system shuts down in 10 min

[vgbaron]

Fortunately it's not my problem. Have a friend in Australia who's been running FSX just fine on an old P4 3.4 system with an nvidia 5200 256M AGP card. Just in the last few days he's run into a problem.Whenever he runs FSX *or* FS9 everything is ok for about 10 minutes, then screen goes black and a 'no signal' displays. System fans are still running but only a reboot will get him going gain.

This does NOT happen when he is just using the system normally.

He's run the nvidia stress tests for 33 passes and all seems well.

He turned down quite a few FSX settings and all was well for about 15 minutes but when he switched to virtual cockpit - same problem.

I'm leaning toward a bad video card.

Any thoughts?

[Groundbound1]

That's where I would go with it. Either the card might be bad, or maybe it's just getting too warm. Another thing might be to run memtest on the system. Since both sims use a great deal of memory, it could explain the passing Nvidia tests.

Does he oc?

[vgbaron]

No he's runing it straight. I also suggested memtest but haven't heard from him yet.

[NickN]

its a hardware failure

I would say if it was memory it would not just go blank but either BSOD or reboot

Video card/drivers or possibly PSU too

Hard to say.. these things require a process of elimination to lock down many times

[vgbaron]

ok - he ran the nvidia stability test and the PCI-E bus and the GPU crashed in 1m 45s.

Would the GPU cause the bus to creash or is the bus causing the GPU to go byebye?

Mobo or GPU?

Vic

[volunteer]

Nah..... dang it - this comp is overheating.

First thing is to take the side off - suck out any dust with a vacuum hose and then take the fan off the cpu fins and suck all the crap out-ta there.

Then take off the bios chip cooler and restick it with heat paste.

Take out the graphics card and remove the fan and suck the dust out of its fins. Restick it with fresh heat paste.

Then take out all the plug in bits and wipe the pins and replace. Get the wires out of the way and I betcha things will run fine.

Then - change the mother board battery for a new one and reset the BIOS which may have corrupted.

good luck  ;)

[vgbaron]

That's pretty much what I told him but he said it made no difference. Let me double check him on that.

Edit: he emailed me that with the sides off, all fans running, dust vacuumed out - still crashing in 10 - 15 minutes with FSX or FS9 running. Fine when they're not.


Just a reminder that this vid card is AGP. What would that have to do with the PCI-E bus failure?????