MB EVGA nForce 680i, DDR2
Intel Core2Quad Q6600, quad 2.4GHz, 8MB L2 Cache
4G RAM
Creative SB X-Fi XtremeGamer
GeForce GTX 285 OC
Running SL standard viewer
Over the course of the past year I've had this type of random system freeze.. It doesn't happen everytime I run SL and is not the type of freeze where just the game freezes. With this, the screen wiil freeze, I hear what appears to be a portion of the last sound heard in the game, repeat itself over and over again. I lose my cursor, ctl alt del won't work...the only solution being to hit the Restart Button.
Originally I had this happen with my older graphics card, a nVidia 8800 GTX Ultra. At that time I was also recieving random blue screens involving the graphics device driver. At that time I ran MemTest to check the RAM...reseated them as well as the graphics card....also updating the Graphics Drives to nVidias latest .
This did not solve the problem, so I gave in and bought the latest nVidia GeForce 285, then did a completely reinstall of WinXP Pro.
Last night I was pleased with myself ...absolutely no problems ... even appeared to be better frame rates, tho the old card was certainly a good one. Then towards the end of the evening I first had my first 'ingame' freeze..but was able to relog......then came the system freeze again and had to hit the reset button to get out.
Any idea what could be causing this? because of the annoying sound loop during the freeze, could it be the sound card? I did blow out the case completely when reseating the new graphics card.