Server problems?

[gial 2]

I had been experiencing many, many ctd of late, and, along with the crowd blaming the instability of the servers, since Sacred was/is the only app I run that misbehaves.

 

Recently though, I began to notice problems with booting (extraordinarily long bootup/shutdown times) and began to suspect I had hw problems of my own.

 

Tried several things to no avail, but found a link to "Prime 95" a Mersenne prime distributed calculating program a la "SETI@home". The math it performs has become well known as a stress tester for CPUs.

 

I downloaded it and tried the stress test. POW. CPU error in less than a minute. Tried it several times, same result each time.

 

My bus speed is adjustable through the CMOS, so I clocked it down from 133 MHz to 100 - eliminating 25% of my processing speed. The problem went away. As did my ctd problem. I have not had a crash in 4 days, with many hours played. I had been crashing about once every 10 minutes on average.

 

I suspect Sacred heavily uses the FP (floating point) numeric processor which generates a lot of heat. Next weekend, I'm taking my system apart, cleaning dust even better, and re-seating the heatsink. If that fails, time for a new chip. To anyone else having frequent crashes, download the Prime95 program (you don't have to sign up as a participant) and run the stress test. Here's the link:

 

Prime 95 info

[Obsession 0]

huh.. that sounds bad, only a minute? even my system can run 10+ hours whitout any errors and I'm currently having so big problems that can't really play any games because really bad slow downs. But still, I haven't had any ctd's as long as I remember (well ones in allmost full kami server), so maybe you just found part of the reason why some players get lot of ctd's and some non.

[masteff 64]

Gial, if the cleaning and reseating of heat sink don't fix it, you might also run a memory diagnostic as the CPU's bus speed determines the memory's bus speed (MS has one you can download, though you have to put it on a bootable media (floppy or CD)). It's an easy test before buying a new CPU.

[gial 2]

Thanks masteff, but I already ran memtest86 and the memory is clean even at 133 MHz.

 

My problem is 2 fold in that it is too old. One, I can't get chips that slow anymore - hehe, and two, not sure if I want to invest any $$ in such an old machine anyway.

 

I have an Athlon 1500XP and the slowest I can find is a 2200. Same bus speeds, so it MAY be compatible, I just need to check my mainboard.

 

@Obsession If you can run the stress test for 10 hours, then your problems are clearly not the cpu. But if you mean your system doesn't crash - mine doesn't either unless I run Sacred.

[Schot 407]

Very strange... Now I've been having troubles lately. Past week or so. Is this contagious? Haha. Lately I've been experiencing computer freezes which is very unusual for me. Every since I installed the Mythos game in fact. When I started playing Mythos I began experienceing pc freezes which forced me to restart my pc. After this happened a couple times I started watching my GPU temperature. It was getting up around 70C and I'm fairly certain that's getting a bit too hot. A couple days ago I had my first Sacred Underworld pc freeze so I'm kinda worried now.

 

As for ctd's in Sacred that's been a regular thing for as long as I can remember. It's sort of up and down. I've gone through a month of playing Sacred without a CTD and then the next month I get tons of them. Hard to pin point but if I recall correctly I read somewhere that the most likely cause of game CTD's is overheating.

 

Interesting tips gial. I'll have a look at that bus speed. I've monitored how much CPU Sacred uses in the past and it's generally around 50%. I'll have to check that again I think. However, I did some checks yesterday and found that my system was heavily fragmented and low on free space. I cleaned that up so I'll see how things go. Strange thing... Photoshop was holding 6GB of space, heh. It wasn't even running when I checked. Happens sometimes with Photoshop.

 

I'm starting to think that maybe we should create a listing of "What to do" for pc troubles. A sort of community resource would be great for the Tech Talk section eh?