Need some IT crew help here - rebooting PC during gaming

[D-Fence]

Hi there.

I need some IT help for a mates PC. It bluescreens while gaming and I can't find the problem.

System specs:

Athlon 2800+
ATI X850 AGP
1,5GB Ram (1024 and 512 *facepalm*)
Windows XP Pro
Albatron mainboard (NFORCE 2)

Now here it what it does:

When you start certain games (like Starship Troopers f.e.) it all works fine until out of the blue it reboots without even showing the bluescreen. The sound hangs while rebooting.

I disabled automatic rebooting, but it shows a blue screen without text....

When searching the event protocol, I found the System Error "Kernel Driver Error" (freely quoted from memory)

Event viewers shows:

1000007F 0000000D 00000000 00000000 00000000


Here is what I did to his PC without success:

a) reinstalled XP from scratch (tried without SP, with SP1, with SP2 and with SP3, same crashing)
b) Newest Drivers for Mainboard, GPU (Catalyst 8.10) and newest Direct X
c) deactivated onboard soundcard as he has some SB Live player
d) Ran Prime95 both max heat and max ram tests, both stable for >2h, CPU never over 52°C
e) Ran Memtest+86 from bootcd, all clear
f) unplugged all USB devices

As noted above, it didn't work. My opinion:

GPU should not be overheating, as there are no fragments etc showing, the PC just reboots.
Ram looks fine.
CPU is cool enough.

I told him to remove one RAM unit and test again, use other RAM etc. and to remove his soundcard...any other ideas?

[Adunaphel]

Try running memtest for more than one sweep. Lots of kernel driver errors can be caused by faulty RAM. I had the same kind of errors, turned out one of my sticks had a very slight defect, which only sufraced after the 3rd run of memtest86.

[D-Fence]

OK got him to send me some minidumps: (thanks for the idea semt-x) and read them out

Probably caused by : ati3duag.dll ( ati3duag+107e58 )

Curse you ATI!

I told him to remove the drivers completely and try Omega Drivers, lets see...

As well Adu, he ran Memtest 2,5 complete cycles...



Now, he removed all ATI drivers and installed omega drivers, seems to run fine now. Thanks all who helped (#gear!)!