New Computer Crashing Problems

Hi. I just got a new pc last night and I seem to be crashing whenever I go into an area with very high bandwith. Here are my system specs (as best as I can describe them) and the options I have checked.

Pentium 4 3 ghz
1 gb of Ram
128 mb Radeon x300 pci express

My options:
maxium bandwith 1000
disk cache 1000 mb
local lighting, shadows, ripple water, disable far clip, shiny objects all checked.
bumped map and cloth checked.
terrian detail full
texture cache size large
avatar vertex program checked
draw distance 192
fog distance 4.0
drop draw distance if fps 0
bumpiness draw distance 30
max particle count 4096
outfit composite limit 30

So what do I need to do or change to stop crashing. Now that I can actually enjoy the game for its visual appeal I can't stop crashing. Help please.

Have you installed the latest video drivers from ATI?

I went to the ATI site, didn't seem to be any new drivers for my card.

I'm having the exact same problems as you are. My computer is also new and nearly the same specs. I've never had a problem running SL until about 5-6 days ago, then crashing and extreme lag problems sprouted up. T_T

Hmm maybe u should try installing the Omega drivers....They are awesome they are maxed out for performance on your card. To download just google it.

When you say "nearly the same specs", do you also mean that you have a PCI-express ATI card? If not, can you list them here? The most important ones are make and model of CPU, RAM, motherboard and video card.

Have the crashing problems started since you got your new computer, or have you run SL on this computer prior to it experiencing problems? When you crash, what happens? Does your entire system lock up, or something else?

So you're running the Catalyst 5.3 drivers?

If so, it's possible that your motherboard needs newer drivers, or possibly even a BIOS update. PCI-express is a very new standard, and many manufacturers will almost certainly have released motherboards with slight errors that they'll later correct in software as they're discovered. What make and model of motherboard do you have?

If you're running the latest motherboard chipset drivers and BIOS, yeah, try Decay's suggestion and get the Omega drivers here.

I haven't really had much in the way of crashing problems until maybe the last 2 SL updates. Some days, I am crashing every 2 minutes, other days it could be hours before a crash. Here's my system specs:

ASUS P4P800 motherboard
2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor
1GB PC3200 RAM
Gigabyte ATI Radeon 9600 pro 128

maxium bandwith 1000
disk cache 1000 mb
local lighting, shadows, ripple water, disable far clip, unchecked, shiny checked.
bumped map and cloth unchecked.
terrian detail full
texture cache size large
avatar vertex program unchecked
draw distance 64-128
fog distance 3.0
drop draw distance if fps < 5
bumpiness draw distance 30
max particle count 0
outfit composite limit 30

I have video drivers from ATI dated from December 2004, not sure if they had an update since then, but I will check out those Omega drivers - thanx for the heads up Decay!

Yeah, they've had a couple revisions since then. You should try to keep your drivers relatively up to date, at least if you're regularly updating software that uses them. (SL, for example.)

Your system sounds like it should be fine. It's possible that an error was introduced in one of the incremental SL patches. You should file a bug report explaining this and when you first noticed the problem. Have you tried the 1.6 preview? Install the latest video drivers and check it out. If it's with SL, the problem may be fixed.

Just a thought... since you've maxed the bandwidth and I assume you're not on a T1, have you turned the bandwidth back down to 300 or so?

I'm on a 4mbit down/384kbit up connection (Comcast) ... what bout yall???

When I had it down to 300 I was still crashing to desktop. A friend thought uping it would stop that but it hasn't. I'm also on a cable connection. I wasn't crashing to desktop before in high bandwith areas until I got this new PC and my last PC was crap.

As far as my motherboard. I'll have to look that up when I get home Catherine. I do know my system is a Dell 8400. I just don't know where to find that information.

If you've got a Dell 8400 you need to make sure you're running the A02 Bios Revision or later. When you boot up the machine it will tell you the BIOS version.

The AOO and AO1 Bios revisions didn't have 16x PCiExpress implemented properly and the Bios Revision should solve this. (The get the Bios update goto http://support.dell.com and enter your service tag into their system. This will allow you to search for specific driver and BIOS upgrades for your computer.)

Colin

I have AO4. I also checked and it seems all my drivers are up to date as well.

With a PCIx ATI card, it might be worth experimenting with other drivers to see what works best. The top choices seem to be the OEM drivers (on the CD) and the newest ones.

When you change drivers, be sure to 1) turn off antivirus, 2) Uninstall the previous drivers, 3) download and install the version you're going to use.

Another data point re. crashing:

Dell Dimension 8400, 3 GHz P4, BIOS A05, WinXP Pro SP2, 1 GB RAM, 128 MB Radeon X300 SE, Catalyst 5.4

Crashing sometimes after as little as a minute or so, although late Saturday night I was able to explore for maybe ten or twenty minutes. After updating from the drivers Dell shipped to Catalyst 5.4, SL causes VPU Recovery to kick in and recover the system to a useable state, but I'm learning that at that point it's best to exit SL or the next time VPU Recovery may not be able to prevent a systemic hang or crash.

Regards,

Things to try:

Radion AGP cards don't like having fast writes on but I dunno if PCI-e has that option.

Make sure all your 3D preferences like FSAA filtering and such are turned to "Application Preference" ATI's don't like upping the quality at all, my 9800 pro couldn't handle it at all without frequent crashes.

Completely uninstall SL and reinstall, this has cured more problems in the last few weeks than anything.

Make sure you have the latest chipset drivers for the motherboard and make sure it has the latest sound card drivers as well. (likely integrated with the chipset drivers)

May be a long shot but you might have some flakey memory, couldn't hurt to run a memory checker. There are some good free ones on the net but I don't remember their names.. Google is your friend.

Check your power supply, make sure the card is seated, any auxillary power connections are tight.

If you have a router, might try hooking straight to the modem and see if it still does it, a flakey router (I've had 2) will dissconnect from the server and make you think there is a crash when it is a simple disconnect in reality. I had them do this straight out of the box.

Also, what happens when VPU Recovery is turned off?

A quick update:

Turning off VPU recovery has had no effect (except that Second Life now takes down my whole system when it crashes, presumeably why VPU recovery was developed).

I've set to "application preference" everything in the ATI control panel that has that value as an option. The options for textures and mipmap detail are high quality, quality, performance and high performance, with defaults at high quality.

I don't see where I would turn off fast writes, although I'm pretty sure I saw that option in the ATI control panel before I updated Catalyst.

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling SL.

None of these steps have had any effect. I don't think it's likely a router problem because the whole system crashes when VPU recovery is off; and since I rely on my router as a hardware firewall, leaving it turned off isn't a viable long-term solution for me. But I'll try it for a while this weekend when I get a chance. And I'll check memory with memtest86 as well. And I'll poke around to make sure my chipset & drivers are current (although if there are more recent drivers, Dell hasn't a clue about them yet).

Thanks for the advice though.

Have you tried the Omega drivers?

Here is one for ya: the x300 ATI is a budget PCIe card and to keep the price down, most come with passive cooling (ie headsinks with no fan), the card may be overheating. Second Life is a card melter when it is running and that x300 will be working very hard to keep up. The x300 is roughly equivelent to something between a 9200 and 9500 ATI. Considering it is the low end of the PCIe spectrum, it could very well be a bad card(or just flakey enough not to work with SL since it uses video memory differently than most other games). If it is the "SE" it may not run SL worth a hoot since it is basically a cripled version of the x300.

Now that I could easily believe. I didn't by the system for the card so much as for the card slot; I always expected I'd want to upgrade the graphics pretty early. Hmm... maybe time to go shopping. Thanks for the tip.

I tried all the things mentioned in this thread, excluding bypassing the router/firewall,
but including upgrading the graphics board to an X800 XL.
No luck (although of course the new GPU iz verrry nice).

Kathmandu Gilman:
> May be a long shot but you might have some flakey memory,
> couldn't hurt to run a memory checker.

It turns out I did indeed have some marginal DDR2,
intermittently failing Memtest-86 (failing test #5 only). (http://memtest86.com)
I replaced it and I've now been connected to SL for two hours without crashing.
I'm cautiously optimistic.

Thanks for all the suggestions, and good luck to those still having problems.

LittleBoar, has your x800 pci express card worked out alright? I should have one shortly.

SuezanneC,
I've been very pleased with the purchase. Of course it turned out to be irrelevent to the problems that had me posting in this thread to begin with. But it's been very stable, gave me a significant performance boost, and I'm glad I have it. I think you'll enjoy yours when it arrives.