I am having a problem and I'm pretty sure it is caused by my hard drive. Sometimes when I am playing games it will freeze for a few seconds, then my monitor will go blank into idle mode for a few seconds, and then I can hear my hard drive spin up and shortly after my monitor will come back on and my game will unfreeze. The problem is that sometimes after it freezes and my monitor goes idle, the hard drive never spins up and it remains frozen until I reboot! This doesn't happen with all games, it has been happening a lot with Two Worlds (the Steam version if that matters) and sometimes with TF2. It is a SATA drive, a Seagate Barracuda ST3250620AS. I have set the power saving mode for my hard drive to never turn it off. I have run SeaTools and it didn't detect any problems with it. Here is my build: Windows XP SP2 750 Watt Power Supply 4GB DDR2 Ram Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz processor MSI 975x platinum MOBO Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250 GB Hard Drive ST3250620AS HIS Radeon X1950Pro IceQ Turbo video card
It appears to be that the graphics quality is set to high. The graphics card stops responding, and gets reset. It is called VPU recover with ATI graphics cards. When the game suddenly un-freezes, the graphics processor has been successfully reset. When it doesn't happen, it will indeed freeze the Operating System and of course the hard disk will stop spinning because it doesn't get any instructions. So I would suggest to lower the graphics quality in games. So turn off AA, and try to lower the overall quality. Also make sure that your PC case is clean (do dust in it). You might want to consider adding a system fan (if you don't have any), because it could also be caused by an overheating graphics card.
Yes, it did used to freeze similarly when I had CCC installed, however every time it recovered a little message would come up that said something along the lines of 'VPU Recover has reset your graphics driver as it was no longer responding... would you like to send an error report to ATI?' I haven't had CCC installed for a while now, so I didn't think that VPU recover was enabled. I am also no longer getting the little window that pops up from ATI everytime it recovers so I didn't think it was my graphics card. So VPU Recover is built into the card itself and works regardless of whether you have software to control/enable it?
Hi, I believe VPU recover only works as part of the Catalyst Control Center. You need to have it installed in order to use it. Tip 4: Reduce Crashes with VPU Recover
Well I do not have Catalyst Control Center installed, so it seems that the crashes do not have anything to do with VPU recover. In that case, I guess I am still confused about what the cause of the problem is.
Sure they do, especially when Catalyst Control Center is installed. that is the reason why VPU occurs in the first place.
Ok, if my graphics card is being pushed too hard wouldn't I see some kind of distortion or artifacts, low fps, or something before it stops responding? None of these occur, and the crashing seems to occur pretty randomly; sometimes within 10 minutes, sometimes I can play for hours without any crashes. Additionally, it has occured where it has recovered from a crash within the first 10 minutes of playing and then I could continue to play for over and hour without any more crashes... If it was overheating or something in the first crash, it seems like I wouldn't be able to continue playing for over an hour aftwerward without any problems.
Not always. In most cases the GPU keeps rendering everthing until it gets too many instructions. Then it just stops, without any trace of it in the framerate. I got the same with my 8800GTX when turning on AA with some games. Turn off stuff like AA or multisampling in games. See if the problems disappears. Also, if possible, try a different power supply.
It seems that it was the video card. All I did was increase the video card's fan speed settings to keep it cooler and I haven't had a crash since!