everyone else does?

 

[Kari]

might be faulty system memory, download memtest86+ and run it like 8 hours (several passes at least)

When i first got my old system, one of the ram modules was bad and i had exactly the same thing happening.

You could pull one of them out and test the games, the performance might take a big hit but it shouldn't crash anymore. That is if you pulled the right (faulty) one There is a risk however that it might mess up the windows installation if you boot up with only the faulty ram module installed... (happened to me lol)

edit: if it was the PSU I'd think it would just reboot or shut down the system

 

[Mark Duncombe]

I just found an old post from 2007 that said this issue could be something to do with the incompatability of 8800 cards and the Creative X Fi cards. I have e mailed the tech support at XFS to see what they said. Have to be honest, its massively annoying and really ******* me off

 

[Mark Duncombe]

Ok hmm... I just took the XFi card out of the machine and it stopped crashing. Hmmm.