New Install of Vista 64 and Random Blue Screen Crashes - Please offer help if you can

[spannah]

Take everything apart, put back together....

test with a diff video card

try one ram stick at the time

Run a memory test

Test ram and video on a diff computer

[Nitro]

My first thought would be to ask what power supply are you using and after that I would start swapping out sticks of memory.

Can you play one copy of wow for long?

[Chorizotarian]

Use nvmon to monitor the temperatures of your graphics card. If it only happens during heavy graphics load card overheating is a likely culprit. You may also be able to tell something by plugging the blue screen error code into a search engine.

[knopstr]

What it turned out to be was that the ISO image of the BIOS that the XFX developer team had sent me did not flash the BIOS as I had expected it to. So, I went back to the downloads section and got the latest off the XFX site and my problems are solved. Much better performance with Vista64 and 8gb's of ram too.

[Jafula]

I'm glad you solved your problem; it took me 6 months to get my Asus Ultra790sli MB stable. Bios update after bios update, RAM rma'd, grrr. It was insane.... one blue screen every hour is not fun :-).

[Seldum]

I'm glad you solved your problem; it took me 6 months to get my Asus Ultra790sli MB stable. Bios update after bios update, RAM rma'd, grrr. It was insane.... one blue screen every hour is not fun :-).

Mental note: "do not buy that card"

I have the same problems with my grafic card. It never truly performed like I expected.....

:0)

[Mukade]

Going 64 bit and Vista you really need to get the memory voltages/timings down right. Not just the recommended ones, and what your motherboard is telling you (because the voltage can always be off slightly from the meter).

With 64 bit you'll probably be using more memory slots. More slots is a lot less stable, so you'll probably have to drop the memory speed from the recommended. The ratings given on the memory are usually for pairs of RAM sticks (I'm on DDR2, so that's 3 sticks for DDR3). I've yet to see any maufacturer sell memory in rated sets of 4 sticks (6 sticks).

Vista also makes use of all of the ram, all of the time, with it's cacheing of programs you might run, so it's more likely to blue screen than XP, which only uses the top end of memory when something big is loaded into it.

One of the other BIOS settings you should be looking at is Northbridge voltage (at least on Intel systems. AMDs, with the memory controller on the CPU probably have something similar), as the Northbridge is the chip that connects to your RAM. With a lot of memory sticks you get an effect called Vdroop, where the larger number of sticks pull more current, and as a result the voltage being supplied to them, and the voltage the northbridge is using to communicate with them, drops. Because of this you might have to increase the voltages for the northbridge and RAM a little bit, although you should never go over the RAM's maximum voltage. Most motherboards have a monitoring section in the BIOS, so you can see how close to your settings the actual voltages are (you may need to set BIOS settings to increase the voltages shown in the BIOS' monitor over what you need, as when the computer is under load Vdroop can cause this to drop again).


[edit] And yeah, BIOS updates are vital, as they improve how the system handles Vdroop among other things.