Happy New Year everyone! How did you spend your first day of year 2008? During the last couple days of year 2007, I had spent most of my time troubleshooting a computer problem.

The Story

My friend took his computer to my store a month ago for an upgrade. He wanted to play Team Fortress 2 but his on-board video was no good, so I installed an EVGA 7600GT 512MB AGP video card for him. The game launched fine so he brought the computer home right away and I couldn’t do much testing on the system. However, after a few days, he called me about the game kept freezing after 5 to 10 minutes of game time. I told him to try updating the drivers but the problem remains the same. He finally brought his computer back two days ago so I could take a look.

Time to Test

Initially, I thought it was due to problems with some old drivers. So I updated the drivers for the motherboard (ASRock 775VM800) and reinstalled the Forceware driver. The freezing still happened. Then I thought it could be just the game, probably having some bugs. However, when I tried to play Company of Heroes on the computer, it froze too. Then I did the following:

• flashed the BIOS of the motherboard
• updated Windows
• scanned for viruses
• checked the fans to make sure it is not overheating
• changed power supply to make sure there is enough power
• did a clean install of Windows XP to make sure there are no software conflicts
• disabled the on-board sound to make sure it is not due to the outdated sound driver

The Solution

After performing the above steps, the problem still exist. So I thought the problem could be the video card itself. I took the EVGA 7600GT out and replaced it with my old Leadtek Geforce 6800GT. The freezing problem was gone. To further test the 7600GT, I installed it on my old computer that is using the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard. I ran the same games on it and surprisingly, they ran without any problems. As a result, I could only conclude that the EVGA 7600GT is not compatible with the hardware of this particular system, and most likely it’s the ASRock 775VM800 motherboard.

FYI

For your interest, here is how the system was configured when it had the freezing problem.

• Motherboard: ASRock 775VM800
• CPU: Pentium 4 2.80 GHz
• RAM: 2 x Samsung 512MB PC3200
• Video card: EVGA 7600GT 512MB AGP
• DVD writer is primary IDE
• A 250GB SATA hard drive
• OS: Windows XP Pro SP2

Fortunately, I could still get some rest on my New Year day.