Monitor shuts off randomly (dumps included)

Hi guys. I've been having a problem for months now. It seems that my system randomly crashes when I use my AOpen GeForce FX 5200 PCI card. Ironically it's a temporary replacement card for my 7600GT that also had problems (but not this one).
Every time my system crashes, my monitor just goes blank. Then I have to do a reset. This is my system setup:

- MSI K9N SLI Platinum
- AMD Athlon64 3800+
- 2x Corsair 512MB 5400C4
- AOpen GeForce FX5200 PCI
- Creative Sound Blaster Live!
- SeaSonic S12-430

- AOpen FX5200 PCI Driver (FW 66.81)
- nVidia nForce 9.16 Driver

- Motherboard BIOS v1.5
- Windows XP + SP2 English

The crashes occur with several ForceWare driver versions (56.72, 66.81, 84.21, 93.71) and even the standard Windows drivers. I have noticed a couple of things while testing:

- When using the 3rd PCI slot (orange colour), the problem can almost be replicated. Installing FW drivers or playing a game for a few minutes then triggers the crash. The card seems to be a lot more stable in the other 2 PCI slots (standard white colour).
- Sometimes my HDD shuts down right after the monitor goes, but not always. When this happens, a minidump is created by Windows. No HDD shutdown means no dump.
- It looks like the problem occurs more frequently with FW 93.71 than with 66.81.
- With 66.81, upon Windows startup, my monitor always goes blank for a second, then returns to normal. This doesn't happen with 93.71.
- The problem often (but not always) happens when I click on something, usually a hyperlink in Firefox.
- Recently it happened 2 times while I was playing an MP3. The music stalled about a second after the monitor went out and continued to loop 1 second worth of music for a while, after that the loop became shorter and it sounded like *BRRRRRRRRRRR...*.
- I've tried the card in a P3 and P4 system, no immediate problem there but perhaps I haven't tested long enough. I did however notice that sometimes my monitor stays blank until I enter Windows. This has happened on my A64 3800+ (WinXP) and P3 (Win98SE) systems.
- With 84.21 my system automatically resets so I don't have to do it manually.

I have uploaded a bunch of minidumps that I believe were made when I had this type of crash (I looked up the dates and times in my personal notes). The most recent dumps of April are definitely related to the crashes.

You can find the dumps here along with the logs in .txt format as instructed here. Don't pay attention to file dates on the webpage.

I have also made a thread about it on another forum. But no solution yet.

Anyone know what's going on? Thanks for reading.

 

welcome to the bbs TomMe!

All I can do presently is sympathize. An intermittant problem in a complex system is almost impossible to solve. Suggest you simplify the problem by stripping the machime of all goodies you don't absolutely require to run it, such as the sound card, and unless the memory sticks are a matched pair run on one stick. Then try another video card, even an inexpensive one, to narrow down the culprit. It sounds like some hardware item or it's driver, is incompatable with another.

 

Thank you sparrow. Well, I didn't have any crashes like this when I was using my 7600GT card. So I'm pretty certain it has to do with the FX 5200. I'm just trying to figure out if this problem can be solved or not.

I've installed FW 84.21 again today. Last time I used this version I experienced several crashes in a row. After it crashed again this morning I decided to lower the "Hardware Acceleration" slider in the Display Properties and haven't had a crash since. I'll try upping the slider bit by bit over the next few days to find out at which point it becomes problematic.

PeteC, I've already analysed all the dumps I posted the link to. Let me know if I did something wrong.