Well this is annoying (was forum=28)Follow

Last night I was playing Dawn of War: Dark Crusade when suddenly the screen froze and the monitor turned off. Upon rebooting I got an error box telling me something about nv4_disp and whatnot. Searching the web tells me that this is a common problem known under the name "Infinite Loop" or something like that.

It still does it, but now only when I put stress on my video card. If I drag windows, use the maximize button or if I change resolutions. It also happens after a while in games.

Pretty ******* annoying, to be honest. Mostly because I don't know how to fix it. According to all the "solutions" I've read, I should try anything from replacing my motherboard due to faulty capacitors to updating my nVidia drivers. I've updated the drivers, in safe mode and everything, but without luck.

Now the screen just freezes without the error and then the monitor shuts down after a while, as if it lost signal or something like that. I haven't installed anything major and I've backtracked and uninstalled everything that might've been causing it.

Has anyone had to deal with this problem? What would you guess is causing the error?

And yeah, it belongs in the Tech Support forum.

Have you tried one of the modified drivers from Guru yet?

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=884

Grab the ForceWare XP 169.21 (32-bit) one, I use that one on one of my machines and no issues thus far.

From what I read over on one of the o-boards,

"...It closes the specific memory register in your BIOS. The official name and function is the Memory Write Queue (MWQ) timer. The MWQ timer is a timing device included in the memory host controller to prevent write data being held in the memory queue too long..."

Here's a link for more info and where I found the above quoted info: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=4432

Basically, the error you are getting is a memory timing problem that only happens when the RX55 register is opened. Looks like it tends to happen more on 6xxx cards with Via or nVidia chipsets.

And yeah, I'll move it to the tech support forum for you.

Your machine was possessed by a Necron Lord and self-destructed. Better luck next time.

The OS is WinXP SP2 and was a fresh install, but I've upgraded it with SP1 and 2 back when they were released.

The problem started on its own. I can't think of anything I installed that might've caused it as it happened a week after I installed anything.

I'm not exactly sure what display driver I'm using. You gave me a link to a "fixed" one from Guru3D or something. I'm using that one and yes, I did remove the old one before installing the new one.

Motherboard is an MSI KT4 Ultra, using AMIBIOS v3.31a.

A heatsink? What's that? The barred thingy underneath the fan? This is my video card (different colors, though).

The brand is Club 3D Geforce 6600GT, 128MB DDR3.

I do have another Geforce card I can swap it out with, but they'll be using the same driver since all the Geforce models use the same ForceWare drivers. I haven't tried replacing it, because none of the threads mentioned anything about the video card itself being the source of the issue. They did mention that one could try lowering the AGP speed to 4x instead of 8x, but I haven't been able to change 'AGP Mode' in the BIOS settings because it's locked on Auto.

The system isn't overclocked anymore, I think. I believe it was overclocked prior to the error, but if so it's been overclocked for the last two years. It's down to 1100GHz from 1400GHz before I reset the BIOS to default settings.



It started doing it out of the blue. I crashed one day in Dawn of War and in World of Warcraft the next, now I crash whenever and wherever the almighty computer sees fit to throw a tantrum. Might be when I'm loading up World of Warcraft, might be when I'm moving a window or it might be when the computer is just standing there, doing nothing.



So far I think I've updated the motherboard's BIOS. Though I somehow started messing with BIOS flashing. Thanks to a hangup I never got around to actually doing the flash, which is good from what I've gathered.

The computer has been running fine for two years or more now. I've had the occasional crash and stuff, but nothing like this. This is nuts.

Yeah, I'd say its more software related than hardware given the info you provided here.

What you may want to do, since you started the flash process but didn't complete it, is use the liveupdate from the MSI site to update the Via chipset and the BIOS to the newest version.

After doing that, I would recommend uninstalling the display driver, reboot, then use a program like Ccleaner or Drivecleaner on the system to clean out any registry entries, left over files etc from the driver. Then reinstall DirectX, reboot then the latest nVidia driver from their site in that order.

This may not fix the issue but when I get weird errors related to video, this is the method I normally take to make sure it's not an older file interacting with a new one.

Okay, this is really odd, but I think I fixed the problem.

I was going to try one last thing and then see if I could fry the computer somehow (ritual before buying a new one, or something). I pulled out the sound card and moved it to another PCI slot. Rebooted and, uh, things seem to be fine now.

No mouse lag (was before), ran five or six programs at the same time without crash. Of course, things might go sour in a minute, in which case I'll make sure to reboot and edit this before I fry my computer.

Hope it's fixed now. I could use the $2,000 on something else, y'know?

**edit**
Well, **** it. Any suggestions on how to fry a computer?

Edited, Dec 24th 2007 3:00pm by Mazra

Won't that, like, blow a fuse somewhere?

After many experiments, I've come to the conclusion that my video card somehow shuts down if it's put under too much stress while being cold. It used to act up if it was too cold. If I switched off the PSU or if my room's too cold, it wouldn't transmit signals to the monitor. I had to power off the computer and then restart it.

The longer my computer runs, the more visual strain I can put on it. If I just started it up, it would crash after moving windows or right-clicking somewhere. After running for a while it took an actual game to crash it and after two hours of running I could play World of Warcraft to some extent (lousy FPS).

This computer is really odd. I think it might actually bleed if I stab it, it's that humanlike.

Edited, Dec 29th 2007 4:19pm by Mazra

I've had very similar problems with my computer and the Geforce 6600. In fact, it's about identical, screen freezes whenever the vid card is stressed (at times the screen indeed seems to lose the signal after a bit), nothing I did fixed it. Granted, I never did go as far as Wordaen suggested here though.

Near the end, I crashed at least once a day. Got a new one now, works like a charm.